Losing control: experiments in outreach

Losing control:experiments in outreach
Amanda Hill
Hillbraith Ltd.
[Deseronto Archives]

Pushing the boundaries
Existing outreach
Blog
Twitter
Flickr site for images
Bi-monthly town newsletters (delivered to every home in Deseronto)
All mediated by the Archives
How to take it further?

User-generated content?
Grant of $16,000 from Museums and Technology Fund, 2010 with matched funding of $4,000 from the Town of Deseronto
Used to build and generate content for a new website: ‘About Deseronto’
Inspiration: http://ournewhaven.org.uk

Absence…
Physical distance from home town
Feelings of affection for home town
with apologies to Jessica Hagy of ‘Indexed’ http://thisisindexed.com

Low-cost, sustainable approach
Just launching a beta version of their hosted service in April 2010

Omeka.org and Omeka.net

Omeka.net plans

Disadvantages
Initially, Omeka.net did not offer an option for users to upload materials direct
Which had been the whole point of ‘About Deseronto’
Hard to get people to engage
Very small population, which doesn’t help!

New direction
Oral histories
Archives Board members helped to identify potential interviewees
10 interviews conducted during the course of the project
Big learning curve – technology, technique

Christmas in the funeral home

Memories

‘About Deseronto’
Partial success
‘Contribute’ option now available, but not really being used!

Other outreach experiments
Family/Heritage Day competition

Self-guided tour
110 downloads

Doors Open
Partnership between Napanee and Deseronto
Benefits of Napanee’s previous experience
Recycled earlier work: Flickr images for display boards and brochures
Plan to use these materials in future events - Waterfront Festival on July 2nd

Facebook
Set up a Facebook account for the Archives to help promote Doors Open through an event page
An unexpected success
(yet another site to maintain…)
Also used Twitter to do a daily tweet on Doors Open

Doors Open verdict
A lot of work, but good to meet people on the day who had never used the archives
1,000 people visited sites in Deseronto
Identified some more potential oral history interviewees
Even accessioned some new materials for the archives!

Conclusions on experiments
Try different things to see what happens
Some things work better than others
Some are more work than others
Digitization groundwork (lots of images on Flickr) was a real boon

Contact details
deserontoarchives@gmail.com
http://deserontoarchives.wordpress.com
@DeserontoArch on Twitter

Losing control: experiments in outreach

by Amanda Hill on Jun 16, 2011

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Losing control: experiments in outreach — Presentation Transcript