Have you  ever wanted to learn hieroglyphics? What if a podcast could help you with that? There is one out there and it’s produced by this episode’s guest. His name is Vincent Brown. Vincent is kind of a new media renaissance man, with a focus on Egyptology and the pyramids. In addition to the podcast he created, he also maintains blogs and a very active Twitter community. That’s one of the things he’s going to talk about is optimizing your Twitter participation for creating a community: crafting relevant tweets and how to optimize those with hashtags as well. Here’s that interview. [Timestamp #00:01:39.6#]

Vincent Brown: I’m a web designer by trade. Before I got into freelance web design, I was an IT network administrator. I was a trainer as well and taught web design. I actually invented a form of Twitter with some guys in my group. I always thought that it would be fantastic to be able to update a website from a mobile phone. We actually got a prototype working. That was 2006, and in the same month, Twitter came out, so I jumped on to that. That’s the powerful aspect of Twitter–to have it on the sidebar of your blog and have those elements remotely feeding into it. #00:02:53.5#

Jeff Guin: Did you have any concept as to how things would evolve with Twitter? #00:02:54.3#

VB: No way. I wasn’t even thinking about social aspects. I was really just thinking about remotely updating a blog, and of course it’s much more than that. #00:03:05.3#

JG: You have quite a community there. Was it intentional for you to build a community through Twitter? #00:03:21.7#

VB: Originally, I started using it as a news outlet–as a micro-blog. My blog posts take hours to write. I get carried away, so there’s a lack of time for doing regular blog posts. As a way of combating that, I decided to post the micro-updates everyday. I generally put out 10-20 a day through my Google Reader feeds that I’ve developed over the years. And that expanded into doing lessons on Twitter as well. I was learning ancient Egyptian, which being a complex language, is a long-term study. I thought if would be great to help my colleagues who were studying with me to have flash cards. So I started by creating a flashcard for one word each day. At the end of the week, I’d compile them and make a chart, which I put on Flickr. Then I thought a video would be even more effective. So I created a video each week to recap six words. Being a trainer, I knew that learning requires extras like sound and visuals for easy memorization. I added music and different backgrounds and released it as Creative Commons content. I really enjoyed the community collaboration of using others’ content and doing that through Creative Commons is a good way, because it allows all involved to be credited for their work. #00:05:48.5#

JG: And this podcast is still available. I discovered it on iTunes. #00:05:53.3#

VB: Yes, it’s available on YouTube and Vimeo as well.  #00:05:58.4#

JG: Who were the folks you interacted with in social media early on? #00:06:01.9#

VB: The Brooklyn Museum was on the forefront early, doing amazing things. They took a few trips to the hospital with their mummy. They did CT scans on a mummy the museum has. Shelley Bernstein, the IT person there, decided to live blog it. I set up a live Twitter feed and embedded it in my blog. I also automated the Twitpics as well so they were coming out on my blog, and encouraged my readers to interact with them so that she was able to receive questions and could ask the curators and scientists questions. The museum also has embraced Flickr in a big way–really pushing The Commons. Flickr was one the first social media companies to embrace the idea of The Commons [here's a list of participating organizations]. It’s a feature of Flickr, so it was powerful for the museum to put their archives on The Commons. There are a few others: Boston University and Harvard collaborated with Peter Der Manuelian of the Giza Archives, to create some fantastic representations of the Giza plateau and some of the tombs there. #00:08:54.7#

JG: Tell me more about your blog. That really is the heart of your community. #00:08:56.4#

Close up of the north-west corner of the sarcophagus chamber. The dusty lid of the sarcophagus can be seen in the lower part of the image (Courtesy of Vincent Brown's Flickr Stream).

VB: I started it in January 2008. I created a few other websites before that, including Pyramid Texts Online, which is more academic than Talking Pyramids. I traveled to Egypt in 1997. Although the internet was around then, and I did a lot of research online, it was really hard to ascertain which pyramids were open. I was disappointed to arrive at the Great Pyramid and found that two of the three chambers were closed. In fact, another pyramid that I was very interested in going to–the Unas Pyramid in Saqqara, which is the most elaborately inscribed with texts, was sadly closed when I got there. I thought there really should an online resource where travelers can go to find this out. That was impetus behind the site. I also wanted to get into blogging. A website is quite static. Little did I know that a blog requires much more attention, and regular updates. I’m still building up those pyramid pages. I’ve been using social media on those static pages by pulling in, for example, Flickr collections of those individual pyramids. I like that because the content is constantly changing without me having to manually do it myself. #00:11:16.5#

JG: How did you get interested in Egyptology? #00:11:21.5#

VB: It’s hard to pinpoint because I’ve always liked Egyptian music, especially. The first time I picked up a guitar, I wanted to play an middle-eastern sounding riff. It’s my favorite sound. One of my first memories when I was about four-years-old was sitting down with my father to make a cardboard pyramid. It was said that if you put a piece of fruit in a pyramid shape, it will preserve it. It was the era of Uri Geller who was doing the spoon bending tricks. So we put a grape inside and folded it up and sticker-taped the sides. Being four, I wasn’t sure what the word “preserved” meant, so I just thought as long as I could rattle the box and hear it, it was preserved! So that’s my earliest memory. Then, in 1996, I read Secrets of the Great Pyramid by Peter Tompkins. It was a pretty comprehensive book that got me really interested in learning more. A year later, I had saved up enough money to go to Egypt and it continued from there. #00:13:34.0#

JG: Is your professional background purely in web design, or are you also a professional archaeologist? #00:13:41.9#

VB: No, I have no professional background in archaeology or Egyptology. #00:13:50.1#

JG: Yet, you’re an authority … #00:13:57.5#

VB: Funny, isn’t it? That’s the nature of the web, combined with passion. If you love something enough and dedicate your time to it, then anyone can master anything. I have a lot of learning to do still. There’s over 100 pyramids in Egypt and that’s a lot of study. Also the language–that’s an ongoing thing that I dive in and out of as time permits.  #00:14:29.5#

JG: Let’s talk more about your Flickr stream, because you have a fairly comprehensive set of photos there. Tell me what inspired you to create your photostream and what the future might be for it. #00:14:45.5#

VB: As I said before I first found out about Flickr when I was teaching web design. It was a great project, because there were community organizations who needed websites made, and I had these guys who could create websites. It was a skill-building process in which Flickr became a major tool. Because of the Creative Commons content there, we could legally use Flickr as a source of images for these websites. I opened up my own personal account, and encouraged my friends and family to do the same. In the old days, you would have to compile photos into a five or 10 megabyte attachment in an email that no one wants to receive. Obviously, Flickr is fantastic for holiday photos. I also find it fantastic for research and use it as a search engine. Recently a friend told me about a church he was visiting in Holland, so I went straight to Flickr and found hundreds of photos. He was describing the patterns on the floor, and I responded “Yes, I see.” He says “what do you mean.” He was surprised so much was already on Flickr. It’s a hugely powerful tool. #00:16:49.7#

JG: You’ve got all the big guys covered: Flickr, Twitter, etc. Are there any other forms of social media that you use to deepen your connection with your audience. #00:17:01.5#

VB: There’s also Delicious.com. Delicious is really powerful. I used to have bookmarks, which got really big and unwieldy. Delicious is a terrific online tool that allows you to give your bookmarks tags to keep them organized and relevant.  That is also fed into the sidebar of the blog as well. The thing about YouTube is some people don’t realize how you can used for anything other than upload. I only have a few videos of my own online. However, I have created playlists for all sorts of topics, such as individual pyramids. These playlists are added automatically to each pyramid’s page. Apart from the playlists, I’m always favoriting as well. When you arrive at my channel, you always see the most recent video that I’ve favorited. Sometimes I don’t watch all the videos right away and will come back on the weekend and watch them all in the playlist then.  #00:19:48.2#

The big news has been the uprising in Egypt. I’ve tried to keep my focus on pyramids, but it’s hard with such a huge event, so I made up a playlist of the Egyptian songs that were written during and after the protests. #00:20:13.6#

JG: Have you found that those events have driven additional traffic to your blog? #00:20:14.3#

VB: Yes. I’m posting more regularly since this is big news. I’ve tried to keep my readers informed about the looting at the individual pyramid fields. That’s been hard. Official reports have been conflicting and it’s very ongoing. #00:21:05.1#

JG: A lot has been made of the role of new media in the social unrest in the Middle East and other places in the world. What’s your opinion? #00:21:14.0#

VB: It seems that is the case. It started with a post on Facebook by the Google executive Wael Ghonim that was an impetus for the uprising. Twitter was a very big part of that as well. We saw when the internet was turned off, that Twitter and Google joined forces to create a service that would allow people to send tweets through a public phone box, or any phone. We saw two giants come together beyond their competition. Then, once the internet was turned off, the people were in the streets and there came a point when social media didn’t matter anymore. But people were still recording video with their phones and other devices. When the internet came back up, we got to see those stories. Social media played a big part, and I don’t know if it would have happened without that first Facebook post. #00:22:55.2#

JG: How do you curate the news that you put out? #00:22:58.3#

VB: It’s very time consuming. It’s a matter of sitting down and skimming through those feeds. I also use Twitter as much as Google Reader. I have a lot of lists that I look at and particular people that I follow on Twitter. It takes me several hours everyday to do that. #00:23:50.3#

JG: Related to Twitter, you mentioned your lists. Explain how you’ve broken your lists down. #00:24:04.7#

VB: My lists are my meat and potatoes. That’s where all the action happens. I’ve got an Egyptologist list that is purely people working in that field. Then there’s a museums list, and a general ancient Egypt news list, which comprises anyone talking about the topic. This lists are private right now as I try to curate the information, but I’m considering opening those up more. #00:25:23.5#

JG: You are for hire as a web designer. What’s your web design specialty? #00:25:37.6#

VB: My specialty is care and attention to the client. I don’t do cookie-cutter sites. Training is important is well. I want to empower the person to be able to update their site as well. For that reason, I used WordPress a lot, so that people can update their content without having to pay me or someone else to do it. I also train them in social media and often set them up with a Flickr account and teach them to make that useful to promote their website. And also using social media to help them promote their site as well, so there’s an ongoing promotion service if they want that. If anyone does want a site made, they can contact me at Talking Pyramids or through my business website “Vintuitive.” People can have a look there if they want to see some of the sites I’ve made. #00:27:14.8#

JG: What’s your strategy for updating your social media? #00:27:18.4#

VB: For Twitter, I post 10-20 updates a day, depending on the news. YouTube, a couple of times a week. Flickr, once a week. Being from South Australia, it’s not easy for me to go and take photos of pyramids. Some I’ve posted have been from the South Australian Museum’s Egypt Room, for example. People also send me photos. Flickr is very powerful for contacting people who have just come back from Egypt. Everyday, I’ll finish my news posts with a photo, usually on Twitter. Those will usually come from a Flickr search. I’m always looking for feedback from visitors to find out which pyramids are open. Official sites will say one thing and things may be totally different on the ground. Ticket prices will also go up and down. It’s a bit time consuming, but it’s also a good way to expand the network. Those people will start following my Flickr stream and blog because they are obviously interested if they cared enough to visit the pyramids. #00:29:37.2#

JG: Do you find that you have different audiences for each of the social tools you are involved with? #00:29:52.8#

VB: They’re very different audiences. I have a lot of schools linking to a post on ancient Egyptian games. I think in year six primary schools, they do a segment on ancient Egypt. That post receives more hits on my blog than any other. I’ve got a post on how to make a paper pyramid that’s very popular with schools as well. I don’t know how many people follow me across these services. There are a lot of people who just follow me on Flickr. Same with Twitter. Some of those people who read my posts of Twitter never go to my blog. Some bloggers will only use Twitter to announce new blog posts. They are shortchanging themselves because Twitter is a fantastic resource for reading. I spend a lot of time reading there. It’s really just a matter of spending time to manage your filtering. I think most people, when they come to Twitter think this is all about “that guy eating a ham sandwich” or “someone watching television.” Of course, it’s about following the right people. #00:31:46.9#

JG: How do you filter you Twitter feeds other than your lists? #00:31:52.4#

VB: I use TweetDeck, which includes rows and rows of searches. I’ll run a search on “egyptian uprising”. There’s the hashtag #Jan25 which is what I tag any post to do with the Egyptian uprising. Hashtags are a big part of emphasizing what’s important on Twitter. I will do searches on particular hashtags and save it in a TweetDeck column. I’ve intentionally kept anything not related to Egypt out of that Twitter stream, and that’s why I have another Twitter account as vinbrown. I use that account for digital archaeology. #00:33:57.7#

JG: This leads to one of my pet peeves, which is use of hashtags. Many people are putting the hash symbol in front of every noun in their tweets, and it’s annoying and unreadable. From your perspective, what is proper hashtag etiquette? #00:34:14.2#

VB: Don’t look at the trending topics and use those hashtags.  Too many put something like #justinbieber in front of something that has absolutely nothing to do with him. I always put any hashtag at the front end of my tweet. It’s stripped out of the sidebar on my blog. Its is okay to make up your own hashtag, as I started doing with #digitalarchaeology. It’s being used my a number of archaeologists now.  #00:36:24.7#

JG: I’m seeing #digitalarchaeology in a number of tweets beside your own. What does it mean? #00:36:43.1#

VB: In the examples we talked about before, I think the work of organizations like the Brooklyn Museum online would qualify as digital archaeology. Also, much of the efforts to recreated archaeological sites in 3-D is a powerful thing. There’s also people like Sarah Parcak, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Parcak), and egyptologist who specializes in using satellite technology in two ways–not  just to search for sites on the ground, but also to use GPS to navigate to those sites on the ground. That process has enabled archaeologists to find new sites. That’s definitely digital archaeology. #00:37:55.4#

JG: Have you been involved in any uses of SecondLife in archaeology? #00:37:58.7#

VB: I dabbled in Second Life for a project of my own. But I found on the Discovery Channel a really innovative project in SecondLife, which was The Book of the Dead. Now we’re not just recreating a three dimensional space. #00:38:49.0#

JG: Are there any unexpected connections you’ve made through your online communication? #00:39:01.2#

VB: One thing I really haven’t talked about it Pyramid Texts Online. I’ve been contacted a lot through that website from people who are doing work in this field. For example, the Toledo Museum wanted to know if there was any way of getting high resolution images of the pyramid texts. It’s a long process of finding those hi-res images, but I did eventually find them. What I did with the site was to create a nonlinear presentation of the texts. There’s contention among Egyptologists regarding how they were originally sequenced. By putting them in a linear format in a book, you’re forcing the reader into a linear sequence. Really, the only way you effectively present them without bias is to present them in a 3-D sense. That’s how Pyramid Texts Online came about, in a two dimensional application of that idea. When you go to the site, you can read the whole north wall of the sarcophagus chamber. I recreated the wall from a photographic plate. Those photos came from an old book called the Pyramid Texts of Unas. Turns out the photos were taken in 1950 by a guy named Fred Husson. I did some research and found that he is still alive and well. I contacted him, and he didn’t have the photos, so it was back the research. Then I found that both of the people who were involved in making that book Natacha Rambova (wife of Rudolph Valentino) and Alexandre Piankoff, were born in the same year and died within a few weeks apart in 1967 before the book was finished. So it was handed over to the curator of the Brooklyn Museum at that time. So I thought, if he finished the book, the images were likely to be in the repository at the Brooklyn Museum. So I contact Shelley Bernstein, who I had the interaction with on the “monitoring the mummies” project, and asked if she could find a record of the images. A week later, she got back to me and said they had found them. It was an exciting moment to have copies of those photographs finally go back to Fred. They were recently used in a publication.  #00:43:14.8#

JG: Do you use your own podcast to learn hieroglyphics? #00:43:19.2#

VB: That was the reason I created it. The vocab is the hardest thing. Eventually, you memorize all the signs and realize what they mean, but it’s another thing to know all the vocab. It’s an ongoing thing and I’m still learning. I can read basic steles and funerary inscriptions, but some of the more complicated things like pyramid texts are very difficult. We are now working to create a 3-D representation of the pyramid texts. Part of that recreation will include analysis of the texts from a variety of people, somewhat like a wiki. Each line could be translated, and then updated with additional commentary and viewpoints. The problem with a MediaWiki format is syntax, especially for the older members of the group.  #00:46:45.5#

JG: Why do you think that is? Not that wikis are mind-numbingly complex, but why should you need to know any code at all to use one? #00:46:46.4#

VB: Especially with Wikipedia, you would think they would drive that forward. They did recently upgrade their interface, but it’s still not there. It’s a fantastic resource. And you have to think, who’s making these edits if it requires that kind of technical know-how.  #00:47:35.2#

JG: I agree. Vincent, thanks so much for visiting with me. #00:47:41.7#

VB: Thank you, Jeff

Additional resources from Vincent:

• A Tumblr page that shows his network of sites and services.
• Subscribe to VOCAB with Bennu on iTunes
• CC Case Study on the Podcast
• Google Docs and Slideshare Study page for Egyptian Vocab
• Panoramio/Google Map of Saqqara that shows sites in a geographically.

