History Commons^™

Forging Connections And Building Collections: The Mass. Memories Road Show At Umass Boston, Jessica R. Holden

Joseph P. Healey Library Publications

In this presentation, I explored three aspects of the Mass. Memories Road Show: the public event, the digital collection, and the archival record of Massachusetts communities. I discussed bringing archival resources out into communities (rather than vice versa), and thus reaching new audiences, as well as building new partnerships within those communities.

The Mass. Memories Road Show is a state-wide digital history project that documents people, places, and events in Massachusetts history through family photographs and stories. In partnership with teams of local volunteers, we organize public events to scan family and community photographs and record “the stories behind the …

Crowdsourcing Digital Public History, Jason A. Heppler, Gabriel K. Wolfenstein

Criss Library Faculty Publications

The generation of communal knowledge is not a new phenomenon. In the late nineteenth century, the Oxford English Dictionary solicited volunteers to submit words and their usage for inclusion in the dictionary ( 1 ). Carl Becker, writing in 1932 on what was already an old discussion in the historical profession, noted that "if the essence of history is the memory of things said and done, then it is obvious that every normal person, Mr. Everyman, knows some history" (2). The historian Jo Guldi's work on participatory mapping shows that urban planners in the middle of the twentieth century attempted …