Did You Know? Police Scrapbooks By: Stephanie Prochaska, CSPM Assistant Archivist Photo of Jim Henderson Since the donation of the Colorado Springs Police Department’s scrapbooks, volunteers in the Starsmore Center for Local History, the museum’s archives, have created catalog records for these eightyfive scrapbooks. Jim Henderson, archives volunteer, helped catalog sixty-three of the scrapbooks since 2012. This January, he completed the last one. These records are being entered into our Past Perfect database. Henderson and the other volunteers who worked on these records summarized each scrapbook by identifying unique articles from each year. These summaries are vital for making the scrapbooks discoverable to potential researchers. The scrapbooks contain clippings from local newspapers regarding the various activities of the Colorado Springs Police Department from 1917 – 2006. Though some volumes are missing, these scrapbooks allow researchers to understand Colorado Springs culture, examine the trends in arrests and crimes and follow the cases as they close. Stories included in the scrapbooks are of bootlegging, elections, city ordinances, natural disaster response, bank robberies and more. Photo of books from the collection Cataloging each scrapbook provides the best access to the collection. These records allow researchers the ability to focus their search, and potentially, discover new information on a topic or case. We are grateful for Henderson’s commitment to this project. He has moved onto a new collection and will continue to help make collections accessible to researchers. Thank you, Jim! pg. 5
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