Presented April 17 at BarCamp Boston 5 at MIT’s Stata Center.
PhilaPlace integrates history with location through an interface that makes examining historical information by location straightforward.
The site was launched on December 9, 2009 and updated March 29, 2010 as described in this announcement (emphasis added):
On the PhilaPlace “Map” page at PhilaPlace.org, visitors can click on the new “Streets” tab and view enhanced historical maps that reveal in-depth patterns of change over time for specific blocks in South Philadelphia and Northern Liberties neighborhoods. Land-use and census data recreate details and activities on a street, house by house, business by business . . .
A screen from PhilaPlace.org
“Through visual representations overlaid on the contemporary and historic maps, visitors can see with a glance how key areas at certain points in time changed in terms of ethnic make-up, land use, and occupation,” explained Joan Saverino, PhilaPlace project director.
The maps were produced by one of PhilaPlace’s key partners, Amy Hillier, Assistant Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania, and undergraduate and graduate students who worked under her supervision. . . .
The site weaves stories shared by ordinary people of all backgrounds with historical records to present an interpretive picture that captures the rich history, cultures, and architecture of our neighborhoods – past and present. The site uses a multimedia format, including interactive maps (both contemporary and historic), text, photographs, and audio and video clips. PhilaPlace features approximately 200 neighborhood stories told through text, audio and video. Visitors to the site can contribute new content on an ongoing basis and have the ability to map their own stories in place and time. The site also includes K-12 lesson plans for teachers. More than a Web site, PhilaPlace engages diverse communities through local programs, teacher workshops, trolley tours, exhibits, and printed neighborhood guides.
The project is a collaborative endeavor undertaken by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in partnership with the City of Philadelphia Department of Records, the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, other institutions and community organizations, and members of the community who share their personal stories.
David Crosson, the Executive Director of the California Historical Society, raised this question in a LinkedIn group:
Q: Is anyone aware of state, regional, or national studies that identify creative benchmarks against which to measure the effectiveness of a history organization’s website? Is there a bell curve out there for site visits, page visits, pages per site visit, etc? How do we know that our site is effective compared to other sites?
My “answer” is below. The thread is here. If any historical (or similar) organizations are interested in participating in an exchange of traffic information, please contact me.
A: This is an interesting question, and one that we’ve dealt with in our local historical society. While I know of no benchmark data for peer historical societies, even if such were available, the answer should really be derived from understanding the role that the site plays in achieving the organization’s goals. After all, for nearly all organizations, a website is a tool, not an objective unto itself.
In the case of an historical society, one can think of several goals for the organization, such as institutional growth (e.g., membership, fundraising, merchandise sales), outreach and education (activities in the community or in schools), increasing one’s collection and increasing engagement with the collection (e.g., by making it more widely available), and scholarship (research and publishing). The web (or e-mail or social media) could be used in each case.
The measure of success, then, becomes the ROI, comparing the success of an initiative with the resources (the web and others) used to achieve that result.
The great opportunity for historical societies of all sizes in using the web is to provide much greater access to collections. Moreover, to do so in a way that people anywhere can contribute to the collection and the understanding of the collection by adding descriptions and links, along with ratings and tags. Taking this one step further, various location-aware mobile applications, especially some of the new “augmented reality” applications, give historical societies the opportunity to connect a collection with a physical place, enriching the viewer’s understanding and appreciation of both.
The challenge that historical organizations (and others with archives) have in this regard is similar to the challenge that Encyclopedia Britannica (EB on EB; Wikipedia on EB) faced in its struggle to remain relevant in the face of Wikipedia [EB on Wikipedia; Wikipedia on Wikipedia]. Fundamentally it’s a struggle over who controls (or owns) the information, and the standards for contributing, editing, and approving content.
The outcome of that struggle should be informative. (Compared on Compete; Alexa for Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia.) In the world of physical things, such as documents and other historical objects, the ability to provide scans or photos along with a platform for community contributions, such as descriptions, narrative context, links, tags, comments, and ratings, means that the traditional functions of preservation, interpretation, and presentation can be decoupled.
