Hello from Champaign-Urbana

[Sarah M Christensen]

Hi everyone, 

I'm currently working on the ExploreCU project with the University Library here at UIUC, and we're gearing up for our big launch date in a few weeks. We also have our first independent study student this semester. I'm wondering what everyone's experiences are with the community contributing content to your projects? We've developed a form that we'll link to our "about" page, and we've discussed setting up blogs for people, but does anyone have anything that's either really working well for them or not working at all? Advantages and challenges? Any feedback will be helpful!

Thanks, 

Sarah 

[James Dubelko]

Over the past year, I've been involved in two community projects with Cleveland Historical.  One involved the 100 year celebration of Shaker Heights, Ohio as a suburb of Cleveland.  From my perspective, there was a lot of positive contribution from that community as well as appreciation for the stories that we told about the history of the community on Cleveland Historical.  I think one of the keys to that success was the very active involvement of community leaders--from the city government, from the local historical society, and from the local library.  Other than the taking of oral histories, I don't know that there was a lot of direct interaction between Cleveland Historical staff and members of the general public in that community.  And even the local histories were done with the assistance of community leaders.  

The other experience I had with community projects recently was less positive but just as instructive.  It involved direct collaboration between Cleveland Historical staff members and local historians from neighborhoods of Cleveland.  The goal of the project was to bring together local historians with great access to neighborhood stories and Cleveland Historical staff members with formal training in history.  The result hoped for was better trained local historians and an increased number of interesting local historical stories on Cleveland Historical.  It didn't work out as well as planned.  With some exceptions, it was difficult for many of the staff members to obtain well-researched stories from the local historians; proposed changes suggested by staff members to less than well-researched stories by local historians were sometimes resisted and criticized; and, in the end, it was not only a bumpy process, but few stories of quality made it to Cleveland Historical.  

From these two projects, I think that I've learned that it sometimes works better to have less direct and less involved interaction with members of the general public who know about interesting neighborhood stories, and better if staff works more indirectly with the general public, for example, through an intermediary source such as city government, local historical society, library, etc. officials.  That's just my experience.  Other members of Cleveland Historical may have had different experiences on these and other projects.

[Eli Pousson]

Hello,

I'll chime in with a quick note on this topic rather than doing a separate introduction. I work with Baltimore Heritage - a nonprofit preservation advocacy organization in Baltimore, Maryland - and lead our Explore Baltimore Heritage project to build a Curatescape website and app. We've been promoting the app since last spring and have had a pretty good response so far with over 1000 downloads.

We created a submission form linked from our home page when we first set the site up but have only received a couple of inquiries through there. We've also sent information about content guidelines out to maybe a half-dozen different local historians to encourage them to contribute but so far we've only received a handful of stories back.

One idea we're working on to encourage more submissions is to start featuring Explore Baltimore Heritage stories in our regular e-mail newsletter to our list (around 2200 e-mails) to raise the visibility of our site and the especially contributions from community historians or local academic partners.

We've also talked about organizing a short free course on researching and writing local history with an emphasis on contributing materials to Explore Baltimore Heritage. We're still weighing the cost-benefit of this approach since it would take a fair amount of my staff time to organize and promote this course.

One quick question about the group settings - I tried to send this note last week but got an error that I could not submit to the group via e-mail. Is that a problem on my end or some setting that could be tweaked?

Thanks!

Eli

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Eli Pousson | Field Officer
Baltimore Heritage in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation
11 ½ West Chase Street, Baltimore, MD 21201 | cell 301.204.3337

Visit our blog- http://baltimoreheritage.org/blog
Find us on Facebook- http://facebook.com/baltimoreheritage
Follow us on Twitter- http://twitter.com/bmoreheritage

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[Sarah M Christensen]

Thank you James and Eli; your responses are incredible useful as we initiate this process. The grant funding for our graduate hourly employee will be gone at the end of the semester, so the biggest challenge for us will be making this a sustainable project. 

Best, 

Sarah