Guide: What is Local History?

How can our library resources help us learn about the history of the place in which we live?

For this program, you’ll host an open house for your Special Collections and/or digital repositories to show patrons what local history resources are available in your library.

This program can be conducted in person, or you could host a virtual tour (this could be done via a variety of video and/or social media platforms–just be sure to consult the internet guidelines for your library system).

If you are short on space, time, or personnel for an interactive tour, consider creating a set of reference handouts for patrons. The handouts can be designed to:

    • answer popular or common local history questions;
    • guide patrons to interesting, underused sources in your local history collection.

See the Activity Resource Sheets for a series of charts that focus on four different local history research topics: Events, Communities, Families, and Locations. These charts are meant to be customizable and can be edited to reflect and include the sources in your local collection and could be adapted for specific collections as a guide for researchers.

Activity resource sheet: What is Local History (docx); What is Local History (pdf)

What has happened here?

What do we know about the place in which we live?

For this program, you’ll develop and facilitate a local history scavenger hunt.

This program can be modified to be completed as an individual activity, a group activity, or as field trip activity for students. Because your goal is for participants to learn more about their community and not just to simply complete the scavenger hunt, you may want to consider making this an ongoing activity.

The resources of your library such as Special Collections and digital repositories/databases will be excellent for this activity. If patrons cannot come to the library to complete this activity, you will want to consider ways they can take part remotely using only digital resources.

The questions for the scavenger hunt come from Rebecca Onion’s article, “What Happened Here?” (see Activity Resource Sheet). Feel free to add your own questions; you can even crowdsource questions specific to your community from patrons.

Activity resource sheet: What Happened Here (docx); What Happened Here (pdf)

Collaborative Community Research Inquiry

Activity adapted from School Reform Initiative, “Inquiry Circles: A Protocol for Professional Inquiry.”

Genealogy is a step toward local history research, as people in the past comprise both family trees and communities. What do we know about our family members in the past? Where did they live? How did they live? This program encourages patrons to bring their family stories to the library and begin crafting historical questions to guide their research.

*Note: This is an active program; you should have at least two participants so that you successfully facilitate the program. It may be too time-intensive to conduct this thinking protocol 1-on-1 with a patron.

Writing What We Remember

  • Give program participants an opportunity to write about the family member(s) and the family story(ies) that brought them to the program–but remind them this is an informal exercise; it shouldn’t feel like they’re in school. Encourage participants to review their writing and choose components that they might want to focus on in more depth.
  • When participants have completed their writing, invite them to sit face-to-face with another participant to begin the next step of the program.

Sharing What We Remember

  • In this step, participants begin the collaborative part of the program by sharing their stories. In their pairs, they’ll take turns sharing & taking notes
    • the teller tells
    • the listener listens for a story: what key words, phrases, themes, and ideas are emerging as the story is told?
    • switch roles
  • After each participant has shared, encourage them to review their notes on the story told to them.

Retelling What We Remember

  • Each pair of participants introduce each other and retells the story they heard
  • The owner of the original story may add and/or clarify what their partner has shared
  • Other participants may ask clarifying questions; these questions should reinforce what works about the original story and center the original storyteller.

Developing Questions

  • Each participant completes a Storytelling Summary Sheet for their partner based on the storytelling process and the questions that emerged during the retelling portion. Completed summary sheets are given to the owner of the original story.
  • Participants should take some time to review and reflect on both their family story as well as what is on their summary sheet. Encourage them to think about the following:
    • What really matters to you?
    • What do you want to learn more about?
  • This reflection may lead to a research question; if so, participants should write this on the back of their summary sheet. Remind participants that this is the question that begins their research, but may go through several revisions once their research begins.
  • Based on the questions developed in this activity, you may suggest available library resources that can assist participants in beginning their research.

Activity resource sheets: Storytelling Sheet (docx); Storytelling Sheet (pdf)