The following is the text of a letter sent to 14 potential contractors, mostly museums, about estimating how long it would take to research their own and their community's resources in building a Stevens County Digital Archive of historic material.
You may be used to me sending letters as a member of the Heritage Network or owner of Map Metrics. I put the Stevens County logo on this letter to emphasize that Preserve America efforts are now an official activity of Stevens County. If Stevens County lands a Preserve America grant, we need to think of individual museums and organizations as potential contractors to the County. As a contractor, you would be responsible for monitoring how many hours of research for this project go on within your organization and making sure the results are passed on to the county. In return, the County would be using grant funds to pay you for work done under the contract. Once paid, these funds can be spent at your discretion for other projects, expenses, acquisitions or labor costs. If you don’t feel that your organization can do this accounting responsibly, it may be better that you work with another organization that can.
Besides money to spend on your own priorities, this structure should yield a decent catalog of your holdings and access to a tremendous trove of historical information in the collective archive.
Another role each organization can play, is as a conduit for local in-kind and other donations, something the county can’t do itself. If your organization, is not yet a 501(c3) or other tax-deductable entity, we will need to route donations through other organizations who are. If you do have tax-deductable status, we will try to find local donors, both public and private, who can benefit from your tax status. We will also want to offer benefits from publicity related to these activities to donors as well as the information generated by this research. Our best hope for funding is to show that we have strong local support both within our organizations and from government, business and other organizations.
If you read between the lines of this application, the Federal Government is looking for: accountability, reliability, publicity, public-private partnerships, community support, education, significance and sustainability. Government is (or should be) very sensitive about misspent funds, failures, scams and partisan publicity. By building pledges from a broad range of other organizations into our application, we can demonstrate that we have the kind of support that will make government look good. As Susan Howlett said in her grant writing workshop, “No one is going to give you money because you need it.”
In the enclosed report and more personal letter, I have entered what information I have on how to maintain contact with your organization. I have also added some fields for visitors per year and miles to travel from Colville. Please check them for accuracy. Since Colville is the county seat, we will have to figure travel expenses from there, though we could distribute them differently. The visitors per year question is a way to gauge if our efforts have been successful in increasing heritage tourism in the county year to year.
The main part of the form that is attached to this letter looks at five kinds of research efforts in seven “Crossroads” categories. Why this breakdown? The crossroads categories will give us a way to blend our research together as a coherent story. Sure, it is artificial, but these really are good ways to characterize our area and to tell our story. You can adapt them to your own holdings and interests. Let me cover each individually before looking again at the five kinds of research activities.
The Native theme is very central to everything that has gone on here. Native trails and the crossroads between them were predecessors to all our other roads and most of our activities. There is so much to be gained by understanding native culture and why it worked so well for so long, that it is difficult to overestimate its value. Additionally, we want to look at the families of natives who provide so much continuity to everything that has gone on and still goes in this, their homeland. I find the Kalispell Trail particularly interesting because it was a principle influence in the trade and significance of our area for 200 years before white settlers swept us into the global politics of modern times.
The Fur Trade was a short but critical period putting us on international trade routes and introducing the gadgets and prejudices of European culture into the mix of everyday life. The surnames of these traders are now the surnames of our oldest families. In some ways this era represents the best combination of cultures from both Native and European traditions.
Although I am currently calling the next theme, US Military, it really represents the emergence of government on all levels, how it affected roads, trade, laws, taxes and “security”. In many histories, the theme of government takes over almost entirely. Although we don’t want to let that happen here, we need to look at both its wanted and unwanted influences. Our museums are full of government documents, uniforms, weapons and personalities. In the larger view, our governments are who we are.
Mining covers a multitude of topics, the Gold Rush, Geology, the many mines and the commerce, companies, towns and travel routes that emerged from the pattern of prospects. Although much of that seems to have faded away, as perhaps the most complicated geologic area in North America, we still have a fascinating array of mineral discoveries and activities to cover under this theme.
Two kinds of Boats that are particularly interesting in our history are steamboats and ferries. The steamboats are gone and the ferries are not as colorful today, but there are lots of good stories associated with both and lots of opportunities for interpretation and creation of some interesting tours. Rivers were our first roads. They were travelled by Sinixt sturgeon-nosed canoes and dugouts. Hudson Bay’s Fort Colville once produced Bateaux, which were large French-style canoes used to carry cargo on the Columbia. Even Loon Lake had interesting tourist steamboats.