The restoration of the Star Spangled Banner at the Smithsonian in 1914.
And while the thought of this decoupling can seem threatening to individuals whose sense of self and whose standing in the profession comes from the physical control of objects others value, the web offers a tremendous opportunity to greatly expand the organization’s impact. Though few high-profile organizations have chosen this road–the Smithsonian is pursuing a version of this with their Smithsonian Commons (slide presentation below)–one can expect that as the cohort of individuals that have grown up with the web ages, we’ll see more and more organizations taking a platform approach instead of the traditional closed approach.
And it’s this transformation that will be the biggest contribution to the study of history. Whether historical societies wish to lead or follow is the question.
A 2009 presentation from Michael Edson, the Smithsonian’s Director of Web and New Media Strategy, describes their Commons initiative. The text is here—thanks to Michael for the reminder—and the slides are below.
Earlier this week the National Endowment for the Humanities made it possible through their site to search all NEH grants awarded since 1980.
This is a big help for anyone wondering . . .
The first two questions can easily be answered through this new tool; there’s no access to the full text of the awards at this point, though individual awards are available via e-mail. (Note that a few examples of narratives for Humanities Collections and Reference Resources are available here, under “Program Resources–Sample Narratives” on the right, half-way down the page. For example, here’s the narrative from an application from the Newberry Library.)
Searching the database is straightforward. Looking for any grant going to any historical society anywhere in the country, I entered historical society in the “Organization Name” field, left the other fields blank, and got back 862 results, including this one:
NEH funded projects search result example: Shelton Historical Society
Because the results are returned on one page, you can quickly skim or search them using your browser’s search function. (Most browsers have page search built in.) This is an improvement over the way in which most sites display search results, broken up into short pages, making them impossible to quickly scan or search.
You can easily modify your search using one or more criteria. For example, selecting the state of Massachusetts and running a search on organizations that include the words historical society in their name returns 59 results.
Brett Bobley, CIO of the Office of Digital Humanities at the NEH, and his team have a done a great job introducing this, their 1.0 version of the search. They have plans for further improvements and are interested in your feedback. If you use the database search and have suggestions, you’ll find a link for feedback to the CIO near the bottom of the FAQ/Help page. And unlike the way this most large organizations–public or private–would handle this, your message really will go to the CIO–and he’ll read it.
…
Note: Another Federal agency, The Institute of Museum and Library Services, recently made the full text of the last two years of awarded Connecting to Collections Planning Grants available online.
Earlier today I sent the message below to my fellow members on the Massachusetts IMLS Connecting to Collections Statewide Planning Grant Advisory Board. It references the minutes of our first meeting, and seeks to continue the conversation about addressing critical issues that may otherwise reduce participation in the survey.
The next meeting of the board is November 18. We hope to accomplish a considerable amount before then.
If you have comments or suggestions, please add them below.
Earlier posts described the efforts of Massachusetts and other states in securing planning grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), a Federal agency.
One of the shortcomings of past efforts, including the national Heritage Health Index (described in this post), was the under-representation of smaller institutions, including the many local historical societies.
There are roughly 1,000 historical societies (in name or function) throughout New England, the vast majority of which are all-volunteer organizations. Often these organizations serve as the repositories for the town’s archives. Despite the tireless work of those who staff and support local historical societies, most societies, including the one on whose board I serve, don’t have the physical set up, the training, the time, or the budget to maintain their collections in ways that are comparable to the preservation efforts at large institutions. We do the best we can, of course, but with meager resources, we trade off things like maintaining the building, putting on programs, supporting research requests, and managing an ever-expanding collection.
The unintended result of the under-representation is that those institutions in which the situation is most dire are the least likely to show up in the results.
In order to address this, the advisory board that’s been established includes three members (in bold below) representing historical societies.
The members and the (draft) minutes of the first meeting, which took place on September 18, 2009, are below.
