The steady demise of the newspaper obituary has become an opportunity for a Florida library to fill a growing cultural gap, with a helping hand from federal grant money. The Orange County Library System (OCLS) received on September 27 a $50,000 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to explore the feasibility for an openly accessible online database into which the families of deceased individuals can upload obituaries. The library will provide $21,754 in matching funds for the project.
The EPOCH project, which would be an offshoot of the library's four-year-old Orlando Memory project, envisions family and friends of the deceased submitting detailed obituaries, including videos, photographs, or other memorabilia, that the library will store and display via a content management system. The prototype is scheduled to be completed by November 2012.
You can read more in an article by Michael Kelley in the LibraryJournal.com web site at http://goo.gl/O9Stb.
My thanks to Donna Meszaros for telling me about this story.
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