What if you could take your vacation time to not only see a new place, but meet new friends and use your hands to preserve built heritage all at the same time?

That’s just the kind of unforgettable experience Jamie Donahoe facilitates around the world. She co-founded Adventures in Preservation with the mission to save the world’s architectural heritage by supporting community-driven preservation projects that seek to create economic and environmental sustainability.

Jamie has a very down-to-earth personality that comes through in her communication online as well. In this interview, she talks about how she uses the web to tell the stories of heritage resources. But, just as importantly, she’ll explore how the Adventures in Preservation concept came about, and hopefully give you some insight into developing and marketing your own heritage brand.

Jamie Donahoe at Bartow-Pell Mansion

Guin: Your site is called Adventures in Preservation, and was actually just rebranded. Tell me how it got started, and where you are today. [Time stamp #00:02:30.6#]

Donahoe: We used to be called Heritage Conservation Network and we started back in 2001 with an idea that a friend of mine–Judith Broeker–had. It was a typical Catch-22: People wanted to learn how to preserve buildings, but there was very little opportunity to get practical and experience. What was available was very expensive. So she had this idea of finding buildings that needed help. We did that for a while, and it eventually faded away. Then, in 2001, I was in the process of moving from Bangkok to Switzerland, and she said she would like to give the idea another try. So, I said let’s do it as a non-profit as a way to get grants and work with different types of structures. We launched Heritage Conservation Network, and we have projects in Italy, Mexico, and throughout the U.S. Word started to spread, and we found ourselves with more places in need of help than we had people to work on them. So we decided we needed more volunteers. We changed the focus more toward the volunteer vacation than the preservation training. You don’t need experience to go on the trips, although we love to have people along that will share their experience. That’s where we started. Then we did some research and decided to change the name to Adventures in Preservation, which seemed to be a little more dynamic and fun. For some reason, people couldn’t remember Heritage Conservation Network, just as they can’t remember names like The National Register of Historic Places–it’s always the National Historic Register, or something like that. We’ve had workshops in eight countries at this point. #00:04:57.4#

Guin: It really is a greater experience than just the classroom. Is that what inspired you to enter this “realm of endeavor?” #00:05:09.0#

D: In terms of the hands-on stuff, yes. Similar to the environmental movement, we really believe that the heart of preservation is education. By making preservation more accessible to people we help them realize that much of what they see around them has historic value and help them gain an appreciation of that. Just like teaching children you recycle for a reason, you try to convey why a building should be preserved by pointing out its special architectural value, history, setting, etc. I think that’s why our trips do well. We do a pretty good job converting people who aren’t yet die-hard preservationists. #00:06:02.9#

G: What do you see being the most common story about why people want to get involved? #00:06:09.8#

D: First, there are people who are contemplating a career in historic preservation, but aren’t yet sure it’s for them. We have a high success rate with that. We’ve had people pounding rocks for a week in the hot sun and they finishing saying “this is what I want to do for the rest of my life!” We also get a lot of “desk preservationists” who have never had the opportunity to do any of the hands-on stuff. For example, preservation planners may talk to planners or see their plans get implemented, but never have the opportunity to get their hands dirty. They then return to their jobs renewed and connected to what they’re working for. #00:07:06.8#

G: What do you see for the future of Adventures in Preservation? #00:07:20.8#

D: We’d like to continue to grow. We get many more requests for assistance than we can possibly account for. A sustainable level for us right now is 4-5 workshops a year. We’d like to expand that to 15-20 fully-staffed programs around the world each year. #00:07:51.9#

G: You alluded to the evolution of the brand. Adventures in Preservation is a name that sticks. Probably there are many heritage preservation organizations who are contemplating reworking their image for the digital age. Tell me about the process you went through, and what advice would you have for others? #00:08:19.9#

D: We made a decision early on, due to environmental concerns and the global nature of our work, to be a virtual organization. There are just two of us, so the nature of internet communication lets us accomplish quite a lot. There are so many ways to communicate now–Twitter, Facebook, etc. But before those, we had a strong presence using website and e-mail strategies. We’re very lucky that the person who set up our website was very together and designed our presence to be organized, easy to navigate and polished. In redesigning the website, we began to incorporate social media like embedded video and images to make the experience more dynamic. Interestingly, we have hits from 72 different countries, and when we look at our stats, we have a number of people who choose to receive our e-mail in text only, and have very slow connections. We have to consider the needs of our audience because we have projects in Africa, South America, and other countries. So everyone should keep in mind that not everyone is running broadband and wireless. #00:10:37.8#

G: How did you come up with the new name? #00:10:42.6#

D: In Boulder, Colo., you get a lot of creative and outdoorsy people. So Judith convened a panel–some had marketing expertise, others had adventure travel expertise–who generously donated their time. They brainstormed coming up with a name from both the heritage and travel angles. The name Adventures in Preservation came out of that with the tagline “restore a building, renew a community.” That is essentially what our projects do. #00:11:28.5#

G: You’re using your website to great effect, and your social media presence as well. I’ve never been on one of your trips, but I’m certainly a fan and follower. Tell me how you picked the communications tools that you did and how you use them in such a targeted, conversational way. #00:12:13.6#

D: Unlike many preservation organizations that work locally or regionally, we work all over the world. We honestly sat on the idea of getting into Twitter and Facebook because we couldn’t imagine fitting it in. It got to the point that we realized that we had to be on there if we wanted to start attracting students and younger people to the programs. Then, information started coming out about the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is women 55 and older. We knew we got a lot of those people on our trips, so we knew we had to be there. We didn’t want to miss the boat. I’m a total information junkie and love computers, so I love finding so many interesting things on Twitter. We had people become fans because I talk about so many topics. I don’t know yet it that has translated into people coming to our workshops yet. I’m still having fun. What’s been useful about social media already is getting feedback from people who might tell us they can’t go on our trips because they are too expensive. Because we have a dialog already going, we can let them know we sometimes have scholarships or financial assistance, and offer other tips for reducing their costs. We can also communicate that more broadly to other people who might be thinking the same thing. #00:14:23.7#

G: Have you run across anyone who went on your trips and really discovered a new passion, and went on to become involved with preservation as a mission in their own lives? #00:14:33.2#

D: A lot of our guests already have a preservation bent anyway. There is a woman who has been on four trips with us. She is a self-described conservation junkie. There are more people who went on a specific project and became preservation advocates of just that project. For example, in Waynesville, N.C., at the Francis Gristmill, there’s a man there who turns out to be my father’s long-lost cousin. He lived part time in Waynesville and saw an article in the newspaper. As retired engineer, he was intrigued. So he joined that workshop and has since become one of the key volunteers of the Francis Mill Preservation Society. He is now one of only three people who know how to run the mill, so that resource certainly benefited longterm from his participation in that project. #00:15:47.2#

G: What sparks people to make the leap to sign up for one of your projects? #00:15:58.8#

D. That is the $100,000 question. Ordinarily, they see something on the website. It interests them personally, but not quite sure so they call for more information. We do have a lot of people who hear about a project, instantly fall in love with it, and sign up. To show you how far the web has come since we started, there is a group called the Analysis Exchange, and they match mentors. They are helping us with the web analytics, which is more deeply scientific than I ever knew. That is helping us understand how people are interacting with our website and informing what we do to communicate through it. #00:17:03.4#

G: What analytics platform are you using? #00:17:09.9#

D: We’re using Google Analytics, and learning so much. I always just looked at the reports to note if our hits had gone up, but have now learned an incredible amount. I would recommend that any non-profit organization that’s looking to use its website to help further its mission to contact them. #00:17:42.2#

On a return visit to Francis Mill in 2009 to check up on the structure. Pictured are Tanna and Tim Timbes of the Francis Mill Preservation Society, Jamie's daughter Colleen, Jamie, her uncle Jerry Donahoe, and Ken Walton, who also volunteered at the first workshop in 2004 and has become a long-time supporter and volunteer.

G: How important is an international perspective for a preservation organization? #00:17:46.8#

D: I think an international perspective is important for everything. I’m personally very grateful to have worked overseas for so many years, and for my daughter work grow up overseas as well. I think the more information you can get for any problem you are facing, the better. A lot of the problems buildings in the United States are now having, people in Europe dealt with 200 years ago. We have to share that knowledge. There’s a lot of historic reinforced concrete (yes there is such a thing) here that’s falling apart due to humidity, and they bring in experts to deal with those problems. Steven Booker is an Australian conservation architect who went to our workshop in Slovenia two years ago and just fell in love with the country. He agreed to come back this year and lead the work. His perspective is that our purpose is to share our stories and experiences and hopefully they decide that approach is for them. But we’re not telling anyone how they have to do anything for it to be right. It’s about doing what’s right for the buildings, but also helping people make informed decisions. #00:19:22.3#

G: How can people connect with you, and are there any new areas of the web you are starting to explore? #00:19:33.6#

D: We have started blogging, and the site is called “Preservation Journey.” We’re currently merging the blog into our main site. Blogging is fun because it can be about anything–Twitter on a larger scale. We’d also like to be able to do commerce online more easily. This is a bigger issue when you are working internationally. For example: we have people who are Slovenian and they want to go to a workshop in Albania, but PayPal may not take their currency. As the world becomes even smaller and web software makes these kind of transactions easier, these problems will continue to become fewer. #00:20:48.4#

G: Do you ever get to do some of the hands-on work, or are you stuck in the virtual space? #00:20:48.4#

D: I get to do a little of both. I had a good time broiling in the sun at the Bartow-Pell Mansion. My best experience was at the Francis Mill, though. Partly because of finding my father’s cousin. The people were great. When I was there in 2004, the building was in a state of near collapse. The east side was completely water damaged. We had two weeks there, and the last hour, we had a boom crane lift this 26-ft. hemlock sill beam and we slid it into place. It was the greatest experience of my life, other than having my daughter. We were all saying “Oh my God, we did it! We saved this building!” There’s not too many opportunities you can say you really did that. #00:22:06.6#

G: Very good! Is there anything else you’d like to add? #00:22:07.8#

D: We certainly invite you to come along on one of our workshops. We’ve got some great ones planned for the future!

More links:

Adventures in Preservation Flickr Stream

Facebook Page

Twitter Stream

“Who are you?” A simple question, but one that could take someone on the adventure of a lifetime. For Mike O’Laughlin of Irish Roots Cafe, it took him on a trip to discover his Irish roots and began his journey to help others find theirs using his books, blog, podcast and personal tours of Ireland. Today we join Bethany Frank as she talks with Mike O’Laughlin. Mike is going to explore the ease of podcasting and how he uses it to share connect folks around Irish heritage worldwide.

Frank: Well Mike, thank you so much for joining us today at Voices of the Past. Tell us about yourself.

O’Laughlin: Well I guess we are talking about how I got into the website and the Irish heritage or the Irish American heritage, and actually now it is the Irish heritage all over the world — Canada and Australia and England and Ireland and the U.S. It’s amazing. And it really started when I was a young boy when I go to the grandparents’ house with the parents on Sunday. And the old folks would always talk about the old days and sometimes they would hold it over you about how they knew everything and you didn’t even know who these people were. So at one point I came and found a travel brochure to Ireland, and it said, “O’Laughlin’s Castles.” And it said, “Here’s an O’Laughlin’s Castle in County Clare.” And my O’Laughlin family knew we were Irish, they didn’t know why, they just knew it. And maybe it was the “O” in front of the name, but I thought, “you know what. If I could go over there and see that castle and claim it as ours, then I would have something on them and I could drop by on a Sunday now that I am a little older and tell them some things that they might not know.” That’s really what started the whole thing. I made a reservation with an B&B whose owner was the same name as mine. From there I came out with a book and it just kept going and I just kept writing, and now I am the most published author in the world in my field of study in the world. But you notice, I didn’t say the best. In the world–there’s a difference.

Frank: There’s a difference. Well, why did you go about starting your blog?

O’Laughlin: Really I was on the web for several years before I even started the blog. I didn’t really understand exactly…I know it is whatever you want it to be when you get right down to it, but I didn’t quite understand exactly what people were doing and I wasn’t real comfortable with it. And I go, well, I’d have to take a lot of time if I wrote a syndicated column or something along those lines. So I waited and finally, I got the podcast going. The podcast actually came first. I thought, “Well, this is a perfect way to get into it. I’ll put the shownotes from each podcast onto the blog and maybe add some things now and then. So that got me into blogging very comfortably since I had several podcasts going. Actually, we’ve got seven different podcast series going now. All the way from genealogy to song and recitation, and local history and history in Ireland. And it’s really blossomed.

Frank: You said before you’re very well published and can see all of the stuff that you’ve published on your site. How did you make that transition from publishing books to publishing podcasts?

O’Laughlin: Basically it was born out of fun. I had no idea how easy it was to get started. Now, it takes a while, maybe 50 shows or so before you start to understand what sound is and how to adjust it and the different kinds of microphones. But in the beginning I got this new Mac computer, which is an upgrade, and my IT guy that came in and was helping me with it said, “Oh, you’ve got to check out GarageBand.” And I thought, “yeah, yeah, I’ve got so much to worry about.” And thought it was just maybe if I was a kid and I wanted to practice the guitar, that’d be the place the go. I didn’t know that you could do a podcast in five minutes. And I just went right to GarageBand, pressed the button to record, and there my voice was recording. So, it was so easy to start that it got me hooked. And plus it was fun, and who wouldn’t want their own radio show?

