The Santa Clarita City Council voted to help with funding for upgrades to the SCVHistory.com site, a critical move to preserve Santa Clarita’s historical archives. 

SCVHistory.com is a comprehensive digital history archive and repository for the Santa Clarita Valley, owned and operated by SCVTV. The site was established in 1996 and has grown in the last 26 years to house close to 100,000 archival items in various digital formats. 

It serves as a repository for historic artifacts, books, film, photography, documents, and oral histories of significance to SCV. According to SCVTV, the site logged over 1.7 million views from January 2021 to October 2021.

“We live in one of the most historical areas in California. The things that have happened here have been remarkable,” said Mayor Laurene Weste. 

SCVHistory.com currently operates on an outdated programming language that predates the creation of Google and is longer supported today. This poses a problem for the future of the site, as the hand-coded HTML architecture is difficult to edit, read, and update. 

The outdated code is not compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and the design is not user-friendly. 

“It’s in old codes,” explained Weste. “I would not like to see all our history lost because we can’t read it and there’s no way to recreate it.”

As a result, SCVTV sought to upgrade its entire web platform, choosing a vendor quoted $300,000 for the SCVHistory.com portion of the project. SCVTV is currently applying for an Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grant through the National Endowment of the Humanities, which is due Sept. 27.

SCVTV sent a letter to the City requesting funds to help with the additional costs of the vendor, in the amount of $300,000.

Dozens of speakers also took to the podium Tuesday night to show their support for this move, all emphasising the importance of preserving history. 

At Tuesday’s regular meeting the city council voted to help SCVTV with the costs of the website upgrade. 

“It is a sacred tie to our past,” said Weste.

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