The End of Class and a Look at the Process

Winners of the Charlotte Woman of the Year Award

The end of the semester and History 6330: History in the Digital Age is upon us.  Our goal was to learn what was needed to create an online exhibit and make it a reality. The final touches are being made to our exhibit “CharlotteWoman of the Year” in preparation for our group presentation it is time to examine the process of making this exhibit come to life. Our group sort of came together because none of us were interested in the pre-planned projects that were laid out at the beginning of the semester. In my group were Sarah Beaver, Amanda Elzey and Andrew Pack. We decided to look at the WBT/WBTV collection in the Atkins Library archives to see if anything in the collection caught our attention as a possible subject for an exhibit.

The WBT radio station had its start in 1920 in the chicken coop of Fred Laxton’s house when he with Earle Gluck, and Fred Bunker set up an amateur radio station. They incorporated in 1922 with the call letters of WBT. C.C. Coddington, owner a Buick dealership purchased the business in 1925 to promote his dealership referring to the WBT call letters as “Watch Buick Travel.” Later it was owned by CBS and the Jefferson-Standard Life Insurance Company. Early on the programming was comedy shows, soap operas, sports programming and music, later changing to adult contemporary music and talk radio.

The collection was vast and was divided into six series: WBT radio station records, WBTV television records, Jefferson-Pilot Broadcasting Company records, Columbia Broadcasting System corporate records, photographs and a sampling of WBTV news film from 1959 to 1981.

We quick found a part of the collection that we could all agree would make a wonderful online exhibit. WBT sponsored the Charlotte Woman of the Year contest from 1955 to 1989 and the collection contained press releases, programs, applications and photographs of these award recipients. We desired to know what qualifications and characteristics led these individual winners to be chosen to represent Charlotte each year. We found out that these were not ordinary woman but were doctors, professors, city council members and state politicians who fought for the rights of woman and minorities not only in Charlotte but across the state.

We found that the easiest way to proceed with the division of the workload in the project was to have a team member to focus on a particular decade in the history of the award. Amanda chose the 1950s and to be the lead editor of grammar and content for website. Andrew chose the 1960s while I took the 1970s. That left Sarah with the 1980s and being the lead organizer of content on website. We each delved in to the records for our decade we realized that it would not be possible to include each of the individual winners in the exhibit so we decided to limit each decade to five winners. We made the choice what to include in the exhibit about each of the winners based on what information was available in the collection and from outside sources.

My decade the 1970s, found the first African American winners of the Charlotte Woman of the Year award Jacqueline Butler Hairston in 1971 followed by Kathleen Crosby in 1976 and Elizabeth Randolph in 1978. The year 1979 for the first time the selection committee, made of up past winners, was not able to pick one winner but gave a dual award to Dr. Mary Thomas Burke and Betty Chafin (later Rush).

After each member of the group had chosen what materials for each winner needed to be scanned I spent a day and half in the Special Collections scanning the materials. Each item was scanned using archival standards for preservation and copies will be given to Special Collections for future use. I spent several hours color correcting and cropping the images to provide the best product for presentation on the web.

While all this was proceeding we took on the task of learning the ins and outs of Omeka. While I was familiar with this new and popular open source web-publishing platform software I had not yet constructed an exhibit using it. All of my web-publishing for the Robeson County History Museum of which I am the Executive Director has been limited to static webpages and Facebook.

Once we had the digitized items and everything else needed to create the exhibit we had to decide on the best way to present the information. I made the suggestion that we plan this like I would a regular static exhibit at my museum. This meant breaking out paper and pen to graph how we wanted the final project to look and how it would look if we were walking through an actual room in the museum how to cover all the information without having to back track in the exhibit but not getting to a place where we could not get back to the start easily.

We organized the exhibit with a history of WBT and an overview of the Charlotte Woman of the Year Award. The next level was a page for each decade with a history of what is was happening in Charlotte at the time. We then created a page for each of the chosen winners to highlight them and their accomplishments including the scanned items.

We picked a template but decided that we did not like the limits that it placed on our exhibit so we looked at the other templates and found one that would allow us more freedom. The new design flows smoother and makes navigation a breeze. I think our final product “Charlotte Woman of the Year” is something that would make WBT and these great women leaders of Charlotte proud.

