The Historical Society of Washington, D.C. will digitize more of the maps, photographs, prints and other items in its collections, thanks to a City Fund grant from the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region.

The Historical Society’s catalog includes “more than 100,000 prints, negatives and slides from the 1860s to the present, documenting local street scenes, events, businesses, and people; more than 500 cataloged maps, tracing the development of the built environment; and more than 800 archives and manuscript collections, ranging from diaries and personal papers, to early 18th century land records, to the historic records of existing organizations.” According to Director of Development Adam P. Lewis, there are images for about 27,000 of the 100,000 catalog items.

“Those images mostly consist of scans of photographs of varying quality that were done on a ‘scan-on-demand’ basis,” Lewis said by email. “The Historical Society, as you can imagine, has many other uncatalogued collections so there are many thousands more to not only be scanned but also processed with metadata so that they can be found in the future.”

Here’s what the Historical Society will do with the grant:

The grant funds a preliminary assessment by the technology firm HistoryIT, which will evaluate the Historical Society’s existing catalog that includes approximately 100,000 records, as well as all of the materials housed at its headquarters in the Carnegie Library at Mt. Vernon Square. The project will then review how the digital collections initiative can help complement other collections throughout the city and produce a strategic digitization plan, informing the Historical Society how best to digitize and make accessible its vast holdings over the next few years.

A sample digital archive featuring more than 400 items will be available in early 2015. The D.C. Public Library’s collection of about 8,000 historical maps of D.C. is also being digitized.