How do scholars, activists, tourists, neighbors, city planners, and preservationists find and share information about historic places in their communities, in their cities, and in their regions? How do they identify relationships between places or understand the context within such places were constructed, occupied, or even destroyed? In most cases, anyone interested in these questions might rely on a wide range of tools and resources, such as calling a local historical society, finding a walking tour brochure at a local visitor center, visting the local history section of the neighborhood library, searching a web-based database provided by a State Historic Preservation Office, or simply searching online in the hope that someone might have already investigated the location. The latter is often productive but resources are currently fragmented both topically and geographically, as well as suffering from an absence of essential features such as mapping, sorting or filtering. If you are searching for information on historic theaters Cinema Treasures is indispensable, roadside architecture can be found at RoadsideArchitecture.com, the Labelscar retail history blog has documented hundreds of shopping malls but none of these sites allow the consideration of the unusual buildings within their local contexts. For example, what African-American neighborhood did the Comet Theater serve? What was located at the site of the Westland Mall prior to  its construction in 1969?

In addition, while a few websites offer a rich user experience, the web services provided by State Historic Preservation Offices are often severely limited by accident or by design (as some local and state governments license their data on historic places to private contracts if they maintain an updated database at all). Take a look at the National Register database provided by the Maryland Historical Trust or the basic PDF list provided by Virignia to get a sense of the limited services provided by government institutions in this regard. Even more effective examples, such as the Pennsylvania Historical Markers website or the National Register NPS Focus database, are often closed and provide few opportunities to even make comments, let alone access the underlying database for mashups or analysis. Regrettably, few preservation organizations even at a state or municipal level, let alone small museums, nonprofit preservation advocacy organizations, neighborhood and city historical societies, have sufficient technical expertise or capacity within their organizations to build and maintain new and effective web applications.

Even with the issues I’ve identified with both independent and publicly supported websites sharing data on historic places, the most serious issue is the great extent to which our knowledge of historic places is limited to the minds of a few individuals in our communities, in a box of documents sitting in a damp basement, or a drawer full of unlabeled photos at a neighborhood church. I’m curious to explore the potential of building websites that support sharing our knowledge of historic places, capturing new knowledge from those who hold it, and allowing scholars, activists, and interested citizens to explore this data at local, regional and national scales. Possible models for this approach may lie with smaller projects such as the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Database, the North Carolina Architects & Builders project, the University of Berkley’s California’s Living New Deal project, Teaching + Learning Cleveland, the Community Almanac from The Open Planning Project, the Open Plaques website, and dozens of others. I’d be very talking with anyone who has an interest in the intersection of place and new media to explore these questions further, but I’m especially curious how my questions relate to those presented by Elizabeth Schultz, Candace Nast, Marjorie McLellan, Andrea Odiorne, Justin Hons, Stephen Titchenal, Doug Lambert, Jonathan Tarr, and Phil Sager. For a quick bit of background, I currently work for Baltimore Heritage, a preservation advocacy organization. My past experience includes work with the DC Historic Preservation Office and a number of small museums and historical societies.

In my day job at the Ohio Historical Society I spend a lot of time working with online collections systems (primarily CONTENTdm). However, most of these systems come “pre-staged” with a particular look and feel and set of behaviors. These days, we want the ability to work with our digital treasures outside of their prefabricated digital homes. Moreover, we’d like to repurpose our digital resources, and do new and interesting and dynamic things with them. Assuming the collections system offers some method of working with its contents (e.g. via API or RESTful web services, etc.), the way should be open to providing new online experiences for a wide range of purposes. I’ve experimented with using several javascript frameworks to “produce” a couple of different “restagings”, and can talk about those experiences. But I am broadly interested in hearing about any other ideas, technologies and toolkits that are able to further leverage the contents of digital repositories. I’d love to hear from THATcampers!

I’d like to to talk about building an online local history collection of audio and video interviews, photos, written narratives, recipes, records, etc. What is doable when there’s lots of interest but no budget or time, tech resources and skills are limited, and people are geographically dispersed?

Hello! I am the Museum Education and Tour Coordinator at the Oberlin Heritage Center.  We are a small historical society / museum in Oberlin, OH and we just a launched a new website.  I have three big questions I’ll be asking at THATcamp:  1.  How can a small musuem/archive such as ours connect with educators to facilitate student digital projects (I like the sound of Mr. Gutowski’s 72 OVI project)?  2. How are small non-profits using web 2.0 and social networking to their greatest advantage?   3. What are some of the digital information management systems that people are using that would be appropriate for musuems of our size? 

We use our website and the database program FileMaker to post historic images, city directories, architectural inventories, and various historical information.  Are there better ways to do it?  Of course!  I know there are some great systems out there.   But what will work for us – an organization with 5 staff members, a really great volunteer force, some tech-savy college interns, and a wealth of history to share?

I’d be happy to discuss the development of our website, our new cemetery database, our admitedly weak attempts at blogging, and the many challenges any small history organization faces when expanding their web presence.  But in reading other posts I get the feeling that many of you are beyond that stage.  So, I instead offer to serve as “little guy” at THATcamp, asking pointed questions about cost, resources, and sustainability, and shamelessly stealing ideas to share with fellow small history organizations, many of which have even less of a web presence than we do.  And I will alwasy be ready to encouragingly say, “Don’t be afraid!  It’s okay to think big and start small.”