Frank: Have you ever done radio shows or anything like that before?

O’Laughlin: No. I had been interviewed a few times and I was active in cultural things on the Irish side. So, I started up a group and the local radio station interviewed me a couple of times, and I think I was on television once. But very small little parts, but I always thought it was great fun.

Frank: After you started, you hit start on GarageBand for the first time, how did you get it to evolve?

O’Laughlin: I will tell you, it still takes me a while to jump into things. But I had recorded in my living room several shows, and it’s not really shows. It was interviews with seven of my friends in a roundtable discussion on genealogy. This is back in 1984, and I had saved those recordings. And I thought, “Hey, I will just take each of those, break them up into seven segments and make those my first seven podcasts.” So really I got over the nervousness of it by the first seven podcasts were really rebroadcasts from 1984 that I had been done at home. So I sort of cut my teeth on that and got familiar with it and then started to try to refine things.

Frank: How’d you go about refining them?

O’Laughlin: Well, first of all, better microphones. And then the little setting on the machine. I didn’t know what those were at first, like the echo and the reverb and the different voices. I hadn’t really experimented with them. And how you keep the sound even and something like compression, which makes sounds that are a little too small come up to a level you can hear them and the ones that are a little loud come down to where you can hear them a little better. So little things like compression settings and the difference between the different kinds of microphones. And some are too sensitive and pick up every noise in the house when I’m recording or in the Cafe here when I’m recording, especially if it is a busy night.

Frank: You mentioned recording in the Cafe.

O’Laughlin: Yes.

Frank: So, it’s a real Cafe? Not a virtual one?

O’Laughlin: It’s a Cafe. Is there a difference? I’d say, at times it is just my place. And then at special times of the year, we open it up and it’s a cafe. And we do serve the food and we do have the performances. And we do record the Irish Song and Recitation Festival, and we are getting ready to have the seventh one of them, and I have been practicing old style Irish song, which I find very few people know about so I feel safe with that.

Frank: What exactly is old style Irish song?

O’Laughlin: Well they call it the sean nós. And it was usually solo and in the Irish language, although it’s loosened up in its interpretation now. And it usually told a story, and shoot, the old fellows might come in from the sea and be singing a song, and that was it. It’s really natural singing, I think, without so much concern for particular notes or phrasing. And each time it’s not the same. And I thought, boy, that sounds like the way I sing anyway. You miss a few notes and it’s not always on the same track. So I thought I’d give it a try. And we started up a little group here in town for sean nós, and we are just having fun with it.

Frank: So, back to Irish Roots Cafe, how did that get started and what all is it?

O’Laughlin: It’s really, that’s a very good question, It’s really presence of everything I’ve ever done on the Internet. And it is just a combination of everything because I’m spread out so far and I am just one person. I have no help other than volunteers that come in and help with the podcast or I interviewed, that type of thing. So it is a way to tie it all together, and it’s a way to put all 60 of the books I’ve written or published up online. And it was also a way to get all seven podcast series going and feeding into each other. So, it really started to tie everything in together. Plus I could have some fun, and I could talk about the things I like, like rare old books. And some little history tidbits now and then, and I’m still…I have a side site, that if you go to my site and you click on “Quick and Easy,” that’s the pages where I can play with myself. I don’t have to give them to a webmaster. And so I do a lot of little strange things there. And then give them to my webmaster and then he puts them on the formal pages.

Frank: And so you have an annual festival with Irish Roots, correct?

O’Laughlin: Yes. And that is basically the Irish Song and Recitation Festival. And we will get folks together and we will sing songs and then we will vote on who wins, and it can be anything at all. You never know what’s going to be walking through the door next.

Frank: On your site, you have your Irish Hedge School, and you talk about carrying the sod.

O’Laughlin: Yes. Well I will tell you. If you go back and read Irish history particularly in the 17th Century, that’s when the Irish culture, the existing culture, was plundered. There was nothing left and even the old Bardic traditions started to disappear. And everything was, you might say, government schools. And the new people that were coming in and taking over Ireland were maybe ruling it in a different way, and they said, “No, no Irishman can actually be a teacher. No Irishman could actually teach Irish.” That type of thing, and you cannot have your own school. And if you have a school house, you will be fined. And so, or maybe they will ship you to the Barbados. You never know what’s going to happen. And so, it was pretty rough times.

So in rebellion, the Irish said, “We’re going to keep our ways and our education, and we’re going to find old cow sheds or we might go and teach out on the side of the lawn on a sunny day next to a hedge row where nobody can see us.” And so the name “hedgerow” came about because of that. And so it became “hedge schools” with “hedge teachers,” and the hedge teachers would travel the country all on their own. They were sort of like migrant teachers, and they would be on the run sometimes. And they would hide, and they would meet with the local people and the local people would have to like them and send their kids to school. They might pay them with butter. Might pay them, if they were real lucky, they might get part of Patty’s pig. But it was a pretty rough way to go really. And you could imagine the conditions, but they actually taught Greek and Latin, things like that in these schools. And some of the folks of the upper classes were amazed at how these peasants that were holding their horses when they went into town could speak Latin and Greek.

Frank: So then how do you incorporate that with your site?

O’Laughlin: Well what we are doing is also teaching and trying to bring up and save the Irish culture and heritage in what little way we can by reviving the old ways, the old songs, the old history. The history podcast brings back the history of Ireland. We have the Irish in America, which does the local history in America and reminds people what role the Irish played in America, what role their ancestors played in America and in settling the country. And there’s things we’ve forgotten. So each one of these podcasts really brings back part of that history and brings it alive just like they did in the old days with the hedge schools, except I think, we have a lot more entertaining time doing it.

Frank: On your site you mention an Irish DNA project.

O’Laughlin: Yeah, that’s really my current issue. That’s were I am focusing right now. I am working on a book on Irish DNA, and I have been interviewing some folks that do Irish DNA for a living, and They’ve done movies on it. It is really fascinating what that’s going to do with what the whole genetics thing (15:28) means to people.

Frank: Can you tell me about it and what all is happening with it?

O’Laughlin: I think we are linked up with Family Tree DNA, and we interview them everyone once in a while with the podcast to tell us about R1B, which is a distinctive Irish marker, or moving up to M222, which is another marker. And so, they tell us what to look for and what has been traced back and examples of let’s say this fellow, the minute he took his DNA, he knew he came from this village in County Clare because that is where this DNA marker first started. So we are having some remarkable success stories with people who cannot find their family heritage, their location in Ireland or really in Europe or anywhere in the world. And that’s really what got us started and it takes the place of…well, if you have reached a dead end in genealogy research, it’s really the only way to go. And let’s say you were adopted and they couldn’t get any records, well they could take your DNA, and you might be able to find out what county or town or area that you came from. And it’s just another part of genealogy resources.

Frank: Did you go through all of this stuff and track your own heritage?

O’Laughlin: Yes. That’s way back to that first story when I talked about O’Laughlin’s castle. I was actually real lucky on my way over. I actually found the O’Laughlin ancestor and the Donoghue ancestor, which was my mother’s side. And that’s a story in itself. But I got very very lucky, and very few people can get that lucky. I actually had a flat tire in kilkan nora (17:06) County Clare, which is the town that eventually I found my ancestors in. I went up and talked with Father Van (17:14), who is the priest there, while my tire was being changed. I’d gone to about 10 parishes before then, and he took me down to the church, opened a safe and handed me the birth register they had kept, and I guess they had sent a copy in to the government when they had collected them. But he says, “Here. Look at it and lock up when you’re done.” Well, I was shocked at that too, but I said OK. It was a bit chilly, but I didn’t care. I kept going through this register page by page until I found it. The exact date that say Peter O’Laughlin had gotten married, and there was the marriage on that date in that parish. And so I nailed it in that case, and it was amazing. The feeling was just incredible. The whole search, to say that I’ve done this. And it was almost just as amazing in County Clare with my mother’s folks. I had to take time. You know you can’t be too pushy when you’re asking people for help. And I found that if you were patient and you went back maybe a second time or a third time, and just casually mention that you were looking for family roots in a certain area or a certain name, you might actually get some pretty intelligent answers, whereas in the beginning they might just think, “Oh, this guy, they don’t know what he is doing. He’s just going to fly by in a car and be gone tomorrow. He has no idea what he’s talking about.” But I have found out that if you ask more than one time, even to the same folks and you’re patient, you’d be surprised. You could have some pretty good luck.

Frank: So, you’ve done your journey for genealogy, and you have all these resources for other folks to work on their journey. Why is having it all available through the web and through the Internet important?

O’Laughlin: Well, I reach the whole world. Or the information reaches the whole world. And I get feedback, and I get corrected if I’m wrong. Somebody says, “No wait, here’s the family history. That’s a little bit off what you’ve got there.” And never in the history of the world could somebody like me be in their house, reach out and get 5 million hits a year from people all over the world–Australia, like I said before, Canada, England, Ireland–regular conversations and regular input. And it’s not a one-way thing. You are sharing back and forth both ways. It could have never have happened. And it is really a way to share knowledge, and it is almost like a quickening. The world is so much smaller now. And here is one of the good things that the smallness of the world has brought about. You can share things and understand things, whereas before you’d never have a chance. I don’t know that I ever would have talked to someone from Australia about Irish roots–or maybe about anything unless I bumped into them on the street.

Frank: Are you anywhere else online other than just on your website?

O’Laughlin: Well my blog propagates pretty well since I am an author on Amazon. I’ve got a, with each of my books, I’ve got a blog. So I have several blogs on Amazon.com. And then I have a separate blog on IrishCentral.com, which is like a gigantic site for all things Irish–Irish news and all things great and small in every subject what so ever. So, that helps reach out to a whole new group of people that I might not be able to contact. Those blogs are great, but still, my best pull is the podcast.

Frank: Where can folks find that?

O’Laughlin: The podcast is at IrishRoots.com. And I’ve got all seven of them there. And we’ve got three different kinds: regular audio, video podcast and then the enhanced podcast, which is a podcast that is audio, but you can put pictures up on the screen and embed links in it. So if I am talking about the McCleary family on the screen, you can have a little link and it will say, “Go here to see the McCleary family.” And you click it and you go while you are listening to the podcast. So that is sort of fun. And I think you have got to have QuickTime or you have got to have iTunes for that to work, but it is just another form of podcasting that is nice to play with.

Frank: And then with your website and with everything else, what is your ultimate goal?

O’Laughlin: Ultimate goal. Well, since we’ve been doing it for forever, I would say it is just to spread the word, to enjoy the Irish culture and heritage, and particularly enjoy the Irish-American heritage on my part. And the Irish-Canadian or the Irish-or whatever country you come from. But to enjoy the good parts of it, and to realize what are some of the good things that bind us all together and that we’ve all experienced in the past that can help us in the future. And it is also always fun to compare one culture to another, and to understand them and the things you have in common and the things that they have differently. And really you get into being an historian after a while because there is no way to avoid it.

Frank: Is there anything else that we can expect in the future from Irish Roots?

O’Laughlin: Oh my gosh. Well we are going to keep up the podcast, and I am going to try to add some links pages. I haven’t had time to do much with links, they change so quickly. And they take up so much time. I prefer to just go with data and things that help directly with research. But we are going to add some links and some more on the Song and Recitation. I’m going to do some more on that. And definitely we are going to have, I am going to do a book on Irish DNA and expand the page to explain more on our site to increase our links on the DNA links. That’s sort of the future of so much of what we’re doing.

Frank: What is your advice to anyone wanting to go seek their ancestors and find out about their genealogy?

O’Laughlin: Well the first thing you have to remember is to start researching at home. If you don’t live in Ireland, you don’t want to start researching in Ireland unless you have some kind of clue. What you want to do is find the place in Ireland that you came from on a piece of paper in the country that you’re living in. So you’ll want to find, Ireland is organized by counties, so you will want to find your county first of all, and then go in for the records. And if you are in America and you want a birth certificate or a marriage certificate or an obituary in a newspaper, you want that to say, “Came from County Clary (23:49) Ireland in 1850 with two sons and his wife.” And there you have your connection and then you can make the jump and look for the folks with the same surname and first names in Irish records. The top thing to remember: start in your country and start with every piece of paper they might have signed and with the computers today and all the massive databases, you can find out fast. You will find out with more information than you want to sort through as apposed to back in the 1980s, sometimes you couldn’t find enough to look at. Now, there’s plenty.

Frank: What’s your advice for folks their own blog or website and want to get interested in podcasting and stuff like that?

O’Laughlin: Well, if you want to get into it, first of all, follow your instincts. Follow what you think is fun, and then develop that into what you want to do in a more real sense. And then that way, it will carry you through. Because there are time when you are going to say, “Well I don’t know anything about microphones and what I want to do is get the word out to people on this or that.” Well you learn a microphone. It might take a while, but you will be much smarter at the end of it and everything you’ve done. You just start one piece at a time, and a blog is real easy to do. It doesn’t cost anything really. There’s sites that you go up for almost nothing, and so expense is no excuse. It just might take a little bit of time to understand it. And podcasts, I’m telling you, you can have a podcast going in five minutes and another five by just pressing a button and sending it off to iTunes, if you are using them. And then it is going to take you some time. It might take you 50 shows before you get a pattern down or you get the sound down, or you start understanding about echoes or microphone sensitivity. But that’s OK. You just go and you have fun and you will grow into what it is you want to be.

Frank: As far as social media is concerned and genealogy, what do you think is the future of genealogy with the impact of social media?

O’Laughlin: Well of course it’s changed things greatly. There’s going to be some megasight, it’s already happening. And I saw this 10 years ago, but as everybody gobbles everybody up with huge databases, there is going to be a few places who have most all of the data, and then the important thing is going to be making that data understandable and accessible. And of course, supplying new input to people. Now, you can always do that with a podcast because it’s current. It’s like a news show. And that will always be valuable to people no matter what and the same thing with the blog. And so, it’s really not a lot of work to do. It is a little more work to do the podcast than the blog because you have to learn about audio, but once you do it, it’s rewarding. Well with my podcasts, my genealogy podcast is first with the number of audience and then my blog is second and then my other podcasts fall in behind that. So it gives you an idea, you can reach a lot of people, and some people will not read and some people will not listen. So if you go both ways, you are hitting both people.

Frank: You’ve helped all these folks find their heritage, do you have a story that you can share with us with one of those journeys with one of those families?

