Explore Some Small-Town Museums with TinCan

I am continuing to keep the blogging light to work on some pressing projects. Here is something neat that I discovered the other day Tin Can's Youtube channel, which includes a series of short video visits to small-town museums in our region.

Every small-town in eastern Washington seems to have a history museum, but they are hard to visit. Most are staffed by volunteers, open only a few hours a month, and have little or no web presences. So these videos are a real service. They were produced as a part of the grant-funded Inland Northwest Memories Project. 

These videos are good but by no means exhaustive--there are dozens of additional small-town museums within an hour of Spokane. It would be nice to see someone pick up this project, perhaps as a part of a film course at a local university.

Barry Moses on Drumheller Spring and Grand Coulee Dam

Here is a fine short video of Spokan tribal member and Spokane Community College instructor Barry Moses, speaking about how the Spokans used (and still use!) some of the natural resources of the area. I love his story about his grandmother and Drumheller Springs, and how he brings the tale around to his own discovery of bitter root in the park. There are some good observations about the impact of Grand Coulee Dam as well.

Moses also blogs (sometimes in Salish) at Sulustu. He may be the only person in the world blogging in Salish?

The video, but the way, was originally filmed during a 2010 educational tour of the Spokane River sponsored by the Center for Justice. I had the privilege of being on the tour and it was great--the experts on the tour were Barry Moses, Jack Nesbit, and Bill Youngs, and we had stops at Spokane House, along the Little Spokane River, and at the Spokane Falls. A film of highlight of the entire event airs sometimes on Spokane's open-access cable channel, Community Minded Television.

Historic Photographs from the Spokane Public Library

Here is a great new resource for local history: Spokane Public Library - Northwest Room Digital Collections. "The Northwest Room of Spokane Public Library is pleased to introduce a digital collections page of photographs selected from collections in the Northwest Room. These collections emphasize the most frequently requested subjects in the Northwest Room – the homes, buildings, streets and activities in and around Spokane."

Remains of the Glover/Pioneer Block after the fire of 1889.

So far the collection contains about 350 items, and Northwest Room librarian Riva Dean says that the library plans to add "plenty more." The initial collection includes historic Spokane photographs in six categories: the Spokane Fire (1889), Spokane River, Spokane Views, Spokane Homes, Spokane Parks, Spokane Bridges, and Spokane Streets. Unfortunately the images are provided using ContentDM, which is the industry standard despite being a fairly stodgy piece of commercial software. It presents information adequately but does not allow users to interact with item to add data or offer corrections. (It would be nice, for example, to flag this item, which contains a picture of one Spokane park with a description of a different park, without having to go back to the library webpage and figure out who to email the correction.) It also does not allow users to easily save or export the images or to share them with friends via Facebook or other social media. (I extracted the image on this page using the Picnik extension on the Chrome browser.)

The first set of pictures are delightful, from scenes of the devastating 1889 fire to early street images to intriguing homes (anyone know where this one is?).

It is a shame the site is not more interactive because these are wonderful photographs and could easily become nodes of online discussion about Spokane history. Many have only partial information with them-the dates are unknown, the locations have been forgotten, etc. If there were a discussion area with each photo, patrons could probably help fill in a lot of the missing information.

The Spokane Public Library is doing a real service to its public by making these photographs so easily accessible. I look forward to watching them add to the collection. Of course if you are the impatient type you can just go to the Northwest Room of the Spokane Public Library, where they have a vast collection of primary resources for Spokane History.

Anyone Using Open Source Collections Management Software?

I recently tweeted the question "What free/open source solutions exist for small museums looking to to create collections inventories?" In my role coordinating the Public History program at Eastern Washington University I often work with very small rural museums and heritage groups. These organizations are run by volunteers (often elderly volunteers at that) have budgets that are more often in the hundreds of dollars a year than the thousands, and have no one in the organization with any museum, historical, or technology training. However they are passionate about their local history, and often have unique and substantial holdings of records, photographs, and objects. How can they organize their collections? The software has to be free and extremely easy to use. It should also have web capabilities and use universal standards so data could be exported to another software package in the future.

Some twitter friend suggestions and a bit of gooling revealed at least four choices. But I don't have time to test them all and can't find a good compare-and-contrast article. If anyone has experience with any of these systems, please let us know what you think:

• Museolog "is a software system, developed by EUROCLID within UNESCO HeritageNet project, and localised by NGO Open Systems where initial functions of input and editing of museum catalogues are provided by a modern intuitive graphical interface using forms and menu." Wikipedia page here.
• "CollectiveAccess (formerly known as OpenCollection) is a full-featured collections management and online access application for museums, archives and digital collections. It is designed to handle large, heterogeneous collections that have complex cataloguing requirements and require support for a variety of metadata standards and media formats." Also web based. Here is a Slideshare presentation about the software.
• CollectionSpace "is focused on developing solutions for museums and related heritage organizations that want to address this information gap and re-define the ways in which collections information is collected, managed, preserved, leveraged, and published. CollectionSpace partners will develop software with an open and extensible architecture, that is community-based and technologically robust." It appears to be in the early stages of development.
• Omeka (of course): "Create complex narratives and share rich collections adhering to Dublin core standards with Omeka, designed for scholars, museums, libraries, archives, and enthusiasts." My only hesitation with Omeka is that lead developer Dave Lester has described it (at THATCamp PNW) as more of a web publishing platform than a collections management tool.
  