In order to provide a platform for communication and discussion, I’ll post updates during the life of this Advisory Board. If you belong to an historical society in Massachusetts and have suggestions or comments, please feel free to contact me or, better yet, add them below. When you add your comment, I’ll be notified and others will be able to learn from and participate in the discussion.
This is a partial list. It will be updated when a complete list of members is made available to us.
To read the document below, either use the controls in the grey bar at the top of the document or double click on link immediately below.
MA IMLS Connecting to Collections Grant Advisory Committee Minutes 09-18-09–Draft
From: [name] [mailto:[address]@IMLS.GOV]
Sent: Friday, April 10, 2009 11:55 AM
Subject: FOIA 09-15Ms. [sic] Lee,
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has received your on-line e-mail request for information regarding “[r]ecently-funded Connecting to Collections grant applications….”
In response to your request and stated desire to obtain information electronically, I have coordinated with the Office of Museum Services to expedite its normal process of updating the agency’s website so that the requested grant information is made available to the public. That process is now complete, therefore, I have provided you a link below to assist you in obtaining the requested information.
http://www.imls.gov/collections/grants/planning.htm
I note that the IMLS FOIA Officer has determined that all information contained on the agency’s website is appropriate for release. There is no fee for providing this information.
Thank you for your interest in the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Respectfully
[name]
Senior Paralegal Specialist/FOIA Processor
Office of the General Counsel
Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
1800 M Street, NW (9th Floor)
Washington, DC 20036-5802
[phone number]
[fax number] (Fax)
How did this come about?
On March 4, 2009 I wrote the program the senior program officer to learn what arrangements I needed to make in order to visit their offices in Washington to read the other awarded Connecting to Collections Statewide Planning Grants.
This is the purpose of the grants, as the IMLS describes on their site:
Statewide Planning Grants, an important component of the Connecting to Collections initiative, foster partnerships among organizations in a state, commonwealth, or territory to implement recommendations of the Heritage Health Index (HHI), which recommends that collections in the public trust should:
- provide safe conditions for their collections;
- develop an emergency plan;
- assign responsibility for collections care; and
- work together to increase public and private support for, and raise public awareness about, collections care.
Surely reading what other states were planning to do would be a good way to understand efforts across the country.
I received this reply:
As for reading funded proposals, we don’t really have a reading room for that type of thing. If you want, you can request as many funded projects as you are interested in to be sent to you via the freedom of information act http://www.imls.gov/about/foia.shtm.
This was quite a surprise for several reasons, including (1) the grants had already been awarded; (2) there was nothing secretive about their content; (3) they were small ($40,000 or less); (4) they were decidedly non-political in nature; and, (5) this is a public agency awarding tax dollars.
Believing that there was both a principle that mattered and a practical application that would serve others, I submitted this FOIA request:
I was surprised to learn that these aren’t (1) available online; (2) made available by e-mail upon request; (3) made available in paper form upon (reasonable) request; or finally (4) available to view on-site if someone drives to your offices in Washington to read them.
Given the fact that all of these are in electronic form, and publishing them is literally free (via the web), one would expect that this would be the standard once the awarding of public funds is announced.
That you can’t even read them on-site. . . Well, that’s pretty exasperating. So, if a FOIA request is the only way I and others in my community and state might learn from those in other states with the same goal, then that’s what I’m submitting.
In terms of fees, $5.00 should cover the staff time required to e-mail the documents or upload them to a free public site such as scribd.com, which is already widely used throughout the Federal government for hundreds of thousands of documents.
Thanks for your help.
A little more than a month later I received the message above reporting that the IMLS had now published the awards from this year and last year online.
Thanks to the willingness of the IMLS to revise their existing practice, it is now easier for institutions across the country to learn what others are doing in the area of collection assessment and care.
In fact, the February 19 press release from the IMLS announcing these awards made just this point:
I applaud these grantees as they take action to combat the crises in collections care that threaten to rob our heritage, said Anne-Imelda Radice, IMLS Director. They represent a wide array of approaches to planning, from a system of conservation circuit-riders in Virginia working with small institutions across the state to the first-ever statewide preservation assessment of material culture collections in Utah.