O’Laughlin: Oh I tell you. One of my early trips to Ireland–I regularly took people over to Ireland that were members and helped them have a good time and also help them search their ancestors if they still wanted to do that when they got there. Most people want to just enjoy themselves when they get to Ireland, I’ve found, but a few people are looking seriously. And I tell you, our bus driver that drove us around at, at the end of the first tour he said, “You know what. I didn’t understand you guys. Coming over here, searching through graveyards that nobody cares about and they are just sort of a fixture in the community, it’s just overgrown with weeds and no one cares.” He said, “I couldn’t imagine why anyone would fly across the ocean and come over here, but once I saw the look in Ms. So-and-so’s eyes when they found the name on that gravestone”–you know when the tears come into your eyes. He said, “I understood.” He said, “We don’t know what we’ve got here in Ireland. We’ve been here forever so we don’t have to go hunting. And you do.” So that was a real neat comparison. Of course they don’t have to go looking. They know. That’s where they’re from. And that was in a, I think, Quaker graveyard. It was through this little town and we found an old graveyard, and one of the people had found the name there and that happens all the time with research.

Frank: Thank you so much for chatting with me.

O’Laughlin: And thank you.

Click to play:

Schroer: Cultural Heritage Imaging has a mission to drive both the development and adoption of practical digital imaging and preservation solutions for the cultural heritage community. (Audio timestamp #00:02:02.6#)

Guin: What are some of the heritage resources you’ve worked on that our audience may be familiar with? #00:02:04.3#

Schroer: We’ve done quite a bit of work on rock art, including a workshop focused on rock art. We’re also working with a number of museums, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the New York MOMA and the Pheobe Hearst Anthropology Museum in Berkley. In all those cases, our primary focus is with the conservation departments in those museums. #00:02:32.4#

Guin: So this is pretty technical. You do a lot of work with laser imaging and scanning of cultural heritage objects. #00:02:43.2#

Schroer: Everything we do is based on digital photography, so one of our core philosophies as an organizations is that we want to develop technology and get it in people’s hands that they can do themselves. We really don’t like the service provider model where you have to hire someone to come do things for you. We’re looking for technologies that people can do on their own. A couple of the primary ones that we’re working with right now are reflectance imaging, where you take a sequence of images with light in different positions around the object. Once you put that together in the computer, you can dynamically relight the object and bring out very very fine surface details of the object. This is one of the reasons we’re working with museum conservation, because getting very fine surface information is of great interest to that community. We also do work with photogrammetry and some other photographic-based imaging techniques. #00:03:37.4#

Guin: With audiences so defined, you wouldn’t ordinarily think of an organization like this needing to adopt social media as part of its communications strategy, but you’ve taken a proactive approach. #00:03:51.8#

Schroer: I sit here in San Francisco, surrounded by all these technology people. We’re not really innovators compared to them. But we always had a web presence and later an electronic newsletter. From there, it became clear that blogging and using Flickr to create sets and have photos people could find online made a lot of sense. We are just starting to foray into video and posting things on YouTube as well. The focus was to make it easier for people to find us through keywords and search. We know from watching our traffic that people are finding us that way. #00:04:46.9#

Guin: You’ve really emphasized photography, and tell stories very powerfully with it. What made you decide to go the “still image” route to connect with your audience? #00:05:08.9#

Schroer: Our work is based on digital photography, which means that we already have good cameras with us when we’re working. So still photography makes a lot of sense. Marlin Lum (http://www.c-h-i.org/about_us/marlin_lum.html), who is our imaging director, also does wedding and event photography, so a lot of the photography on the website is his work. He has a great photo-journalistic style. The rest of us are more studipophotographers–very focused on special needs for getting a reflectance image and photogrammetry sequence, where Marlin is more of a photo-journalist. #00:05:56.7#

Guin: You’re a little different than most folks that I’ve interviewed for Voices of the Past in that you’re not a solo blogger or someone doing this for the fun of it. You’re doing this because it’s rooted in the values of your company. And, though you’re a non-profit, you still have to make payroll. So, how does your social media work? Is it the responsibility of one person, or is you as a group working together? #00:06:23.0#

Schroer: It’s definitely us as a group and we even have volunteers that help. It’s a group blog and we have guest bloggers as well. We are currently updating our website to WordPress to make it easier for all of us to share web management duties as well. We’ve started using CulturalHeritageImaging.org, rather than C-H-I.org, which will allow us to transfer content to the new site while keeping the old site. We’ve had some incredible volunteer help, including a design group that offered to help us pick a theme at get it customized. We’ve also had a writer who’s been doing a lot of work editing existing materials. We made decisions on how to regroup the material, but were missing some “glue” on how to make it flow. #00:08:13.7#

Carla Schroer of Cultural Heritage Imaging

Guin: What kind of topics do you blog and what is your audience for your posts? #00:08:20.6#

Schroer: It’s a group blog, so we’ll have equipment tips on there, we’ll talk about conferences we’ve been to or projects that we’re working on. We also invite people who are adopting technology, particularly reflectance imaging, to talk about their experience doing that. We have guest posts from the Smithsonian and the New York MOMA. We also post FAQs when we get questions. #00:09:14.5#

Guin: Beside your blog, what other social tools do you use? #00:09:14.5#

Schroer: Flickr has been big for us. We have started YouTube as well, including a video on our NCPTT grant project, and we have some additional videos on projects sponsored by the Kress Foundation with a museum conservation focus. Hopefully, the YouTube work will be similar to what happens with Flickr in that it will help people from a broader audience find us and be interested in the stuff we’re doing. #00:10:00.8#

Guin: Now that you’re branching out into these other forms of media, if someone wanted to visit your content there, what do you recommend they take a look at? #00:10:15.8#

Schroer: On our Flickr site, we make use of collections, so it’s easy to identify our work both by topic and project. #00:10:45.5#

Guin: You mentioned optimizing your content for search, so that you make connections. How do you optimize your content for the web through titles, tags and descriptions? #00:11:04.1#

Schroer: That’s what we’re working on right now as part of our website redesign. We’re doing some search analytics for what people are searching for. It’s a little tough, because some of the things we’re known for, like reflectance transformation imaging, are not something most people will go type into Google. So we’re working to figure out what people are searching for when they find us. And terms like “photography” and “cultural heritage” are so broad that it’s hard to optimize for those concepts. As we become more known in fields like museum conservation, that’s an area we’ll work to optimize. #00:11:59.6#

Guin: Since you’re transitioning to a new content management system, is there something that’s changing in your social media approach since you first began? #00:12:15.4#

Schroer: We are trying to tie some things together. For example, we have an e-mail list that we started about five years ago. So we use our social media blog posts, photo galleries and videos, as content to drive traffic that way. We also pick themes. So each month, we’ll focus on something like training and education, or rock art, etc., and use all of our platforms to emphasize that theme. It’s a more powerful way to help people learn about an aspect of our business. The biggest thing is that it always takes more time than you want it to. Because we’re small, we’re always thinking about how much time and effort should we put into these platforms and what kind of payback are we getting from them. We’ve stayed away from Facebook and Twitter at this point, not that we wouldn’t go there, but just because of the amount of time that it takes to really use them correctly.

Guin: What advice would you give to another small cultural heritage organization that’s just now getting into social media? #00:13:49.6#

Schroer: Blogging is an obvious first choice, because it’s easy to throw in pictures to help tell your story. To take that on, you have to have a person or two on your staff that are into it and feel that it’s fun. For us, Flickr made sense because we already had piles of photographs. We’re learning to use YouTube to tell our story in a more dynamic way. We had a couple of projects that specifically called for producing video. We’re also exploring the use of Screenflow [screencasting] technology to help explain concepts without people having to download data sets or a special view. They can quickly get a sense of what we’re doing. That will hopefully whet some appetite so that people want to download a data set and seeing what’s possible. #00:15:07.3#

Guin: What are your social media goals for Cultural Heritage Imaging? #00:14:42:00

Schroer: For us, it’s an expansion of why we started our website. We want people to learn about us, our work and the people who are partnering with us. It’s also a way for people to find out if they would like to partner with us, undertake a new technology or take one of our classes. As a non-profit, we also hope it will inspire people to volunteer or become donors. We have multiple audiences for our website, so we have multiple audiences for our social media as well.

Photos courtesy of Cultural Heritage Imaging

Guin: How did the site develop and how did you come up with the name? (timestamp #00:01:52.6#)

Thompson: A few of my colleagues and I from school realized that we had a lot of information gathered individually and that it would be more practical if we could share it. So the site started as a small venture for a group of five people. We quickly realized that we weren’t the only ones in this situation and that information was lacking in the field of archaeology. Resources are hard to find and when you do find them, they often aren’t complete. We agreed that if we were going to do this, we’d go big. It grew into the Archaeological Box. We just rode the wave to what it is today. We’re still adding daily. As for the name, I’d like to say there was a well thought-out plan, but our site is bilingual. We found the name in French first. We are a French-speaking team mainly. It has a dual sense as a box with all the information in it. But in French, it can also mean “the firm” or “the enterprise.” So it also meant the “archaeology venture.”

Guin: What was on the site initially? Was it more like a blog? #00:03:37.0#

Thompson: At the very beginning it was just news. Daily, we’d find news articles on archaeology. Anyone who’s familiar with archaeology sites will know how important Google is for survival. Even before we started putting the the site only, we supported a “mini version” so Google would get to know us. Then we found our web designer and started building the components of the site. We started adding photos, blogs and events.

Guin: It’s one of the most professional and refined archaeology sites that I’ve seen. What are some of the other components of the site? You said you have a podcast and are going into other new media adventures … #00:04:58.9#

Thompson: Other than podcasts, we have field school repertories and archaeological site listings. We have an archaeotourism section where people can post travek reviews or look for archaeological travel packages. There’s something for everyone.

Guin: How did the travel packages come about? Does it help support your site?  #00:05:32.5#

Thompson: The travel section serves as the general public portal to the site. The general public accesses the site through the archeotourism portal where they have access to news, events, travel reviews, packages and forums. Our main site is built around a Google Maps search engine. Archaeotourism has similar feature, which includes any hotels that have packages with us for tour groups, car rental deals for tourism. It’s an interesting part of the site that’s being developed more.  #00:07:19.0#

Guin: You mentioned that site was developed professionally, but there are a lot of people who are starting up with pre-made blog sites or ready-made social networks like Ning. What’s the advantage for building your own site from scratch? #00:07:43.0#

Thompson: We are using a content management system called Drupal, which offers a lot of flexibility. That was most important, that we be able to do whatever we wanted to do. As much as our website designer will take care adding things, others I can do myself without much knowledge of the web programming. I can add groups, or use the messaging system or add a customer service window. Those are blocks that are already available via Drupal. It also allows us to custom-develop our site. We did look at Ning and the possibility of developing a Facebook page or creating a cheap version of a social media website. We quickly got to the point that we couldn’t go any further with doing what we wanted. So that’s when we decided to find a web designer and do it right. #00:09:10.2#

Guin: Is Drupal open source? #00:09:15.5#

Thompson: Drupal is open source. A lot of people know it. A lot of people know Joomla. It’s pretty much the same thing. It works with “blocks,” and you’ll see that on our website. And I think that’s a good thing. There’s a lot of information on our site and a lot of first time visitors will be overwhelmed by what they see. As much as we try to cut things out of our homepage so it’s not so heavy, we need to guarantee a certain level of quality at the same time. So having a block-type system that’s very clearly identified, we hope to make it easier for viewers to make sense of what they’re seeing. We started with WordPress in the beginning when we just had news because it’s foolproof. We use two host platforms which allow automatic install of Drupal on the website. We can add things pretty easily. We’ve been adding groups to the site, which have been in prototype states. We set them up and began testing them for functionality, but making the final tweaks to the layouts is where the web designer is so important. So that’s the side-effect of using Drupal: you need to go into code and tweak stuff.

Guin: You’ve got a lot of content on your website. I noticed you have memberships. Why did you decided to follow a membership model? #00:11:38.8#

Thompson: We have two main types of users: personal users and business users. Since the beginning, we decided we wanted to have free personal memberships. There is a cycle that if you don’t have personal members on the site, business members won’t come. But if you don’t have business members, the personal members won’t come. So we decided to have two types of business accounts. A regular business account that is also free and allows basic capabilities for viewing and posting. Then we added a business-plus account. It’s not very expensive and gives these businesses potential to develop a more profile as a viable business portal. You can add a portfolio, create an events manager, add a corporate blog, photo albums, etc. In regard to the personal accounts, we protect users’ information. But a lot of site protect too much information. Business members don’t need us to hide their information, so we tried to create a balance where personal information is locked away and only members can access it. But non-members who only want to come to the site to look at the news, events and field school listings can still have access to a basic level of the site. By creating sign-in option, we were able to serve all these audiences.

Guin: What kind of business customer are you looking for? #00:14:09.6#

Thompson: We have several, which leads me to another complication of building a site: developing categories. Whether it’s for news articles or business members, you need to find a way to include everyone. The hardest thing we faced was deciding how members would be classified on the geography of our Google Map. When we got to the Asian section, we forgot to write “southern and eastern Asia.” Likewise, that was an early difficulty: figuring out what we need to offer as business “types.” At first we thought of everything possible–members from museums, archaeological sites and interpretation centers, archaeological missions, tourism, hospitality, etc. There’s not really a limit for the types of people that we wanted to welcome to the site.

Guin: You mentioned Google Maps. Tell me how you’re using it. #00:16:02.9#

Thompson: When we first started using Google Maps, we wanted a shock value. We wanted people to get to our site and be impressed by something “different.” We think our site does have a shock value, but we also wanted to make sure it was high quality. So if you are impressed by the look of the site, you’ll also be impressed by its content. Google Maps allows us to do both things. It’s nice to look at. It also permitted us to create a search engine based on our site. So you can search for our members on the site, whether they are listed on Google or not. We used a Google Map and overlay our business members with pins that are located on the map by address or by longitude/latitude for archaeological sites because a lot of sites and field schools don’t have addresses. So when you create your account, you click on the map and add your pin where ever you want it to be.

Guin: Do people have the option to include what information they want displayed on the map, or does it just bring up their profile? #00:17:39.6#

Thompson: If you click on a pin on the map, it will open a small window with a member’s profile picture and a short description. If you’re a business-plus member, then you’ll have more information such as a web address. For a regular business member, it will bring up your account name with a link to your profile.

Guin: You’re using other forms of social media outside the site as well. Tell me about those. #00:18:11.5#

Thompson: When we started this thing, we went all across the web. Every social media outlet that could help us, we were on it. We had an account. For folks who are in social media, you quickly realize you can’t do everything. I’ll use our Facebook page as an example. When we first got on Facebook, we posted everything on it. And our membership went up fairly quickly. A hundred new members came from our page every two weeks. But most of those members don’t come to the site because they could get all the information they wanted on Facebook. So we quickly decided to pull back from outside social media. So we kept Twitter and Facebook and we control the information that’s put out there. We use Twitter to post news, so every news article on the ArchaeologicalBox.com is also posted to Twitter. We use Facebook for announcements on the site. Whenever we post a new podcast, we’ll put it on there. New additions or functionality to the site.