Railroads continue to be a fascinating topic, hopefully we can find lots of material on them in our museums. They were both the economic salvation and siphon of our local economy. They brought settlers and goods, created markets for our food and raw materials and ultimately built bigger crossroads in Spokane and on the coast that stole the thunder from our original historical significance. All of our major communities have strong connections to the railroads. Let’s find those stories.
Finally there is a new theme, the End of the Road. Crossroads have their cosmopolitan character, but many towns had mines, mills, farms or some other industry that put them on the map. Without them there would be no crossroads. Local museums are often the best places to find stories that exist nowhere else and give a place its character. This theme gives room for each community to feature itself, its own interests and treasures.
These themes should give us plenty to work with before history was taken over by the tumultuous technology of the Twentieth Century. Mass communications, mass production and mass education made local history much harder to distinguish. These themes are our roots.
Bringing the artifacts, pictures and records of this early era into the technology of our own times will be tedious and time consuming, but also hopefully fun. I’ve broken it down into five kinds of activities.
- Cataloging – Some museums will have done a lot of this already. We’ll put it to the test. For the rest of us, this is a chance to create inventories of your holdings. It is a step that applies to everything and no matter how much we accomplish beyond this, let’s try to get on top of this one.
- Scanning – I’m grouping scanning pictures, taking pictures of artifacts and scanning documents into this category. Coupled with cataloging, it gives us at least a shot at sharing and preserving what we have. Of all the steps, this will probably take the most time, both for the scanning itself and keeping track of all that digital information.
- Transcribing - Virtually every written or printed word that holds the stories we want to share will need to be typed into computers. This can take a long time and is prone to errors. We should do as much of this as we can, but the other processes are probably more critical for starters.
- Oral History – We are losing chances to do this every day. For the periods up to the 1940’s, we have already missed most of them. If your museums have oral histories, we should duplicate them and catalog them. Gathering them is an art in itself. I made a category out of this because it is important. If you see opportunities to do it, please include them in the scope of work.
- Linking – This is the techno step that is usually too much for the average non-nerd. I’m considering this to be a task that takes the output of all the other tasks and makes it accessible on the Internet, probably through some kind of WIKI. You can make a guess at how long it will take, or we can do a few tests and calculate it as a percentage of the whole job. I’m thinking of it as a job for a separate contractor.
So those are the numbers I am trying to put together gauging the scope of work for this grant. The next step will be to try and match these themes and this work with people who can get the job done. That will include companies who might have some people with time to help; local groups that have hobbies such as trains or rocks that could contribute from their own knowledge; churches who may have members or church history that overlaps the community history; families whose members played important roles under any of these themes; governments that want to promote their community events; students getting credits… There are a lot of possibilities, but we need to see what needs to be done first. Since common labor for purposes of this grant is valued at about $20 per hour, volunteers could sign up for 10 volunteer hours and also work 10 for-pay hours and make and average of $10/hour. The key is that we need to have those volunteer hours signed for up front.
There will also be a need for some professional oversight. I have already began to look at the national standards and possible candidates for someone with the credentials to assure grantors that we will be doing a quality job and gathering useful information. This person, or these people can also train us and help build the data structures to take the maximum advantage of our efforts.
I have roughed in some numbers in these initial reports based on what I know of the history of local communities. Your holdings or interests may vary widely from what I imagine them to be. My philosophy is to give you something to throw stones at rather than try to make you imagine what I am talking about. This sometimes gets me in trouble, but usually gets the job done faster. So I expect to follow up on these preliminary reports and get some better numbers and feedback on the whole idea. Some of you may want to jump on them right away and straighten me out from the get go. That’s why I am sending them out.
My initial estimates totaling 1600 hours are decidedly low. At $20/hour, they total $32,000. These grants start at $40,000. Of course there will be a lot of other expenses. Feel free to increase these estimates, but remember, we have to find a 50% match.
I hope that this process is fairly transparent and that I will be talking to each of you soon.
This ends the quoted letter. I welcome comments on the structure of the plan and suggestions for more research.