ELGIN — The Elgin Museum and Historical Society, 180 N. Eighth Ave., is conducting a detailed inventory of its collection and digitizing it for the first time.

Debbie Leslie, vice president of the organization, invites volunteers to help create the digitized museum inventory. Interested people may reach Leslie at 530-574-8839.

Volunteers meet at the museum each Tuesday from 1:30-3 p.m.

To prepare for this project, museum board secretary Suzy Goodall and Leslie went to a museum crawl along the Columbia Gorge and visited other museum directors to learn how they catalog their inventory.

Leslie also took an online workshop on collection management through the Oregon Heritage.

“We learned so much,” Leslie said. “Now we have a pretty good handle on what we need to do.”

Volunteers will be trained in the cataloging process, starting with matching items in the museum to their donation forms and transferring that data onto the computer database.

Items will be classified as worthy of the permanent collection, the use collection or something to be rehomed. In this process, a determination is made whether the item is meeting the objective and mission of the museum, if it came from local families or the local area.

Items chosen for the permanent collection will be assigned an accession number, a unique number identifying it by year of donation and other data. These items are entered into the museum’s computer database by number, item name, description, photograph, donor name, museum location, background history and the recorder’s name.

Items in the use collection are reserved for research, education and things the public can touch.

“If we have a good inventory, then we can start displaying things because we will know what we have,” Leslie said. “So far we have recorded about 100 items, and we have more to do.”

Volunteers will also be needed to fill future roles such as website designer and social media manager, event planner, building maintenance, running a gift shop, genealogy services, newsletter writing and publishing and Elgin Recorder scanning and preservation.

The next board meeting is Monday, March 3 at 1:30 p.m. at the museum. The public is encouraged to attend.