This class has served to give a great overview of how to incorporate the new digital technologies into museums taking them from static boxes of history into almost a living organism with the ability to reach outside the four walls and into the consumer’s computer and smart phone.

Museums and Twitter

MuseumNext conduct an online survey about Twitter and the way that museums should use it. They asked museums to have their followers help with the research and over 1000 people participated.

Over ¾ of those who follow museum tweets are over 25. More women follow museums then men. The public mostly wants to use twitter for exhibit and events info.

Over half of people had actually visited the museums they follow and when asked if they would attend an exhibition if suggested by a friend 93% said yes.

When asked what they were looking for with the museum’s tweets people responded:
- To engage with people interested in that museum or gallery. To make people feel special. To have a conversation
- Extending the museum experience beyond the gallery walls, exhibit news, discounts, discussions
- Tell background stories and share information that will make you want to go and see an exhibition even more: enrich their program
- Informing people about new exhibitions, news relating to the museum, talking to people about the exhibits if they have specific questions
- Help further its brand — is it a fun place for families and kids? Then tweet funny facts based on the collection. Is it a gallery with amazing art? Tweet about commentary and opinion of that art. A lot of followers are not local, so don’t tweet exclusively about events. Point me in the direction of related topics, for instance, a nat hist museum could tweet about a recent paleo find in China.

It appears that there is a place for Twitter to be used to attract new visitors and keep interests in exhibits.

Looking at Perspectives Online

This week I reviewed two articles from the May 2007 issue of PerspectivesOnline which is published by the American Historical Association.

Edward A. Riedinger in his article “Enhancing Internet Use for History byCategorizing Online Resources” talks about the importance online resources. He states that there are. Three types of resources essential for scholars are:

• periodical literature indexes, listing what has been published in a field or specialization;
• library catalogs, describing what an institution holds of what has been published and detailing bibliographic data on the holdings; and
• full-text retrieval databases of articles and books, often digitized facsimile versions of the texts.

He then talks about the differences in each area talking in depth about sources of information available online from synopses to full articles, journals and books. Never before has it been so easy to obtain information outside of the physical library.

In this article “Creating a Virtual Student Community at theUniversity of Maryland” Bud Burkhard talks about the concerns many have with so many internet classes. He stated that online class enrollment in history classes accounted for 85 percent of enrollments by 2005. With this large amount of online students it is very important to maintain contact with the students in an attempt to make them fill part of the department.

One thing there instituted was a secure online discussion site into which all students seeking a history major or minor are automatically enrolled and allowed for easy communication between faculty, current students and alumni. They also sought for online students to be involved with Phi Alpha Theta the history honor society, even to holding online inductions. He ends his article with something similar to what I have said about students and people in general that the main factor in a student’s success depends on them and how active they want to be in obtaining their goals.

Wikipedia - Use It or Lose It

This week I am discussing Wikipedia. There is lots of debate in the academic world about the use of this site. One of the best discussions out there is this one “Debate over Wikipedia at Middlebury College”.

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia) they report that several studies have been done about their reliability. The study by the journal Nature reported the site was up to the accuracy of Encyclopedia Britannica. They state while the site is open to editing all the editing is checked and vandalism is removed right away.

I looked at four entries having to do with Robeson County: Alice B. Russell Micheaux, African-American actress; Angus Wilton McLean, NC Governor; Malcom McLean, and the town of Maxton, NC.

I had never realized before that there was a tab for the history of revisions to the entry and also one for discussion about the entry.

The entries seemed factual until I studied Malcom McLean’s entry. It contained numerous errors that would have only been known by someone familiar with his life. I am planning on making corrections and will back up with primary and secondary sources that are in my files.

The entries for Micheaux and Malcom McLean are part of the WikiProject Biography. While the one for Angus Wilton McLean is part of the WikiProject North Carolina and

WikiProject U.S. Governors, the Maxton part of the WikiProject North Carolina and WikiProject North Carolina To-do.

In looking at the history of revisions Micheaux had not had any updates; the changes in Angus Wilton McLean and Maxton had been mostly to clean up and changed banners and the like. Malcom McLean’s entry has had several updates and changes and it appears that a lot of facts were changed that now make the entry not as useful.

So as with most things found on the internet you need to look closely at the sources and if in doubt never use.