Guin: I think it’s important to have your community area and let the social media tools support that. A lot of people think they have to optimized every social media tool with all of their content. Really, the purpose is to use those tools to bring new audiences in. #00:20:23.0#

Thompson: As I mentioned, we have two podcasts. One in English and one in French. Both are news podcasts. We put together a selection of the most important articles. We have a short podcast of about 20 minutes for the English podcast and about 10 minutes for the French podcast. Ironically, the French podcast is recorded in Seattle. The English podcast is recorded in Montreal. In the summer, we have a more relaxed podcast where we go visit sites. #00:21:50.7#

Guin: One of the things that interested me in your site is the “lecture series” area. #00:22:15.5#

Thompson: With “information” as our theme, we realized there was something lacking in the archaeology world. And that was a “free” global lecture series where members from communities that don’t necessarily have structured archaeological organizations or funds to put to that could still welcome renowned archaeologists to speak to them. So we created this series that pairs together lecturers and hosts from around the world for free. There’s no payment. Members will tell us their travel schedule and we’ll match them with hosts that have given us their availability. So we if have a lecturer from Australia who is going to Vancouver to lecture at a university for three months, and there is a host in Vancouver who is looking for someone to lecture about South Pacific archaeology, we can match them.

Guin: I’m sure that you have had a lot of experience in the development of the site. I know that in developing a few sites myself, that building websites can become addictive. A lot of things come up that are unexpected. I’m sure there are archaeological and other heritage organizations looking to start up their own sites now. What advice do you have for those people?

Thompson: We had no idea how much time and resources something like this would take. But we were a good team that had the patience and time to put into this project. So I think anyone who want to build something similar, needs a good support system. Sometimes I’ll get calls at one in the morning: “the site’s down; what do we do?” You need to good support system to be ready for those things.

Guin: Do you use social media personally to engage with friends or other interests? #00:25:46.3#

Thompson: I do have things like a profile on Facebook. But most of my time is spent on developing the ArchaeologicalBox.com. Everything’s available there, right? We can have statuses, blogs, photo albums, so why go anywhere else.

Guin: Are there blogs or bloggers that you follow? #00:26:50.5#

Thompson: I do take the time to follow some of the social media blogs. And in the interest of being a good social media geek, I went to PodCamp (a podcast camp) in Montreal. I met so many people with interesting and smart things to say, so I follow some of their blogs as well.

Guin: That leads to another question: how do you find the news for your site? #00:27:50.5#

Thompson: We control the news a lot. Members can post news articles, which we approve. There is a team of four of us that divide the week per days and go through the web about two hours each day. What’s fun about our way of doing the news is that we don’t use RSS to gather information. You can be sure our news is fresh and not duplicated.

He also has an all-time classic blog tagline: “those who forget history are doomed to retweet it.” Marion is also an educator and author of several books. In this interview, you can hear  just how passionate he is about inspiring connections to the past.

Marion Jensen: Like a lot of folks, I found Twitter and had no idea what to do with it. The first time you see Twitter, you just don’t get it and on the second time, you still don’t get it. When they got the search feature, I realized I could follow conferences and all the different people–strangers who I have never met before–I could follow them through these tags. I found that it was almost like being there. You could see this running stream of tweets and you got a sense that you were actually there.

And I thought, from the author side in this, that you could tell a story from that. Just come up with your different characters and tweet out a fictional story. And then I thought, you know “That’s too much work.” And then of course, the idea hit that you could take history and take different journals of people who are at the same event and you could give that sense of presence even though it was an event that happened a hundred years ago.

I started out with the Battle of Gettysburg and kind of that as a proof of concept and it turned out really well. It went from there.

Jeff Guin: Obviously you have a very strong interest in history. Where did that start?

Marion Jensen: I did my undergrad in Political Science and there is a lot of political history and I’ve always kind of have a love for history. I ended up going to education route with the focus on technology but I’ve never lost that interest in history. And for me, the real interesting part is when you dive in to the people’s stories. You know its fun sometimes to read a history book that it kind of covers a wide expenses but when you find out that one character and how they lived their life, to me that’s interesting.

And that’s what TwHistory, “Twitter History” allows you to do is get that feeling of not just, you know these things happen generally but this is what happened on Thursday morning. You know: “I woke up and I had beans.” To me, that makes it all the more real.

Jeff Guin: This question maybe a little obvious but I am going to ask it anyway. How did you settle on the name, TwHistory?

Marion Jensen: You know it’s hard to find a URL. All the good ones have been taken but with where it was kind of a Twitter History, I just shortened that up. We pronounced it TwHistory but you could also just pronounce it Twitter History and that URL was available so we grabbed it and ran with it.

Jeff Guin: I know you began the project began in 2009 but can you give us a little bit more history about how it got started?

Marion Jensen: In spring of 2009, I located the journals of 15 Civil War soldiers and we ended up doing the Battle of Chancellorsville and the Battle of Gettysburg. So that was the first official kind of kick off with the site at the end of April 2009.

Jeff Guin: And there were other people involved with this as well, correct?

Marion Jensen: What I would do is wake up and I would have read through the journals for that day and you know most of these people wrote you know during their lunch time or at dinner and would write in past tense. So, “we woke up at 6:00 o’clock and we had breakfast.” So I would take those daily events and then create tweets and tweet them as if they were happening right now. So instead of saying, “I had beans for breakfast.” I would say, “I’m eating beans for breakfast” and I would tweet that at the appropriate time and on the appropriate day. Then as you can imagine for 15 soldiers that became pretty overwhelming.

Jeff Guin: How did you coordinate it?

Marion Jensen: I’m a doctoral student at Utah State and have some great friends who are interested in the project so several, we just found several volunteers that would take one or two journals and they were in charge of that person and they would tweet out the events.

Jeff Guin: Now story telling on the web is nothing new. In fact it’s been around since the early days of listserves. I wonder if you had been involved with anything like that before?

Marion Jensen: Yeah in fact that was one of my–I have had many dissertation topics–that was one of my early ones. It was a collaborative composition. You know we have seen with Wikipedia that a group of people, in fact a group of strangers can come together and write a good article about a certain topic and my question was you know could you do that fiction and I actually with my second book I posted the entire thing online and invited people to combine helping write it. I didn’t have that many people come by but we did have some. So you know I have kind of dabbled in it here and there, I am a big fan of fan fiction. I think sometimes we give our students (this is the educator in me) we give our students a blank paper and tell them to write a story and that’s difficult to do. But if we can give them a world, if we can say well write in the Simpson’s world or write in JRR Tolkien’s world, they have the worlds already done, a lot of the character are done and they can focus on some of the smaller aspects of bringing the story versus have to worry about the entire thing. So I am a big fan of collaborative composition and think it’s a good way to learn how to write.

Jeff Guin: In what ways is TwHistory different that collaborative story telling? Because you are taking the original source documents from history and you are tweeting them but not verbatim. I am wondering how much room there is for creativity in this process?

Marion Jensen: I have thought a lot about that question, I have a brother who is a historian and so I understand what historians For us to say, “well we didn’t mention what they have for breakfast so I am just going to make it up.” There is value in that but to me that’s more moving into the realm of historical fiction and quite frankly I think that’s an exciting realm to move into. There is a lot of events that we just don’t have detailed enough records but we can kind of guess as to what happened and we don’t use a verbatim out of the journal simply because they didn’t write in 140 characters. But if they didn’t say what they had for breakfast we don’t make it up. We try to stick as closely to what they said. One of the things we do have to make up unfortunately is the time because they have already said we had breakfast at 6:47 in the morning. But as closely as possible we try to convey the events as they happen so we people follow these events, they are getting a sense of what really did happen.

Jeff Guin: So what’s the ultimate benefit for this project?

Marion Jensen: I think there are two benefits to a historical on Twitter. One benefit comes to those who have followed the event. And what happens is they really get a sense of the event as if that were happening. So for example, when we did Gettysburg was a two and half month event. Usually when you study history you sit down maybe you are watching a film and you understand the battle, a three-day battle you get in three hours. Or you read a book and you get it in bits and pieces here and there. What TwHistory does for the followers is they get a sense of how long it took and what happened on each day. I will forever remember Chancellorsville took place in the spring because when I followed the feed it was spring in my world, I mean it was raining. It really gave a feel for how the events transpired and what the people went through, so that’s one benefit.

The second benefit, and this is the exciting part for me again as an educator, is after we did Gettysburg we had a high school teacher said hey, this is great, I am going to have my students do and they tweeted the Cuban Missile Crisis. So these high school students went out poring through White House documents, original sources and then extracting the tweets. So just a fantastic educational opportunity instead of just reading about any event they created it, they reenacted it and the teacher was very pleased that how it turned out, how involved the students got and how to engage them.

Jeff Guin: Now this must require quite a bit of focus not just from you but from the other people who are tweeting because all of these tweets are kind of interdependent. I wonder how you attract the people with the dedication and reliability for lack of a better term to carry out a project like this over you said three months right?

Marion Jensen: Yeah, what I did was a you know was a volunteer project and I was doing the entire thing at first. As it became overwhelming I kind of just cast the net out and said hey I am doing this project anybody like to hope out and I had a quite few volunteers and then a couple of them fell out and stopped doing it. But I found that the ones that did stick with it  helped me out quite a bit and so I you know I made my life easier. That is one of the challenges, that these events are pretty hard to coordinate, these smaller events not as much so.

The TwHistory group is working on a set of web tool to try to make this easier because the way it sets, the way the project works now is it, it does take quite a bit work and it was, there was a big effort by this high school teacher. We would like to simplify that, we would like to make these original documents available so that a teacher could come and just pick up say the Continental Congress package. We would have all the documents there they needed, the characters and they could just kind of do the fun stuff but it is a difficult thing to do.

Jeff Guin: Now you mentioned earlier that you collected all the journals and the research for this project initially I am wondering if that’s going to change in as this project becomes little more collaborative?

Marion Jensen: You know that’s an excellent question because I am not a trained historian and historians everywhere will you know roll their eyes in how I did my research because basically I went over to the university library and found Civil War section and pulled off book after book after book. And if it was a journal and that soldiers at their at Gettysburg and I took it. I am sure that I missed a lot of good sources and I would love a Civil War historian to pick up what I did and to see what I have because like I said we only followed fifteen sources and I know there is more than that. I would love to see the battle of Gettysburg become a more complete story. But you know I am a big fan of Wikipedia. I should mention that’s one of the hallmarks of the tools we are creating, these feeds that we are creating are open and free for anybody to use. We license  material and we have under a Creative Commons license and encourage others to do the same.

Jeff Guin: Now you eluded to earlier your first experiences with Twitter and that you and actually I think it was, it’s been a common perception of people in the heritage field in general that Twitter is kind of inane almost and that there are not a lot of redeeming qualities to it. What actually lead you to the process of seeing the possibilities of where this could go and how it could be used as an educational tool.

Marion Jensen: When I first signed up for Twitter I followed a few of my friends and I got updates like, “Hiding My Cat” or “This Yogurt Tastes Good,” and I just did not see the value of Twitter at all and there has been a lot of that criticism. But then as I mentioned the thing that changed it for me was when Twitter included their search capability. The best way I explained it is that Facebook is really good for having random conversations with specific people. Twitter is really good for having specific conversations with random people. So for example if my sister breaks her leg I want to know about that. It’s a random event in her life that because I know her and I care about her, I want to know that.

If somebody breaks their leg and I don’t know them, I don’t much care about it and that just don’t mean but that’s with our goals. So with Facebook I talk about any topics with people who I have known to care about. But Twitter allows me to, can talk about specific things with random people that I have never met. So I can go on and talk about Civil War just by typing that the search term “Civil War” and I can be introduced to experts and to various different people. So for me that’s when my life went off and said okay if I want to talk about a specific topic then Twitter is a good way to go.

Jeff Guin: I have never heard that explained better. Seriously, I think in those terms about Facebook versus Twitter, but I have never heard it articulated so well. Now you mentioned earlier that you were in academia, can you give us a little more of your background there?

Marion Jensen: My undergraduate was political science. In my senior year I went to back to D.C. and did an internship and promptly came back and changed my major. Actually I graduated but immediately went on to something else. I love and still to this day I love politics but I did not want to be involved with that level of bureaucracy and what not.

So I came back and went on to get my master’s in Instructional Technology, went out and made my way in the world but I missed my school days. Ended up coming back to the Weber State University and started teaching and really enjoyed that and thought I wanted to get my PhD so that I could teach for a living. I started working for the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, I became the director of their Open Courseware Project and that led me to a lot of social media learning environments and eventually learned TwHistory.

Jeff Guin: So what social media tools did you use either professionally or personally?

Marion Jensen: I have dabbled in just about, all right I shouldn’t say all of them, I dabbled in many of them. I used Twitter regularly, Facebook, LinkedIn… I am a big geocacher, which is a kind of a kind of a mix of a virtual and the real world. I love all of the Google tools; I’ve used Media Wiki. There are just so many ways in that to hook up with people in just about any topic.  I have got an Android phone and now I have an application where I can leave messages at certain places and other people that come along from can read those messages. The golden age of social learning and social interactions.

Jeff Guin: Okay, as you looked toward the future of where you are going to take TwHistory do you foresee using any of those tools to maybe augment the experience and specifically I am talking about things like using historical photos from Flickr to use along with the tweets?

Marion Jensen: Absolutely and that’s an excellent question. We’re doing the Mormon Pioneer Trek. So several of the Mormon Pioneers who crossed America. We are also doing the Louis and Clark Trail which is a very big project, its about three years. We have every intention to use Google maps, Flickr or some iteration of that to show where these people not just what they tweeted but where they were when they tweeted it. I think that will offer an edge with the Louis and Clark as they describe some of these places, we can upload pictures of what it looks like today. For somebody following that the Louis and Clark feed, if they can pull up on a map and see where they are, when they are tweeting it, we hope they will better be able to remember and kind of comprehend that information.

Jeff Guin: Interesting, well I am just thinking out loud here, I wonder if there is any potential for this to serve as kind of a travel guide of sorts. You mentioned Google maps earlier would it possible for folks who were following the tweets to actually follow along the journey–kind of serve as a heritage tourism experience?

Marion Jensen: Yeah you know one of my other dissertation topics was geo-tagging and that’s the idea of taking content that’s relevant to a specific location and somehow making it available for people. So we had Wikipedia and that’s great, I love Wikipedia and I can go learn about anything on Wikipedia. But as soon as I close my laptop and I step outside, all of that information is lost, its back in my house. How cool to be hiking in amount and then come across the a strange rock formation to be able to pull out your cell phone and listen to a video from a local geology professor who explains how that outcrop was formed.

The project that I was working on just before TwHistory was a virtual game that takes place in a living museum close to Salt Lake. The problem they had was they had a lot of volunteers who were helping to interpret the site but if this volunteers weren’t here the visitor who had come to the site here had missed out on a lot of information. So we created a game that sat on a GPS and they would actually interact with the GPS and as they came to certain location that a message would pop and say if you see a bear what are you going to do? If they have the gun you could maybe try to shoot the bear. If you didn’t, you had to run away and find something that had a gun. So by doing this it became interactive; it wasn’t just an interactive game on a computer but it was an interactive game with a location and the content that we presented was relevant because of the location that we are at. So I think TwHistory eventually–you know it would be great to go to the Gettysburg National Park and to be able to follow what happened those three days with the GPS device maybe, maybe we tie in our tweets in a condensed version but you can go through and see where people were at different times.