•  Open Office version of Access (or Access itself if they already have it?) 

If you have experience with any of these systems, or suggestions for other ways to get this done, please weigh in!

[Image from Flickr user Brunngrrl and used via a Creative Commons license.]

Does the Northwest Need a Heritage Area?

Why are there no federally-designated National Heritage Areas in the Pacific Northwest? And if we were to propose some, what would they be?

I came to these questions after reading Carroll Van West's nice article in the current Organization of American Historians newsletter: Historians and the Opportunities of National Heritage Areas: "National Heritage Areas are a significant development in the United States’s national parks system. Since 1984, Congress has created forty-nine National Heritage Areas, stretching from the Essex National Heritage Area in Massachusetts to the newly designated Kenai Mountain-Turnagain Arm National Heritage Area in Alaska."

National Heritage Areas have been around for 25 years now but I think it is fair to say that they are little-understood. Van West does a nice job of explaining the heritage area concept and practice and suggesting ways that historians can become more involved. "For public historians and scholars who wish to take their research and classes into historic settings, National Heritage Areas are potentially valuable avenues to explore," Van West writes. "With justification, historians have long decried the incomplete history, out of step with prevailing scholarly research and interpretation, which they encounter at local and state parks and museums. The same criticism may be launched at heritage areas, but this federal program also offers opportunities for engagement between universities and communities that potentially gives historians a way to bring new questions, sources, and understandings to large public audiences." Amen!

So with these ringing words echoing in my head, I went to the NPS Map of National Heritage Areas to find the ones in the Pacific Northwest. There aren't any! OK, there is that one in Alaska, but none at all in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, or Wyoming. Friends, we wuz robbed! And since the heritage areas seem to be organized from the bottom up, it is no one's fault but our own. Let's fix this, shall we?

Fortunately, the National Park Service has a handy set of resources title Becoming a National Heritage Area. These include the very-objective-looking "Suggested Criteria" which include:

"1. The area has an assemblage of natural, historic, or cultural resources that together represent distinctive aspects of
American heritage worthy of recognition, conservation, interpretation, and continuing use, and are best managed as
such an assemblage through partnerships among public and private entities, and by combining diverse and sometimes
noncontiguous resources and active communities;

"2. The area reflects traditions, customs, beliefs, and folk life that are a valuable part of the national story;

"3. The area provides outstanding opportunities to conserve natural, cultural, historic, and/ or scenic features;

"4. The area provides outstanding recreational and educational opportunities;

"5. Resources that are important to the identified theme or themes of the area retain a degree of integrity capable of
supporting interpretation . . . "

There are five additional criteria, mostly addressing planning and cooperation.

So what broad historic themes are uniquely illustrated/supported/preserved by historic sites, institutions, and peoples in the Pacific Northwest? My quick thoughts include:

A heritage area based around the continuing historical interactions between Indians and whites on the Columbia Plateau with emphasis on the fur trade, missions, and military conflict. I sketched it out by creating a custom Google Map (which for some reason is not centering properly!):


View Cultures in Collision National Heritage Area in a larger map

Some other possible PNW heritage areas include one focused on mining along the Silver Valley in Idaho, a maritime heritage area in the San Juan Islands and Puget Sound, and a pioneer Oregon heritage area in the Willamette Valley.

Does anyone have additional ideas? Would anyone like to work on this?

Washington State Library :: Washington Rural Heritage

Washington Rural Heritage: "Washington Rural Heritage (WRH) is an online aggregation of special collections from small and rural communities throughout the state of Washington." This site from the Washington State Library features "photographs, maps, manuscript materials, books, oral histories, and more." The idea is that the state library will help small communities put some of their historic collections online.

So far the site consists of the Ritzville Heritage and Whitman County Heritage collections. The photograph above, of a 1948 parade in Tekoa, Washington is from the latter collection.

This is an important initiative from the Secretary of State--enabling obscure local history sources online as part of a larger searchable database. It will be interesting to watch the site grow as additional communities join in.

WallaWallaHistory.com

I am charmed by the amateur enthusiasm of this site, WallaWallaHistory.org. Living up to its billing as "A Virtual Museum Preserving Walla Walla's Legacy" the site reminds me so much of little town and county museums scattered across the west. It features historic photos of Walla Walla, maps, the odd historic newspaper article, and a section called "Vanishing Walla Walla" that juxtaposes photos of decaying and demolished historic buildings with the strip development monstrosities that have replaced them. This is how amateur local history should be done, with a passion for place, careful research and a bit of whimsy.

The site also includes a enchanting (and extensive!) series of before and after pictures. I like this set. The ladies in the turn-of-the-century postcard on the left look so very proud as they stand beside the little fountain. The background is the treeless bleakness of large swaths of the Inland Northwest as it appeared it the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Presumably these ladies had something to do with the establishment of the fountain and the park, their efforts expressed an optimism in the future of their community and a desire to leave a legacy for future generations. The modern photograph of the same fountain to the right is profoundly satisfying--the fountain appears well-maintained these hundred years, the trees have grown up and benches allow visitors to enjoy the shade, and children frolic in the water, just as in the original photograph a century before.

Hey--I see that the site also offers careful reproductions of historic postcards and a calendar of historic photos of Walla Walla. I am going to buy one for an old friend from Walla Walla.