Boy Scout Digitizes History of Glencoe Homes
as Part of Eagle Scout Project

[Article written by Dan Dorfman and originally published as www.chicagotribune.com on September 21, 2024]

As he seeks to fulfill the community service requirement for his Eagle Scout badge, Kastl, 15, has led an effort to digitize papers, some going back to the 19th century, at the Glencoe Historical Society with the goal of allowing people a central place to learn about the history of a village property. “I wanted to make a bigger impact,” Kastl said. “I thought it was unique and interesting.”

Traditionally Eagle Scout community service requirements are met through outdoor projects such as cleaning up a fire pit or painting a bench, but Kastl took a different direction.  “He wanted to do something different and something that would really contribute to the community,” noted his father, John Kastl.

The Eagle Scout recognition also requires leadership ability, thus Collin Kastl, a life scout of BSA Troop 20 in Winnetka, had to work with and oversee others. So he recruited other aspiring Eagle Scouts, and some adult volunteers have assisted.

However, before he could start the effort, he needed to have the requisite computer equipment. He came home in early June from a Litchfield, Connecticut boarding school and launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise the funds allowing him to buy a monitor, PC keyboard and mouse. Plus, he wanted to buy snacks for his team.

By mid-July, the equipment was purchased and Kastl was taking on the large collection of papers and organizing them by individual address.  “It is going to have a really big impact in Glencoe because anyone can find out all the information about their property,” he said.

Historical Society officials embraced Kastl’s idea because they frequently get questions about the history of a house. Now they will have one centralized place to look.  “That is incredibly valuable to the community and to our research people,” Glencoe Historical Society co-president Karen Ettelson said. “It makes everything easier and more accessible.”

Kastl and his team have faced challenges as the amount of paper to organize was far more than expected and the scanners occasionally didn’t work correctly.  “It is an enormous amount of work to scan all of this stuff,” Ettelson acknowledged.  However, Kastl was a daily presence during the summer— he was known to stay as late as 7 p.m. — at GHS trying to chip away at the backlog of documents, earning kudos from Ettelson.

“One of the key things about doing this is you have to have a critical attention to detail,” she said. “The possibility of mistakes is huge. He has a tremendous work ethic and is dedicated to making sure the scans and information and the mistakes are absolutely minimum.”

Kastl sent out an email to supporters and donors a few weeks ago announcing his team’s results.  “Over the past two months, we scanned thousands of property documents that were stored at GHS and uploaded the PDF versions of them into a database to be accessed by a unique portal coded by the donated service of Ben Keller.  Today, anyone can come, type in their address, and see all the documents about their property on a dedicated computer, donated to GHS through your contributions,” he wrote.

“Digitization is the future for a lot of museums,” Ettelson said. “It is really expensive and hard to do professionally for an all-volunteer organization like ours.”  Ettelson added Kastl has created a model for other parts of the historical society’s collection, so this initiative could serve as a template for the institution’s future. “We are very excited about that,” she said.

Kastl is pleased with the summer’s accomplishment. “I like to see all the progress we have done as volunteers,” Kastl said. “I also like seeing everyone’s faces when they hear about my project and the impact it will have. The progress is awesome.”