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The Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, announced the completion of a processing of the papers of the Northern New England Weather Center (NNEWC), a division of the museum. The finding aid, a detailed guide to the collection, is now available. While much of this information contained in the records can also be accessed through the National Climatic Data Center, some of the NNEWC papers, most notably the wind data, are unique and only available through the Fairbanks Museum Archives. A description of the records is also available on the Internet as part of ArcCat, the union catalog of Vermont's archival holdings maintained at the University of Vermont's Bailey/Howe Library.
The NNEWC papers were selected as the museum's first archives processing project because of their importance to the museum's collections and potential use for both staff and outside researchers. Weather observation has been an important facet of the museum since its founder, Franklin Fairbanks, kept weather records in his home in St. Johnsbury. He continued to work after establishing the museum and in 1894 set up an observation station at the museum and started sharing his data with the National Weather Service Bureau. In the late 1940s, the museum began to broadcast weather...