Jeff Guin: Yeah and that actually ties into what we hear so much about with augmented reality these days and it being the next evolution of social media, which I am sure if you have an Android phone then you see that Google is taking things in that direction. Reading your blog one of the things that really interested me was your participation in an UNESCO event. Tell me a little bit about that experience?

Marion Jensen: That was a fortuitous meet-up. Tom Caswell was at a conference and Tom, I used to sit right next Tom and we were doctoral students together. And he was at a conference and it happened to start raining. So he kind of took the shelter under this one even somebody else came and joined him and it someone that was attending the conference and they started talking and he brought up TwHistory and as it turns out she was, she was in charge of this international seminar of UNESCO in Barcelona. And she thought the idea was great and invited both of us to come out and speak and that’s just been fantastic.

We were able to go there and present our idea. A couple of the keynotes speakers were there and they actually tweeted what we were doing and that went out to three or four thousand followers and that lead to a brief article in the Chronicle of Higher Education so this kind of made more people aware of what we are doing. And so far all the response we got back has just been very positive. People are excited about the idea and we would like to help build further.

Jeff Guin: And so do you actually have people volunteering to help you do that to take this concept to the next level?

Marion Jensen: Yeah we do, one of the biggest challenges we see right now for is a website that provides all of these tools and makes the process easier. Because if I am a high school teacher I can’t take four or five hours getting to know all of these various different tools in your various different locations to put this together. I happen to work with two great developers that have done some really unique things and their specialty is social learning, social environments and they have, their list of projects that they have worked on is very impressive. If there is one plug that I would put in, we are currently, we have started our fund raising campaign on kick starter and we are asking for donations, we might take those donations and build out this site the way it should be done. But that’s the next step and those are kind of the volunteers I guess on the developers side.

For our upcoming events I have kind of just, I run a personnel blog with several friends and a lot of them are setup and have volunteered their time. Its kind of like Wikipedia but you know Wikipedia is not a full time job it can be done in little bits here and there and these volunteers can sit down for 30 minutes on a Saturday afternoon and do a couple of week to work through a content. So that’s kind of the extended volunteer that we are looking at right now. One, on one side it’s the folks doing the content, on the other side of the developers that can make this site what it needs to be.

Jeff Guin: Okay well what kind of help do you need, if there is someone out there listening to this that has some type of specialized skill and would like to contribute, how do they volunteer?

Marion Jensen: I don’t know if our site conveys this very well but we consider ourselves along the same lines of wikipedia. So we are creating content, we are generating this TwHistory events but we don’t want to be the only ones that are doing it. We would love for high school groups, for college groups, for heritage center organizations to say, “Hey look we have got this event. We have got some great documentation on it, lets create our own TwHistory feed.” We would be more than happy to show you how to do it and then we can push those out from our site. We get quite a few visitors to our sites so it’s a good way to advertise maybe your heritage center or you know just for the educational experience. But we would love more volunteers coming to us and saying look lets redo the Cuban Missile Crisis lets do the Continental Congress, lets do just about anything and we would love to see more content.

Jeff Guin: Well you mentioned heritage centers, I mean one of the ones that’s mentioned prominently on your side as the American West Heritage Center. Tell me a little bit about your involvement there?

Marion Jensen: I have always enjoyed technology so I have a desk job and always in front of the computer, I always have my phone and sometimes I just need to go away from it all. So about two years ago my wife signed this and volunteered the American West Heritage Center which is a fantastic place. And I grumbled the entire way, we got out there and absolutely fell in love with it. It’s a living museum, so we would dress in 1917 farm clothes. We would go out and interpret as if we were a 1917 farm family. We would milk the cow, we would plow and harvest and run the garden with 1917 tools. It was just a wonderful,  wonderful experience for me and my family. So I have got different ways in technology for a little bit.

Jeff Guin: Well another one of your interesting projects is something called “Where I Go” and these are actually games that you are developing. They are not related to TwHistory though right?

Marion Jensen: No they are not related. I mentioned earlier the interactive game we have created for the American West. We used the platform Where I Go to create those and those that runs on a Garmin GPS. So we were able to secure some funding for the American West Heritage Center to buy six of these GPS devices and then we have created this interactive game that we went up and the visitors on this site can check up these GPS devices and go and play the game.

We thought it was a great way for visitors who come to the site to interact with the site itself. So you know they can go to the various sites, they can see the farmhouse, they can see the Native American Center. But if there aren’t any volunteers who are there to help them interpret the site this GPS kind of gives them additional information. And we found that children especially enjoy it because they you know instead of just going to the Native American section and see the teepees, now they have got this virtual character on the GPS. A Native American who they talk to and that they actually help. So it’s kind of a fun way you know we played interactive games on the computer before. It’s kind of the same thing except you are actually out of the site so instead of just clicking with your mouse and never moving, you are walking all over the site gathering berries to one place and dropping them off at another place and visitors found it very enjoyable.

Jeff Guin: There is a question I ask almost everyone I interview. It’s about how you find balance in your online of life. Social media offers so many new ways to connect and to do important things but it can easily end up distracting you from your mission. How do you find that balance?

Marion Jensen: I am distracted all the time by technology and if I see a thing, I run off and play with it, which is why I have had multiple dissertation topics. It can be distracting. One of my colleagues compared Twitter to the Borg. The Star Trek Borg have all these voices going in their heads, and when one gets cut off, it says its “just silent.” You know sitting on my computer I have these little pings from my Twitter but it says you got another you know another message so it can be distracting. My wife asks me all the time how I find time to do all of this and the fortunately I find something new and I can’t let it go so right now I am working on  TwHistory. I have also got another book that I’m marketing. I do some curriculum development for an online high school. But for me, especially with TwHistory, it’s so intriguing to me to be able to follow an historical event as if it was happening to follow this in real time that I can’t let go this one. so we are trying to push it as far as we can. The downside is that I don’t see any business model to it, so it’s not like if I make this work I can quit my day job. But we are hoping that if we can get the volunteers, I won’t have to quit my day job to generate all these content that we can get a lot of good high-quality feeds getting out there without it costing one person a lot of time and energy. It can be done collaboratively.

Jeff Guin: All right well in your blog post “Gatekeepers and Holes” you mentioned the importance of losing the middleman in publication and how that promotes the expression of ideas in literature. How do you think that same concept could be applied toward heritage preservation?

Marion Jensen: Yeah so I am an author and one of the things that authors have a privilege of doing is trying to get their work published. And in order to do that you have to find an agent, you have to find a publisher and it can be very difficult to do. One of the beauties of the internet is that it has taken out some of those I called them “Gatekeepers” and then a lot of times you could say that that’s not a good thing. But I think it is a good thing. I was in college when the Napster Revolution kind of took place and I saw all of these songs just given away for free and I thought you know that’s horrible all these musicians, how are they going to make money? And you know of course the record industry starts suing people and we have seen that battle go on for years but a lot of the savvy musicians have said “you know what I am just going to give my music away and then people come to my concerts and I can sell them tickets or I can sell them T-shirts or surprise people still want to buy CD’s because they want to support me.” So there is this whole wave of musicians that bypassed their record industry and went direct to their fans and as an author I have always wanted that same ability but its kind of a different meeting, that’s hard to sit down and reading the entire novel on the screen.

But I do think this idea of hooking up artists with consumers and in our case say heritage museums or people with a historical content, directly with people who have an interest, it is very powerful. So I might say hey look I have got the journals of my grandfather who was in World War II, he wasn’t in anything famous battle so you know a lot of people might say we don’t have interest there but there are some people out there who would find that very interesting and I can share that directly you know I don’t have to find a gatekeeper or a publisher. Twenty-five years ago if you wanted to get your message out you had to on the television station or a newspaper or magazine and now all you have to do is set up a blog. So I think it’s a powerful way for consumers to hook out with the people with the content and we are just, I think we are just starting to see a lot of the benefits that are coming out.

Jeff Guin: Now you mentioned that you are an author tell us about some of the things that you have written?

Marion Jensen: I have written three books. Two of them have been published. They are for young adults and they are kind of based loosely on my childhood, I would call them humorous fiction. And then my latest book is kind of speculative fiction for young adults, it’s about super heroes.

Jeff Guin: Okay well I am going to put you on the spot for a little bit, because I want you to define what an author is these days. You have got the traditional books the publications that you write and you also blog and you tweet. So what, in your mind, is the difference now?

Marion Jensen: Yeah you know kind of in the author circles people say “well if you write you are a writer, if you have been published you are an author.” And that was it, you know that was an easy limpness test twenty years ago when being published and that you had a book. But now you know if you have a blog what does that mean, you know how many followers so you have to have before you are considered an author. So I kind of just lump it together and said you know what if you are creating contents and people are consuming or enjoying that content then hats off to you, that’s what we need: more good stuff out there.

Jeff Guin: What would be your advice to people or organizations who want to get on the web and have conversations about heritage topics. How do they get started?

Marion Jensen: Well first one we just say that we are more than happy to help anybody through the process whether they want to do a TwHistory event or just some other way they can come to our site: TwHistory, TwHistory.org and just there was a “contact us” form, just drop us e-mail we would be more than happy to help you out. The one thing I would like to tell people you know there is that movie, the famous line “if you build it they will come”: Field of Dreams, that does not apply here.

If you send up a website and put great stuff on there, people are not necessarily going to come. So that’s the real challenge as finding you know where do people already come and then how can I get my message out through those means. Yet now it is possible to start a blog with the generally a lot of followers, it’s a lot of work to get people to come to your site, a lot of work to build followers but it is possible. If you can find sites that already provide this service and use those channels especially if those services are you know free and open and in groups there. That’s why Twitter is good. When we first started TwHistory we could have started our own you know broadcast mechanism–that wouldn’t be hard to do. But people already use Twitter, and it’s very easy for them to just sign up and follow us. So that would be my key piece of advice: to find out how people are already using technology and then use that technology in an effective and efficient way to help getting message across.

Jeff Guin: Is there anything else that you would like to add about either your current projects or what you are planning for the future?

Marion Jensen: I guess the only thing other thing I would say is that if anybody would like help using some of these new social tools with their heritage projects we are more than going to help out. We enjoy technology, we enjoy heritage and we think that the marriage of the two is a good thing.

Jeff Guin: Marion thanks for being on Voices of the Past.

Marion Jensen: Thank you.

Jeff Guin: John, welcome to Voices of the Past. What’s the mission of Historic Homeworks?

John Leeke: Helping people understand and maintain their older and historic buildings–that’s even a formal mission statement for my business, but it is really what I am about.

As a kid in the 1950′s, I grew up in my father’s woodworking shop. I was about 10 years old when I started and it was the usual thing: cleaning up and helping out. But by the time I was 12, I was doing some formal, regular jobs. My first one was fixing a broken picket on a neighbor’s fence. At least that’s what I thought I was doing. But later as an adult, I talked about this with my dad, and he said, “Now John, you thought I was teaching you about working with wood? Actually I was teaching you about working with people.”

When my dad passed away, I was clearing out his shop and came across the job sheet for that first fence picket project. And my dad had written at the top of the sheet “Help Mr. Williams fix his fence.” See? The work was really about helping our neighbor, not about me or the picket.

And you are still doing that today. And one of the ways that you are doing that is with web communication. And maybe some people don’t realize that you were producing social media even before the term came into existence. For many years now you have been producing video and communicating online. What lead you down that path?

I’ve got some inner need to share what I know. I am still not very sure where that comes from, but all throughout my work career it’s been there.

In the 1980′s I started writing articles about my work on historic buildings, woodworking and preservation magazines. National publishers like “Fine Home Building” and “Old House Journal” and so on. But there was a disconnect between me and my readers. And an occasional Q&A from a reader via the editor, but no real connection.

I am an inveterate do-it-yourselfer, so by the end of the ’80′s I was publishing my series of printed booklets and practical restoration reports. This put me in touch with contact with my readers and a dialog developed with many of them. Definitely social interaction, but the media was print. The booklets and letters, many phone conversations. Some of that interaction was on the Internet on bulletin board services.

By 1994, the World Wide Web was developing and I had my own website. So that interaction with the readers continued and expanded to many others this new media, webpages over the Internet.

By the end of the 90′s, the social media was developing and widely recognized, and I’d already been in the “thick of it” for five to eight years.

We’ve talked about your content, and it’s very rooted in the principles and ethic of social media. But what you have chosen to do is maintain simplicity within your own website and not overload it with all of your social networking icons and things like that. Why did you go for simplicity in actually maintaining your website and communicating with your audience?

Part of it is just the practical side that I can only put so much time and effort into it. I am out earning a living, working on old buildings, and that takes … full time. And then I am spending another half-time sharing what I know and writing and other projects, going to conferences and giving workshops and such. So there’s time and a half. And just like only so much could go into it. But I’ve always thought of my website as a destination. A quiet place for me and others to learn and share what we know. If you notice there is almost no advertising like some of the other old house websites. Ads flashing on every webpage and distracting from the real message. Well, maybe with some of those other old house websites, the advertising is the message. Tricking visitors into wanting more than what they need and the underlining purpose is making money.

One of the big struggles in preservation today, as you know, is the consumer marketing and building products. Like the vinyl pirates and the cooperate monsters in the consumer economy have mind-washed the American public into trashing all their final windows and replacing them with plastic, imitation windows–Don’t get me started! Well, they spend millions of dollars a year doing that. May of those dollars taken by the owners of old houses websites. When folks come to the historic home works, they immediately see it’s a different sort of place. They have some confidence, I think, that they will get objective information not hyped up and spun up with advertising dollars.

And I never got into blogging. The discussion forum at my website was highly active before blogging, so I just continued with that formal, well-known format of discussion forum. Now the forum has display video, and I could add features like live audio, but I really want to keep it simple enough that folks are comfortable using it.

I do participate in some of the social media. Folks learn about my work and end up on my website to learn more. One of the things that we all value highly is an original, historic house that still looks like it did when it was first built. So it seems OK to me if my website looks just like that: how I first built it. It’s a bit quaint, perhaps, but I get a lot of visitors and many of them say how easy it is to navigate. They can find what they need to know, so I don’t have any compelling urge to update it. No need for modeling and renovation.

You’ve got a book about historic windows. Tell me about it.

Save America’s Windows started out as two or three articles back in the 1980′s that I wrote for “Old House Journal” and a couple of the others. And by the end of the ’80s, I was consolidating those into a report on window preservation, restoration, maintenance and repair methods. So the content has kind of a history. And through the ’90s that developed and expanded. And by 2005 and 2006, it was thick enough to be a book. So I gave it a new title. Instead of “Save your Wood Windows,” “Save America’s Windows.”

And, I have to say, it is selling like hotcakes because there is this real strong interest in saving windows. I mean, that’s how I got the title. There is a thirst all across the country to take care of old windows within the field of historic preservation and maybe some of the practical affairs at the lower economical scale. Those who can’t afford to replace all their windows at such a high cost are just taking care of their windows. And so that’s what the book responds to.

You have actually pioneered the use of live chats regarding heritage topics. And you kind of had, for lack of a better term, a campfire chat about preservation topics over the course of many years. Tell me how that got started.