They’ve now made this possible for all via the web.
An earlier post listed the grants by state and described the way in which several institutions throughout Wyoming collaborated online in the development of their successful grant submission. Another provided full online access to the submission and timeline for Massachusetts’s successful award.
Today was the deadline to comment on the National Park Service’s draft digital photo policy. An earlier article on state leadership on digital photo policies cited North Carolina’s policy of requiring digital photos.
I recently asked Peter Sandbeck, who administers North Carolina’s Historic Preservation Office and serves as the Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer, how they made the decision to implement this policy:
We took the leap with our eyes open and a sense that this was quickly going to bring great benefits to our process, which it has.
Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, one of more than 2.600 properties in North Carolina on the National Register of Historic Places.
Michael Southern, the state’s Senior Architectural Historian and GIS Coordinator, picked up the discussion from there. Michael, who has worked for 35 years in historic preservation in North Carolina, said the move was “a little painful at first,” so to help his colleagues bring their skills up to the level required by the Office’s new policy, he set up a computer lab in their conference room and held full-day sessions.
He also worked with the consultants throughout the state who assist with National Register filings, including making trips to the houses of some to walk them through what they were going to need to do in the future.
Here’s the full e-mail interview with Michael:
Q: What prompted the move to requiring digital photography? Peter mentioned “great benefits to our process.” What are the major ones?
A: With the improvements being made in affordable digital cameras, by 2004 or 2005 it seemed clear to us that digital was a better way to record buildings for architectural surveys. As the policy states, “Digital photography offers speed, flexibility, and cost savings in acquiring, editing, sharing, presenting, and printing photographs. It enables use of a single camera to obtain photos for every step in the process of recording, presenting, and nominating a property or district.”
While most of us would agree that traditional view camera photography is superior as “art” photography and for special images of VIBs (Very Important Buildings), the point is that thousands of photos of buildings and their architectural details and settings are taken in the course of a survey. The images need to be good descriptive photos, and improvements in affordable SLR (and even some non-SLR) digital cameras made their images equal to or better than 35mm film cameras. In fact, I would say that the quality of photos taken by our consultants has improved since they have switched to digital. The benefits have been improved photo quality, improved presentations (PowerPoint versus slides), easy sharing, and of course, speed and cost savings.
Q: What process was used to develop and ultimately put in place the new policy? In other words, what entity made the decision, and what did it take to get to that point?
A: Before Peter became our Deputy SHPO in mid-2004, he had been in the thick of digital imagery issues at Colonial Williamsburg. The impetus came from him with concurrence of senior staff. I drafted the first efforts at a digital policy, which went through multiple reviews (first by our staff, and later by consultants) and several subsequent revisions and improvements. Some of the least technical members of our staff had an important role showing how we needed to clarify the “geekspeak” and make things as clear as possible for general users.
Q: What concerns were voiced when the revision was made? Any strong objections?
A: Some of the older consultants—some have been doing field work in N.C. since the early 1970s—were skeptical and wary of the change, but I don’t remember what I would call strong objections. (But it’s possible there were objections that never reached my ears!). Most have made the transition to digital pretty well. These people are mostly traditional historians with limited computer skills beyond word processing and email, and I have spent a good bit of time on the phone and even visiting the homes of some of them to help them with downloading, batch processing, and PowerPoint questions. I would say that states that wish to implement a digital policy need to provide at least some measure of technical support of this nature. But some of the younger ones were actually a step ahead of us with the new technology.
Q: Have you run into any problems with the implementation? Peter mentioned ”long-term storage, cataloging.” To what extent are you looking at storage in the cloud as the solution for storage?
A: Storage and cataloging are the biggest problems. We’ve tried to address the cataloging issue with a photo naming protocol based on survey site numbers that serves at least in a rudimentary way as its own index. For the time being we are simply storing the photos by county in an “Image Library” on our server. As the collection grows, storage space and retrieval are going to be more serious issues. I’m not familiar with storage in the cloud technology, but I wonder whether the state would be open—at least for now—to using that sort of external service for public records.
