Estimated time to complete this section: 2 hours
5.3 Readings:
- Dougherty, Jack, and Kristen Nawrotzki. “Part 2: Wisdom of the Crowd.” In Writing History in the Digital Age, 2012. (Estimated Read Time = 30 minutes)
- Romeo, Fiona, and Lucinda Blaser. “Bringing Citizen Scientists and Historians Together,” 2011 (Estimated Read Time = 20 minutes)
- Sheila Brennan, Sharon Leon, et al. “Outreach and Publicity” in Building Histories of the National Mall: A Guide to Creating a Digital Public History Project, 2015. (Estimated Read Time = 10 minutes)
- Sheila Brennan, Sharon Leon, et al. “Social Media Strategy” in Building Histories of the National Mall: A Guide to Creating a Digital Public History Project, 2015. (Estimated Read Time = 10 minutes)
Digital public history projects often involve working with groups of people at various stages of the project. From group transcription to digitization, to working with an advisory board at your local library, or promoting your digital local history work through social media, many different groups may engage with your project.
As your projects grow, you may begin to see the importance of outreach and publicity. In order to reach your publics effectively and efficiently, it is important to develop a strategy for outreach and programming that includes a plan for publicizing your project.
Planning for programming:
- Connect existing programming with the digital – think about what programming or services you already engage that might lend themselves to a digital component, possibly to act as a connector over time. For example, if you frequently have patrons researching the history of their property, and conduct workshops on house histories, you could create a site with local maps, photographs, and other resources from your collection along with an exhibit explaining how to research a property’s history. If people in your area are interested in digitization services for their own documents, offer programming showing your digital work in progress.
- Build programming from your site – what programming can you offer based on your site’s content? Would communities described or included in your exhibit be interested in hosting a talk about or demonstration of the exhibit? Could you host a panel discussion built around the exhibit’s content?
Planning for outreach:
- Content Strategy – Make a list of goals. Do you want to drive visitors to a particular event? Or encourage users to visit your website? Are you trying to reach new audiences?
- Print media – Flyers, brochures and stickers easily distribute information to the public. If you are interested in directing visitors to your project or raising awareness about upcoming programming, providing patrons with material they can carry home may help to increase their engagement. As described in the Outreach and Publicity reading, be strategic in your development of these materials. Rather than printing multiple types of brochures to keep up with changing information, consider developing materials that can be used for a long period of time.
- Press Release – connect with local news outlets and work within your library to promote information about your activities. Your library administration may have an office which can help you draft and distribute a press release.
- Collaborating with other organizations – Be aware of other groups in the area with similar interests – churches, community organizations, scouting groups, etc – and be sure to reach out to them. Attend local meetings and events (bring print media to distribute) and build connections within your community. When appropriate, reach out to local and regional cultural heritage organizations about conducting activities that demonstrate the effectiveness of the project and encourage further interaction, either in your library or in their meeting space. If there is an existing walking tour or annual tour of areas included in your project, could you collaborate with the tour organizers in some way?
- Think about timing – outreach at the end of a project makes sense. Depending on your project, however, you may want to include your community at various points as you move forward with a project. For example, you might bring in members of a community to talk about what stories might not be included in the archive, or invite a group of students or scouts to help build an exhibit from your collections.
- Social Media – does your library have an institutional social media account? How can you talk to your social media team or person about your project? What content would be good to highlight? How could your social media team use your project to encourage participation in events or bring attention to an anniversary?
- Consider sharing your work – If permissible at your institution, you might want to document your progress on the project, sharing these steps via a blog, on social media, or a bulletin board in your branch. This can help make visible both the work of historical thinking and the work that goes on within your library.
Planning for programming that extends your Omeka project
- Add to your exhibits – Collaborate with members of your community to expand your library’s collections and/or your digital local history project through donation. Be clear that community members are invited to contribute to your collections, and have policies in place regarding ownership of digital and physical materials (for example, if you digitize a family photograph, be clear about who has final say on its use). You may find that as you open your local history collections to the public, an increasing number of patrons become interested in contributing to your collections, through stories (oral history), family photos, documents, and other material.
- Seek feedback – Consider asking your patrons, community, and peers for feedback on the project you’ve built. Ask them, and yourself, what worked well? What could be improved? Whose voices might be missing? Take this feedback into account as you move forward.
- Create more exhibits – After you’ve completed your first Omeka exhibit you may be excited about investigating additional local history events, people, or questions. Expand your collection of items, conduct additional secondary research, and build new projects within your Omeka site.
- Use tools to expand your exhibits and site – A number of tools available for free online allow users to create engaging visuals, some of which make use of maps and timelines. You or your patrons can use Juxtapose to contrast two images, TimelineJS to create a scrolling timeline of events, and MapWarper to connect historical maps to the present day landscape. Documentation on these tools is available on the linked pages.
- Use tools to collaborate with others – A number of resources are available online that encourage collaborative work. Tools like Scripto and Scribe allow you to harness the expertise and skill from your community members. Documentation on these tools is available on the linked pages.