In the 1980s there were internet bulletin boards, and I got started on those as a user. And that was strictly a text message system. And after that I was a systems operator for a Compuserve board about old houses. And that was late ’80s or very early ’90s. And that had text and photos. You could upload photos to the files area. In ’94 or ’95, I had a contract to provide preservation information to a section of AOL called “House Net.” Part of that was hosting a two-hour text chat. Man, that was something. I learned how to think quick, be brief and type fast. And I felt that I could still help people pretty effectively with their old houses even with that kind of brief format. But I think it was so effective because it was live and interactive. It was actually conversations with few and many people involved.

Then in ’97 the first International Preservation Trades Workshop was held in Fredrick, Md. This four-day assembly of preservation trades people has continued every year since. But that was the first one and the participants had access to a bank of personal computers for their exploration of the Internet and other electronic resources. The timber framers are there, and the wood carves and so on. So this was kind of the newest thing back then.

Well, I couldn’t afford to go, so I set up and hosted an online conference through my own website. For two hours, with 15 folks there in Maryland and me in Maine, we chatted about using computers in the field of preservation and live text and realtime video. A rarity at the time. It was certainly the first time I’d done it. When high-speed access became common in 2001 and 2002, I started posting videos on one of my webpages and updated the webpage every day. I updated it by hand with HTML editors and ordinary text editors. Just like I was doing work by hand in the daytime with house restoration projects, planing  the old wooden boards by hand. This was way before any of the automated blogging services, so it was essentially a blog before blogs because we were updating it daily, and then I heard about video blogging in 2005. There was a group of 15-20 people who called themselves the “video bloggers.” And I kind of fell in with them. They were doing blogging just like I had been doing on my own by updating web pages, and then others were figuring out ways to do that easily on the new video blogging services. Well, this group of folks had this weekly online video conference meeting using the flash meeting service, and there was a lot of camaraderie as they developed new video methods.

Every week were were checking out each other’s new video blogs and helping each other figure out what looks good and what works and so on. And so even some of them were writing books about blogging and video blogging that were being published that year and the year after. And they really liked me because they were all video blogging about video blogging. And I was out in the real world video blogging about saving historic buildings. So they loved that and really helped me get up to speed quick using interactive video, mostly by using that Flash Meeting service. Now Flash Meeting is a live, interactive video conferencing service, they are kind of common now, but they were a rarity back then. And it was developed by the Old Media Institute of the Open University over in England in the 1990s. And they have on going developments and improvements on the Flash Meeting system.

The Open University is a distance learning school that is students worldwide. In fact, it is an interesting place. They have a campus with 2,000 or 2,300 people on it, but there are no students at the campus. It’s all staff and instructors and professors at the campus and their student body is truly all around the world. So they made the Flash system to serve their students all around the world over the web. Well, I got in touch with Peter Scott who leads that program, and he gave me a grant of services, so I could use Flash Meeting for my own work. He did that because he sad they were stuck in the academic realm, and I was out in the real world to train preservation trades people to save historic buildings. And one of the principle things they do at the Open University is study how knowledge spreads around the world, and they actively support what they call the horizontal spread of knowledge rather than vertical. The traditional way of learning is a vertical system where professors at the universities know it all, and they teach their students who end up becoming teachers themselves teaching their students to go out in the real world and do work using what they learned. Well that’s a vertical system they say. And what they are promoting is horizontal systems of knowledge transfer, where if trades people like I’m working with in preservation need to know something, they go side ways (horizontal) to other trades people and get the information they need to know directly from them. And that’s what I was doing with their Flash Meeting system. So they wanted to use me as a case study for how their system is used out in the real world.

Which kind of made you the original heritage video blogger …

Well, I was doing it pretty early. And all of the stuff, all of these tools whether it’s a table saw or a wooden hand plane or the Internet and my computer and a video camera are all just tools that I use to help people take care of their old buildings. And so this is just the next set of tools to learn about, and I was picking up kind of early on. As soon as they were helping me, I was using them. One of the things that they study at the Open University is how knowledge spreads, so that’s what I was doing. And I think that’s why I kind of looked interesting to them. And this Flash Meeting system is highly useful. After a live video conference is recorded, that recording is available and even more people watch it. Maybe six or eight participants have logged in and participated in the live meeting, but some of these recordings that I have done have been viewed 10s of thousands of times. And the Flash Meeting system keeps track of all that, and you can see in a worldwide map where the original participants were located in the video conference and the location of the recorded viewers all around the globe on six continents. And Peter at the Open University jokes, and he says, “They’re just waiting for someone on Antarctica to start watching my restoration videos so they can say ‘worldwide,’ seven continents.”

And recently, for example, we’ve had a live video training session with New Orleans Renewal and Building and Crafts Training Program, where Bill Robinson is training a crew of preservation trades people learning about wood window repairs and maintenance, and it’s an ongoing program of training that lasts for months, and windows is just one of the components. And so one Saturday we set up and had a morning and afternoon session over these live conferences, and those are still available.

Livestreaming and using video, recorded and live, is really where the Internet is going right now. Do you have any advice for heritage organizations that are considering livestreaming their training?

Yeah. I think the real key is to first understand that all of this is very doable. All of the tools have kind of…it is like they’ve merged finally into ways that actually work. And it’s not a big struggle to plug in your camera to your computer and hook your camera up to the Internet and be doing it. It may take a bit of learning and a bit of practice, that’s the other key–is to just do it. It’s like start doing it, don’t get worried about trying to meet high-production values. It isn’t Hollywood. It isn’t broadcast television. And you don’t even have to do it like anyone else is doing it over the Internet with their video camera. Just start doing it and do it enough. And that’s the key. To do it enough. Do it regular. Like once a week. Once a month. Or everyday, but just depending on what time you have available. And that’s the key. Just do it and practice. I mean, the first few times I did it, it was stilted. It’s not Hollywood. Like the true grit of what it’s like to work out at old buildings is where things get dusty and dirty during the work, and it’s OK if your camera shakes a little bit. It’s the content within it that’s important. And the way you get to that is just by practicing. By doing it. But don’t practice and then put it away in a drawer. Practice and get it out there. Because now, it’s not like it’s a television show where it’s highly edited. You might edit a little as you learn about that, but you get it out there and people respond to it.

I remember one of the first videos I did was about scraping paint, and so I demonstrated scraping paint and made this big screech like fingernails on the blackboard only worse. It’s like the scraper on the side of the house. And it was like this screeching scraping sound. And that was right in it, part of the true grit. And so a comment I got back from Simon Herbert out in Tucson. And he said that I showed that with my fellow office workers, he works at the county and their state preservation office. And he said that as soon as we came to that part, everyone turned around and walked away because they couldn’t stand that sound. So while it might be true grit on the worksite, but if it drives away viewers then you edit it out or you or you shoot your video so that you are minimizing that disturbance. And so it was just a lesson I learned early on and that’s how you get at it. But it’s like you have to overcome any embarrassment and so on, and the way to do that is just practice. So those are the two keys. Realize that it’s not costly and it’s very doable, and then just do it.

How have these technologies been effective in doing that? How has Historic HomeWorks changed because of these technologies?

My business is a little unusual. I’ve never paid for marketing or advertising. Through the 1980s and since, I have written articles for national journals and magazines, and that’s been a big part of my marketing. Like a lot of people learn about what I’m working on and then they call in and want some of that. But I’m not doing it for that reason. I’m not doing it for marketing it. I’m doing it because I have this compelling inner need to share stuff. And so that’s just like one of the happy results. And I started recognizing it just about the time it started happening. It was a big part of my marketing. For example, in an article I just tell stories about what I’m doing. And my first magazine article was about repairing the porch columns that I had to get done real quick because the couple was getting married on Saturday, and they were taking their vows right out on the front porch. So my work working on the Internet is just an extension of working on my projects and working in the print media. Now I tell my stories on the Internet and this means I can share my work and stories with a lot more people. One of the interesting marketing concepts, and now I didn’t develop it, is this idea called “long-tail marketing.” If you plot out a graph of let’s say all sales of windows. Big on the graph, coming up high on the graph are sales by Pella and Marvin. So that makes high in the curve of the number of sales over time. And so that’s like Pella is selling a lot of windows, and then like half way down of the regional companies like Black Mountain, windows over in Vermont, they are kind of like down on the curve. They were only selling a few windows compared to Pella in a regional area in New England. And then a little further out along that line, like maybe out here are the window restoration shops. One or two people working together saving old windows. And then, a little further out in the line, like maybe on this scale that I’m talking about here. Maybe 10 feet that way is John Leeke selling his book, selling a few books about saving America’s windows. It’s way out there on the horizon and then the long tail going out. And that’s the long tail of marketing.

The long tail is important because it goes way out. And even on this scale, the long tail goes out. Like here we are at a foot, it goes out 10 or 12 miles. Where way out at the end of the long tail, one neighbor helps another neighbor fix a window. And that neighbor gives his neighbor and friend $10 because he helped him out. So that’s like the far end of the long tail. And so that’s out on the long tail and that’s important because under the long tail, the size of that market because it goes out so far, is much more important that the area where all the windows are sold. And that works and happens largely because of the Internet. People can find out about each other. And sometimes, way out at the end of the tail, people are finding out about each other just talking over the backyard fence. And that’s a form of marketing, spreading ideas. But I think the real key is in this live interaction on the Internet. I mean, we all know how the Internet is used. How we use it to display words and pictures, and that’s the way it kind of started. Now, I learned back in the ’90s about this interaction that can take place over the Internet, and that’s something that the big corporations can’t do. They are trying to do it. But they do things like pay homeowners to write blogs about replacing their windows. And it has this inauthenticity about it that’s pretty recognizable. People know, or have a feeling, that that’s what is going on. The key with the social media now, Facebook and MySpace, is that it’s authentic. It’s real people talking about real things in their lives and sharing that.

What social networks do you use? You mentioned that you do use social networks even though you may not promote them on your website. You are out there on the social space. So what social networks are you actually active in?

The one I use most is the discussion forum on my own website. I really spend most of my time there. And enough people have found it and so it is pretty active. One of the reasons I use it is because of the outcomes from it. I can really directly help a lot of people. And also it is where I am writing most of my content now, both for my print publications and also for the videos. I mean, I do what people are interested in at my forum. And then I see what people are interested in at the other social media websites. But I can easily count the numbers, the system automatically does it, and I like that the numbers aren’t a secret and they are displayed right there at the discussion forum. You can see each of the topics, how many people are looking at them and how many people have left messages, and I use that. People are leaving messages, I am answering them. And that becomes the content for my articles. And because it is highly responsive, it helps the marketing of the materials I’ve developed there. So text and photos and videos are the tools there, but the real work flows around the community and work of the people that stop by. It’s a lot like the classical Roman forum where people stop by to ask questions and to see what’s going on and what people are interested in. At my website at the discussion forum, I say, “where people can stop by to ask questions, seek guidance, help others and keep in touch.” And nearly all my articles are developed there.

I’m active on Facebook. I’ve been about a year. I come to it a little late because I’m busy over at my forum. But I am not sure if I am actually helping there or not. For one thing, it is kind of complicated. The system works and then they keep changing how it works. Too complicated to easily learn and use effectively for me, and I practice with this stuff. And I have been using it for a year. I maybe log in there weekly. And so after 50 to 100 times logging in, I still don’t have a grasp on what’s actually going on, and that’s because they keep changing it. It’s sort of like that corporate marketing strategy where you keep your consumers off balance so you can take advantage of them. And so I am a little weary about that and Facebook and some of the others. And it’s pretty clear. Facebook is designed to benefit mainly it’s owners. And who knows whether or not it is truly helping its users possibly. So I am still dabbling there. I have gotten a few small pieces of work through connections at Facebook, so I am not saying it is a bad thing. Just, it’s questionable.

And then I post some videos and stories pretty regularly on “My Old House Online” account, which is another social website. They use the ning service, N-I-N-G, and that’s partly because it is hosted by one of my publishers, and occasionally I stop by Voices of the Past, and LinkedIn occasionally. LinkedIn to me seems even a little less useful than Facebook. But a lot of people are on it. And it is sort of, sort of, like there is an expectation that you will be involved in some of this stuff. And so that is a part of what brings me there.

You are expected to maintain the same level of activity on Facebook that you do on your own website, and it really, I think, dilutes your capabilities somewhat because your efforts are going in all these different directions ...

I think you are right there. And that’s exactly my response to it and why I’m being actually somewhat careful about spending too much time there. When I first logged in, everyday for about a week I spent about an hour there just trying to figure that out. And then everyday for…about an half a day a week for about a month, I spent time there. And now I limit my time to no more than 10 minutes a day and total half hour per week. And I am spending only about twice those numbers at my own discussion forums. I am only spending about an hour a week, sometimes more if I am writing for a project on the discussion forum, which I do frequently, but just on the interactive part of it and responding to new people and new posts, that’s less than an hour a week that I spend on my own discussion forum.

You talked about your involvement in traditional media a moment ago with the Old House Journal, and the fact that they have an Ning site now. Because you were actually in this industry before the social media really took hold, what has changed in the print-based industry and just the industry in general that you have seen since the advent of social media?

For me, having my first articles on wooden porch columns published in Old House Journal and Fine Home Building in the early 1980s was a real turning point in my work and career. And then I continued writing which helped me get established in my career and building it through the ’80s to the ’90s, but now print media is definitely declining, not only in the broader economy in almost all quarters, certainly national and regional newspapers. Local newspapers still seem to be thriving. But especially the magazine or book industries, not book publishing, but magazine industry. That’s definitely declining. And so they are all scrambling to do things, like Old House Journal, and getting online like last year or the year before. Now actually, the Old House Journal was online maybe it was 10 years ago or more. But that had been 10 years after some of us had been online and developed some rich content and ways of working with it. And I still write for the print publications occasionally.

My self-publishing efforts put me in direct touch with my readers. And like when my own readers pay me for a book, I get far more money than with the big publishers, who used to take most of it. And when I get more money, I can put more of that back into the publications, helping my readers even more. Essentially this happens pretty well in a niche market like mine. I mean, even Old House Journal and Journal of Light Construction, they’re pretty much a niche market, but mine is like a little micro-niche. And mine’s like hands-on, historic preservation, building specific, and the big publishers just get in the way. They are in the way now between me and my readers. I can help more people without them. Now that’s partly because I am pretty practiced at it. I’ve been writing for more than a quarter of a century. But this is true for somebody who has something to share and that other people want to know. I mean, they can just jump right in and start doing it too. I don’t think that I am anything special. I just sort of got an early start with both my hands-on work with these ways and sharing it.

If people want to find out more about your work or purchase your book, where do they go?

