Earlier this year, the Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor, and its signature program the National Canal Museum, were awarded grant dollars from the National Endowment for the Humanities to defray the cost of operations and to support the more expansive digital efforts of the museum.

In alignment with these efforts, the DLNHC has increased its sanitization efforts and welcomes Emily Rose Clayton as the part-time, temporary digital collections and engagement specialist.

In this role, Clayton works to make the museum’s collections more accessible to the public by digitizing more pieces from the archives.

Moreover, Clayton investigates new and innovative ways to share that information online and through other virtual means. Clayton will be with the team through the end of the year.

Clayton is a public historian with extensive archival experience. She holds a master of arts in archives and public history from New York University, and dual Bachelor of Science degrees in history and dramatic arts from Martin Methodist College in Pulaski, Tennessee - her home state.

Her capstone project examined the relationship between the military and universities in the New York City area and as an undergraduate presented original research on Civil War prison camps at national conferences.

“I am very excited to begin featuring those collections in new digital formats in order to help visitors and researchers connect with the people who lived and worked in the D&L Corridor in the past,” Clayton said.

Clayton has begun an assessment of the museum’s archival collections in order to offer a more complete listing for the museum’s website, canals.org. She will also contribute more collections-related content to the museum’s Facebook page, @NationalCanalMuseum, and help to develop virtual tours on the D&L’s forthcoming app.

Over the coming months, with the help of Clayton and the NEH grant, the D&L looks forward to sharing its nationally significant history and collections.