Science Literacy Maps

FREE Webinar on Using
National Science Digital Library
Science Literacy Maps

Monday, October 29, 2012 from 4:00-5:30 p.m., EDT

Whether you work in a science center, planetarium, aquarium or zoo, community youth organization or a K-12 classroom, you are invited to attend a free online webinar designed to help you get the most out of the National Science Digital Library's Science Literacy Maps and the digital science learning that are linked to them.

Sign up for the Webinar today.

Online Exhibit Group Project

There are two words I dread hearing any time I take a class – group project. In high school, undergraduate and graduate school I would do anything possible to get out of doing a group project or either would take on the entire project only leaving small things for others to do in case they were not great to have on team. Well this will not be the case with the current group I am in made up of Sarah Beaver, Amanda Elzey, Andrew Pack, and myself.

At first it appeared that we were going to have problems when the remaining project to choose was not something anyone but me wanted to work on and we had to try and come up with something else. Dr. Cox suggested we look at the WBT/WBTV collection and see if anything there appealed to us.

We chose the WBT/WBTV Digitization Project: Women of the Year Award that will look at the Woman of the Year contest from 1955 to 1989. The project will make use of the WBT/WBTV collection in the Atkins Library archives. We hope to post photographs and profiles of select women from each decade and working to provide historical context to discover why they were chosen.

It was easy to see a clear division of labor with the project the four of us each took a decade to be our main focus there by allowing each person to be focused on a smaller group instead of one person trying to hand a big chunk.

If the project goes as smooth as the process for choosing a project and doing our contract has then we should have a great working relationship.

A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln

The online exhibit A House Divided: America in the Age ofLincoln is base on the book of the same title by Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney. The exhibit is broken into the same sections as the book Lincoln’s America; Slavery; Slavery Debate; Impending Crisis; Civil War; War, Politics & Society; and Aftermath.

Each section of the exhibit has a great introduction section followed by the exhibit artifacts. For artifacts they did a great job of using 3-d objects, newspapers, photographs and other ephemera. Each artifact can be enlarged and includes a wonderful description. 

Overall the site is a great example of an online exhibit. I think that most age groups could enjoy the site and learn from it.

Omeka’s Contribution Plugin

I am looking forward to beginning to use Omeka to design online exhibits for my museum. This is a wonderful tool to bring our collections to the public.  One of the plugins that I think in my position that would be great is the Contribution plugin. This plug in allows visitors to the site to add their stories and images to the archive. While at first the thought of outsiders being allowed to add to the project might scare you off from this plugin there is a safety net in the form of the reCAPTCHA box that prevents spamming.

The plugin allows a lot of customizing to fit your needs as an institution. You can pre-select what types of items you will allow to be added. You can also set up the form with questions that you want the contributor to have to answer.

One exhibit I am wanting to do at the Robeson County History Museum is to use my personal post card collection and use this plugin to gather visitors’ memories and stories of the places portrayed on the postcards.

This seems like a perfect way to collect additional content for your collections and add to the experience for everyone.

How much Klout do you have?

According to the Klout website everyone has influence. In the past the people who had the most influence were people in the traditional media but social media has democratized influence.

The company started in 2008 to help you measure and leverage your influence. According to their website “Klout measures influence online using data from your social networks. Anywhere you have an online presence, you have the opportunity to influence people by creating or sharing content that inspires actions such as likes, retweets, comments and more. The more engagement your posts receive, the more influential you are. Klout uses this information to provide you a Klout Score that measures your overall influence.”

Why Study Digital History?

Posted by W. Caleb McDaniel on August 31, 2012 (full article)

Dr. McDaniel talks briefly about the fact that his graduate program did not have a digital aspect but that recently he had decided to learn about digital history. He stated four reasons for this change in attitude:

1. He realized that more and more primary sources are being digitized and it would be counterproductive not to make use of these readily available sources.

2.Even if he chose not to use computers and digital history all his peers writing on subjects that he was interested in and need to study were using them. He also felt that he must know how to use these sources to be able to teach his students how to use them effectively.

3.He spoke about how when he was working on his dissertation he used a printed map and drew the movements of American abolitionist Henry Clarke during his European tour. HE realized how much easier and beneficial this could be done now using GIS software.

4. Finally he found that working with digital history was fun and did not make him a nerd.

North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

If you have not checked out the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center then you need to take a look at the digitization project. They work with cultural heritage institutions from the coast to the mountains to promote access to their collections. Their latest newsletter is here.