Community History Digitization: How-To Manual and Exercises
From eBlackCU Manual
This wiki features a manual to support community groups, institutions and individuals wishing to launch, build and sustain community history digitization projects.
Community history digitization projects are focused on representing community memory online. They could include projects to digitize school yearbooks, cherished recipes, family histories, oral histories, information on historic buildings, church histories, the history of local government, and much, much more! In community history digitization everyone's stories can be included. These projects could be small, such as digitizing the story of a single family, or huge, such as digitizing all the yearbooks of a given high school.
We hope this manual will be of use to any individual or institution wishing to launch such a project. Public librarians, historical societies, genealogical societies, universities, colleges, teachers of all types, community groups, churches, city governments, historic preservation groups, families, local historians, and others are all welcome to use this manual to represent their community history online.
Whether a family historian seeking to make a website for an upcoming family reunion, a church member seeking to represent the church’s history online, a local historian with stories to share, a planner for an upcoming school reunion, a museum or library with historical content to share, a social worker seeking to use local history to build community, a genealogical society with transcriptions of local cemeteries, a media outlet planning special features on local history, a government employee planning for a city anniversary, a school teacher planning a local or family history module, a sports coach wishing to represent the history of local teams, this manual has something for you.
In Spring 2012, a series of community technology workshops are being organized around this manual. Visit the Spring 2012 Workshop Series website for more details.
The most up-to-date powerpoint presentation used in these workshops can be downloaded and used by all.
This manual includes practice-derived advice and exercises organized into 11 chapters. It is currently in draft form, with the final version slated for release in Summer 2012.
The manual grew out of the eBlackCU Project, a community-based collaborative digitization initiative based in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
We have also released a short video tutorial on the topic of developing community yearbook digitization projects.
Anyone can edit, add to, and enhance this manual for the benefit of everyone engaged in community-based digitization. This manual is being released online as a draft. A final version will be released in Summer 2012. Please add links to related projects and suggest revisions so that we can pool our collective intelligence to enhance community memory everywhere. Feel free to leave feedback on this project and this manual.
Spring 2012 Workshop Series
Acknowledgments and Introduction
What supplies do I need to make community history digitization possible?
[Exercises]
Getting started: Time-line, scope and sources for the project
[Exercises]
Ethics and Logistics of Community History digitization projects
[Exercises]
Collecting history in Communities: Social Procedures
[Exercises]
Technical procedures to digitize history
[Exercises]
Overview of Omeka Content Management System
[Exercises]
Putting history online using Omeka
[Exercises]
Utilizing the project: In Communities
[Exercises]
Utilizing the project: For Scholarship
[Exercises]
Conclusions
