Nora Mishanec is reporting for Columbia-Greene Media on how librarian Jacqueline Elmo-Emel put her time to good use during coronavirus pandemic lockdown. When Elmo-Emel first began working at the Mountain Top Library five years ago, she found slides, genealogical records and a filing cabinet stuffed with old black-and-white photographs. She then began scanning and adding them to the digital collection of New York Heritage, a website run by the Empire State Library Network, but work progressed slowly. When the pandemic closed down the library in mid-March Elmo-Emel was able to continue her archival work despite the shutdown. Elmo-Emel, along with Elyse Browne, another Mountain Top librarian, scanned thousands of slides previously unseen from the library's collection over the past months, expediting the process by about five years, Elmo-Emel said. Elmo-Emel said she has absorbed more history by handling old letters, records and photographs than she could have ever learned in school. Once the task of digitizing the library’s collection is complete, Elmo-Emel plans to move on to digitizing the Mountain Top Historical Society’s materials. Her goal is to make the society’s collection more accessible to the general public. The process reinforced her belief that libraries should preserve information, and also share that information with a wide audience. The Mountain Top Library Digital Collection can be found at nyheritage [dot] org. Read the full story at HudsonValley360 [dot] com.