Q: Did you consider, or do you plan to consider, adding geotagging as a requirement?
A: Not in the near term, though we recognize how it could be beneficial in certain types of survey work in the future. Most of the field work is done by consultants, and as I indicated, many are decidedly non-technical and uncomfortable with computers in general, so it’s one step at a time. Our GIS system bases site identification on the survey site numbers, and that will facilitate linkage to associated photos that use the site number at the beginning of the photo name.
Q: Can people view these digital images online now? If not, do you have plans to make this possible in the future?
A: We have begun making PDFs of recent National Register nominations that have some photos included. The first of these will begin to appear online within a couple of months, we hope. But it will be a slow process working through our National Register roster and into other categories of historic properties and districts. We are in the very early stages of considering how we will present GIS mapping and general survey materials online.
Q: Are submissions (text, in addition to photos) done electronically when they are sent to you? Can these be viewed online?
A: Survey reports and National Register nominations are submitted in word processing format, usually Word. We have also developed a survey database in Access that is used by consultants for new surveys, survey updates, and new historic district nominations. The database is designed to serve as a stand-alone project data manager, but it also links to GIS. Except for the nomination documents converted to PDFs to be posted soon, these other materials are not online.
. . . .
Read the full text of North Carolina’s revised photo policy, which now . . .
requires the use of digital photography for all grant-funded survey and National Register nomination projects.
An e-mail exchange with a small circle of colleagues about the evolution of the Web and society–we’ve all been deeply involved with the Web since 1995– brought such an interesting exchange yesterday that, with their permission, I’ve moved it here. Given the focus of Read Write History on the use of modern tools to foster interest in and engagement with history and historical artifacts, the discussion about the evolution of the Web, social media, and society is directly relevant (albeit sometimes irreverent).
"Twitter! Down again!"
This is the text of my original e-mail message; the messages that followed appear in the comments below.
“I’ve been amazed for years at people’s amazement at the ongoing changes wrought by the web, and for a year or so by all of the twittering over “social media.”
“It finally hit me: The reason so many are surprised and intrigued and amazed is because it is new to them. They simply don’t think very hard/often/clearly/rigorously about things, so when things happen, even those that are part of clear, long-term trends, it’s new to them.
“Other explanations? (Let’s leave out the motives of those selling books and consulting gigs.)”
Best–
Lee
Tip: It’s the discussion that took place in response, which I’ve moved to the comments below, that’s the interesting part.
"Specimens of Illumination and Calligraphy" (1754)
Susan Hamson, Curator of Manuscripts and University Archivist at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, responding to the question, “How did the Web change archives?” on ArchivesNext, offered this perspective:
“The Web has not only democratized research, but forced a paradigm shift in the way we think about research overall and the very definition of what scholarly publishing is. It was not so long ago in many academic institutions that only ‘researchers engaged in scholarly research and publishing’ were even allowed to get near a rare book or original manuscript–and that had to be approved by a curator or director. If I had a dollar for every time an undergraduate or terminal Master’s alumnus of Columbia University told me they were laughed out of special collections I would be one wealthy woman; and we’re not an anomaly. Indeed, just as the web is ‘open to one, open to all,’ so too have academic institutions been encouraged (in some cases forced) to be ‘open to one, open to all.’
“In addition to democratizing access, the Web has also had a surprising effect on what rare or unique really mean. The aggressive push by Google to digitize books has not isolated archives, but made them the prized commodity in the business of the academic library. Archives and special collections are being leveraged in a way never seen before. It’s a dynamic fuse that now burns: ‘researcher’ is redefined > collections are not just used, but used by more people > demand grows to see more, what else is there? > process faster, make material accessible > institutions forced to reexamine past practices, embrace change > explore new delivery practices > standardization > competition.
“It’s an exciting time to be an archivist. We are part of a major shift in professional practice and identity. Embrace it! Revel in it!”
Ready to embrace and revel at the Spring 2009 New England Archivists Conference, March 27 – 28 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. See you there.
