A Letter from the Director

Connie L. Lester, Ph.D.Associate Professor of History

Editor, Florida Historical Quarterly

Director, RICHES

The Regional Initiative for Collecting History, Experiences, and Stories (RICHES) completed its sixteenth year of operation at the end of Spring 2026. From the first meeting in fall 2009, when Dr. Larry D. Davis Jr., Dr. Rosalind Beiler, and I began to brainstorm ideas for an interdisciplinary, interactive database, we knew that the project had enormous potential. Today, the project includes three sites, works with 85 partners, sustains interdisciplinary and community projects, and has created two digital tools. Our first big data project focused on the digitization and OCR of a century of the Sanford Herald newspaper. RICHES works with three veterans projects, the Veterans History Project (VHP) to collect oral histories, the Veterans Legacy Project (VLP) that works with Florida’s national cemeteries, and the Florida Soldiers in France Project, that focuses on American soldiers from WWI and WWII buried in France.

Community partners remain at the heart of the RICHES projects. Community partners host History Harvests, panel discussions, and workshops to collect, discuss, and research local history. In the best example of a more democratic history, individual families, businesses, and organizations contact RICHES to document their history and make it available to the public.

RICHES’s capacity to work with multiple partners expanded in 2020 when, in collaboration with the Center for Humanities and Digital Research, an infrastructure grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities was funded. The funding enabled the creation of a dedicated digital laboratory and meeting space for rapid digitization of images, documents, maps, and film. The space is also used for conferences and workshops to present research projects and teach new methodologies.

RICHES continues to attract an interdisciplinary cohort of undergraduate and graduate interns who gain skills in writing metadata, planning and writing grants, conducting History Harvests, planning and executing focus group feedback, and design and programming.

Finally, RICHES is grateful for the UCF Department of History, College of Arts and Humanities, and the Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) for it for their continued support, the interdisciplinary faculty members who partner with the project, the community partners who are the backbone of the project, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for its grant funding support.