Research Starter Kit

Hello Stevens County History Preservationists:

As agreed at the last Heritage Network meeting, I have created a form for listing stuff you think should be researched from your museum/group/stash....

In preparation, I visited the Hunters Museum - (This may be your last chance to see it.)  I took some photos there, and they already have many suitable for a virtual tour.  They also lent me some materials Ted, Dianne and friends have prepared about Hunters: a short history with pictures, a video CD and some post cards.

I have printed a blank Research Form as an Adobe PDF and also saved it as an Excel Spreadsheet.  I also filled in a sample sheet to show you what I had in mind.  You can find the Research form here: http://theheritagenetwork.org/blogs/barreca/ResearchForm.pdf and the sapmle fille-in form here: http://theheritagenetwork.org/blogs/barreca/ResearchSample.pdf.  What I want out of it is a quantifiable number of research hours assigned to identifiable tasks.  (Remember we will probably contribute at least half of them for free.) The items, quantity, dates etc. are to help in identifying what you have already and where you want to go with it.

To re-iterate, what the Preserve America program wants from research is to identify and prepare materials for interpretation to promote historical tourism, preservation and community identity.  This little trip helped me visualize how this would work.

I see five fundamental outcomes from this research work:

• It will create digital records to speed access for genealogy and interpretation (telling the stories).
• It will help identify, organize and categorize materials for museum use.
• It will highlight important and interesting stories and themes with roots in the collection.
• It will help preserve with scans, photos of collections and copies of media a museum's collection.
• It will help identify materials whose rights for use or copyright are owned by someone else. 

This is my first take on the task.  I'm open to suggestions.  We can continue the blog and talk it over at the next meeting.

Joe