The central location is my website. That’s historichomeworks.com. And there I have the discussion forum, you will easily find it, and also the retro-video online conferences. Both those there’s no cost, it’s highly responsive. It’s the place to actually get the latest info. If you want to know what’s going to come out in my publications next, go to the forum. And if you don’t see what you are looking for, ask for it, and you’ll get it. And then it’ll be in print next month or maybe next year. And then there are also my publications, the result of that. The practical restoration reports. Gordon Bock, the OHA editor said, “They have my trademark hands-on, step-by-step instructions and famously lucid illustrations.” He said, “photos in particular are photos of clarity.” Well, that’s because I went to six years of art school. And to have the knack of getting it out on paper, in print and now all over the Internet. And then there is also workshops and training. There’s a section of the website that shows what’s coming up. Hands-on guidance around the country, my shop here in Portland, Maine. Or live videos all over the Internet. I also do consulting, personal advice for homeowners, contractors and building owners. I will even write back if you send me an old fashioned letter on paper. My address is 26 Higgins, Portland Maine. Zip 04103. Or give me a call. 207-773-2306. My personal computer and the Internet are like my bench saw or my hand plane. Just another tool that helps me do my best work. And it’s like the telephone, it’s a tool. So if you see me at a conference, be sure to come up, tap me on my shoulder and introduce yourself. There’s nothing like personal meetings, and if you are ever up in New England and get down east along to Portland, stop in and see me. I do that too.

Is there anything else you want to add?

Well, I think that the web and the social media is changing the heritage field, but we have to be a bit cautious about that change because it opens up a lot of opportunities for us like you and I (Jeff and I) and each of the listeners and viewers of this podcast to get in touch with each other. But it also opens up other possibilities. And the consumer economy and the corporations who benefit and control that are not blind. And they are busy taking over the Internet, and the World Wide Web, for their own purposes. Which, of course, is just to make money. And by law, these corporations are only to be concerned with making money. And so that’s the issue and you really do see it on the Internet. A lot of the early video blogging companies and websites are now shifting over to be a substitute for broadcast television. They have series of shows and channels. And some of them even set it up so it looks like a television. And so that’s what we have to be aware of. Is that that’s happening. And I think that when the World Wide Web really was like the Wild West. it was easy to jump in and do your thing. And it’s getting somewhat difficult now to do that. And it’s still possible to do it. And all of my methods were very low cost. Once you have access to the Internet, which is not low cost, but it’s available to many people even at local libraries and so on. And access to a few pieces of equipment like the computer to log on, or the video camera which is now modest in cost. This one that I am using right now is just a couple hundred dollars, and you can even get video cameras now for $40 or $60 that can act as a web cam or record video that’s editable. So you can get into a very low-dollar cost, and I think that it’s important to jump and do it before it’s taken over and you have to start paying the big bucks to participate. And that’s beginning to happen.

OK, well there was one more question that I had and that was on the blogs and websites that you personally enjoy. Whether they are related to heritage or not. Are there people out there on the web who are  your heros?

Yeah, there is one. And it relates directly to a video on the Internet. His name is Steve Garfield at SteveGarfield.com. And he was one of the people in that cadre of video bloggers that I first got in touch with when I first became serious about video over the Internet in 2004 and 2005. And so go to SteveGarfield.com and see what Steve’s up to. He just came out with a book. “Get Noticed” is the name of his book. And it is how to do this Internet video thing, and it’s a great book. And he’s a great guy. And so, that’s one person, but usually I am too busy fixing old houses and writing or shooting video for casual reading or casual web browsing to relax and have fun. I turn around and see who needs help next.

Well that’s awesome. John, I appreciate you talking to me. And thanks for being on Voices of the Past.

Leeke: It is great to meet up with you.

(Photos courtesy of Lisa Sasser on Flickr; Additional teaser graphic elements by SOYBEANTOWN and Damon Duncan)

Guin: we’ll start the podcast with Michelle explaining how the Flickr partnership first came about.

Springer: We started out in early 2007 in the Office of Strategic Initiatives wanting to look at a pilot using user generated content and seeing how that might help us describe our collections. Photographs seemed a very good fit for us so we partnered with the photographs division to look at, how we might do this. Photographs are very approachable and can be appreciated at all different levels. We decided as a pilot, this would be a very good place to start. We didn’t know the outcome that it would be when we went into it. We had three goals:

1. We were interested in exploring how user-generated content could help both the library and users of the collections.
2. We also wanted to increase awareness of the photographs with the idea that not everyone might realize that the library has pictures, and so this is a way of getting the word out for that.
3. The third goal that we had was to gain experience using web 2.0, techniques and vendors to get an experience of how you speak, for example, in the social media environment as opposed to the more formal way the library usually communicates. So getting staff experience in swimming in those waters was a part of that.

That was how we started it and it took off like a rocket and we can’t say that we were expecting such a popular response. When we created it, it was very much a pilot. We didn’t set an end date to the pilot because we didn’t know how long it would take for us to get enough data to actually evaluate the success. Within 24 hours we had over a million views of the c

ontent. It just exploded in the blogosphere as a great idea and people were very interested in it, people really enjoyed it and I think the success, the longevity of the project over the last two years have underscored that this was a very good idea, people really like this.

Zinkham: When it comes to thinking about heritage and how it’s preserved this Flickr project with the Library of Congress — as you can imagine we’re a massive four thousand person organization, largest library in the world, but we’re also everyday human people. It turned out to be a very strong partnership between people who understand technology and the future well, like Michelle and the custodians of the physical objects or the stewards — that’s my area, the prints and photograph division.  I was given the fun of picking the first two collections to put online in Flickr. And they needed to be rights free, they needed to be fully available on the Library of Congresses own web page so that what we were offering out on Flickr wasn’t exclusive in any way. We needed that technique for people to begin to talk about the pictures and with each other, not just passively read a catalog record.

It’s very much an experience that the people who come to Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. and hold the physical collections in their hands. They have always, when interacting with picture collections, come with great stories. “That’s how my grandmother spun wool or that’s how my grandfather built trucks or flew airplanes.” They also bring often us corrected and new information: “Can’t you tell that’s Akron, Ohio, and not Sioux Falls, South Dakota?” Well with so many pictures here, we haven’t looked at each one as closely as you can so we’re really quite dependent for a long time on other people coming, doing their research, telling us more. They bring their questions. It isn’t always about bringing information; sometimes it’s just sheer curiosity. “What is that sign is the window about, what does it tell you related to segregation or integration of society? What’s the identity of that person? I see one clue, does another person have a clue?” Though it was technology, future, faith, people coming to past old heritage collection — I think in the end it was a tremendously strong partnership because we knew from the way that the physical pictures were handled. So as soon as we looked at a site like Flickr you could see the kind conversations that were absolutely familiar to us whereas I think with books or some other information resource in the library, that would not necessarily have been the traditional practice. Flickr is a very good fit for the kind of experience that picture libraries have long had with their physical users and it became a forum where we could reach out to the international community of what are essentially volunteers reacting in all kinds of ways to the pictures: Your basic fan mail, “I love it, great blue sky.” Or more hardcore specialists: “See that name on the hub of the back wheel, that’s how I know it’s a 1932 such and such car opposed to a 1933.” Again, very familiar debates and conversations for us and a real privilege for us to be able to have them held in such an international form.

Guin: Ok well lets go into a little more deeply then because crowd sourcing and the concept of open data has become increasingly popular in Gov 2.0 circles but not a lot of organizations have opened up quite so much content as you have for public comment. Would you describe that process and how has it changed the way the Library of Congress interacts with the public?

Springer: Once we decided and thought this would be a good fit for the pilot that we wanted to do, we had to approach Flickr because the Library of Congress has the office copyright, and we take copyright very seriously. Their rights statement which was the default rights statement of Flickr was not appropriate for the photographs that we were going to place there so we contacted Flickr management and we explained what we wanted to do there, and they were very accommodating and we worked with a staff member who is no longer there, George Oats, who looked forward and thought “this is the kind of model where not just the Library of Congress but other institutions could possibly add photographs.” And working with our office of general counsel,  as Helena referred to is a very collaborative project. Working with the office of copyright, the general counsel’s office, experts in prints and photographs and office of technology here, we approach them about different rights statement, which is the no known copyright restrictions statement, which allowed us to place our photographs and some others which is an observation about what we know about the photographs and if you look at Flickr it links back to every institution about what that means about the collections that they’ve been loading on the photographs, but that’s what allowed us to move forward with Flickr.

Guin: I think that’s interesting because here you are armed with the federal government and you have things that need to be done a certain way in the interest of open access and you’re teaching these lessons to a social media company. But at the same time, you’re learning how to engage in social media. Helena can you describe that process a little more and how you actually started to engage with folks through Flickr.

Springer:  We aim to participate in Flickr as regular members — part of a community — not people bringing some great big gift or opportunity, not some special admiration session, that wasn’t a part of the goal. We really wanted to be one among many members of Flickr. But this single area of copyright was the main challenge we presented to Flickr because by in large the Flickr member is the photographer. They have a very different relationship to the photographs. We are caretakers to the collection. We’re not the creators. So we can’t say we’ll put this in the public domain or will use a particular Creative Commons type of license. So that was the one area, challenge, that we took to Flickr to say, we would like to participate, could you consider making a change. And you ask what’s it like to work with a social media company: The answer is fast, nimble, responsive, and they took our basic request for a regular account with a new rights statement and said; “hang on, what about if we open this to all kinds of institutions? Could this be a whole new category of user and participant.” And as long as the pictures are rights free as best as you can ascertain, then we can go forward. And now something more than 30 institutions from Australia, to London, to France, Canada — many people have brought tremendously strong photo collections to the table. That’s another piece of the answer, why Flickr. There are many photosharing sites. But it’s Flickr felt like a good fit to our traditional libraries and the conversations that would happen in the reading room would now happening in an online environment. It’s a very photo focused community. Yes, you can share your family pictures and such but people are thinking about the composition of the image, they’re having large discussions about how to frame and crop and mix and mash up the images, the absolute focus it’s not just a means of transferring or printing or viewing, but real conversation about the content of the pictures. That is how Flickr came to feel like a good fit for our collections.

Guin: And it really has become a model for government agencies working with web companies. Even though you’re best known for the Flickr project you actually engage in a lot of other different types of social media-type services, and I wondered Michelle if you’d be able to tell me a little bit about how those services work together in addition to the Flickr project to increase your interaction with the public.

Springer: The Library of Congress has a number of web 2.0 or social media accounts. There are two Twitter accounts that the library has, there are I believe four Facebook pages, we have three blogs that allow people to comment on the blog posts so user generated comment is available on LOC.gov in that way. In fact, the blog came first and we used the criteria we worked out for the blog to moderate the content on Flickr and that was actually another criteria, in reference to the previous question, that we could use to moderate the content that was placed on our account with a light hand but we did want to remove spam, personal attacks, some criteria like that so that we could maintain that safe account. Again it comes down to the business case, in Flickr we are definitely trying to engage the community and have them provide information back to us about the photographs. The library has an account on YouTube that’s strictly an awareness exercise so in that instance we have comments that are turned off. We’re not asking that the community tell us about those videos, we’re just placing them in a location where they are more findable and more discoverable, hopefully because the YouTube boxes are the number two search engine on the web so that provides us with an avenue to display our historical materials as well as some of the events that happen at the library where people are more likely to find it.

Famous 1936 Photo from the LOC Flickrstream: Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California (LOC)

Guin: You are obviously very engaged on the web at work, but I know there have to be issues with creating boundaries between your personal interaction and your very public social media face with the Library of Congress. Do you have personal accounts on social media?

Springer: I do, partially because my job relates to the policies connected to social media so I have to understand Twitter, Facebook, iTunes, all of these in order to advise the library and to look at the issues that we might have as an institution participating. But an institution participates very differently than a person participates. For example on Facebook I have a profile but the institution has a page. I decide that I will friend you if you want to be my friend in Facebook but a page is open to anyone, anyone can “like” the page, and we get no personal data back from anybody on that page. There are differences, but I think it’s important, just as we talked about one of the initial goals for the Flickr project was to get sort of get your feet wet for staff in web 2.0 and how to talk in that milieu — that people have some personal experience with that. When people approach us institutionally and say,” I’d like to have a twitter account”. We ask them for a business case but we also ask what’s your experience talking in this milieu, have you written a blog post for example or if you haven’t would you do a guest post on the LOC blog just to see and sort of become familiar with the way that people talk in these types of venues oppose to our type of institutional speak?

There’s no reason that, I personally feel, that people should have to intermingle those personal and professional accounts. Facebook, you have to use as an administrator of an official account you’re still using your personal profile as an administrator, but those from the outside looking in you would never see the connection of those accounts. We’ve tried to create a very bright line between personal information, personal accounts versus their professional accounts. So although the people behind the Library of Congress Twitter account have personal accounts, they are separate from the Library of Congress accounts. And that’s true on Facebook, that’s true on Flickr. When staff respond to the commenters, Helena at LOC, Michelle at LOC, those are separate accounts than their personal accounts

Guin: Now this is very interesting to me because you talk about that “bright line,” yet so much of what goes into social media success depends on voice and authenticity. How do you make that happen if you’re trying to keep the personalities of the individuals out of the official social media channels.

Springer: When we launch institutional accounts, when there’s going to be a new Twitter account for example, it’s going be a Twitter account that is related to work, related to some business activity at the Library of Congress. We would have a class with the Office of Communications here, the office of general council, myself and others who would talk about experience that they’ve had so far and talk about the voice issue. A blog post is a different voice than the Twitter voice which is a branded account. Twitter tends to be we, while a blog is first-person voice, and what does that mean? We have three blogs present, pretty soon we’ll have some more that are in the works. For example, Jennifer Harbster and Donna Scanlon, who do the Inside Adams blog, may very well have personal blogs, personal accounts, Facebook accounts, whatever, but they don’t intermingle those two. They speak with an authentic first-person voice with the blogs posts they post but they don’t reference their personal accounts. That point gets back to the business case of why they’re doing the library accounts. It has to do with business, but that doesn’t mean they don’t bring their personal viewpoint or personal flavor.

One of the difficulties is with these social media accounts they give you system administrative access to the entire account. They’re not built as institutional accounts, they’re built for a person so it’s a little bit tricky to divide responsibilities with them in account. In Flickr, we have someone from our information technology office for example who load the photographs.  That’s a completely different activity from prints and photographs who modify the content and respond to the comments. For password security and general accounts security, we didn’t want everyone into the account in all aspects to the account who might be less familiar with some parts of the account so we’ve undertaken ways and business processes to try to limit access to the master account but still be able to respond back. This also adds a little bit of personal flavor so that the people from prints and photographs that are responding to the comments for example respond from “Christi@PNP” but it has the brand mark of the Library of Congress and they’re talking about Library of Congress information. They aren’t linking back to personal accounts if they even have them. They’re speaking in a professional role and it’s that sort of delineation trying to limit access to the master account. It was a little bit better for password access and the security of the account access and for personalized voice to create those other accounts for the staff and have them talk back from their own account.

From the LOC Collection: This girl in a glass house is putting finishing touches on the bombardier nose section of a B-17F navy bomber, Long Beach, Calif. She's one of many capable women workers in the Douglas Aircraft Company plant. Better known as the "Flying Fortress," the B-1

Guin: At this point I think that I should step back and acknowledge that the Library of Congress has a much larger role in the world than just this Flickr project and its social media engagement. As part of the U.S. government you really are seen as the global leader in archiving heritage. Helena what do you feel has been the impact of what the Library of Congress has been able to accomplish with that goal in general and also communicating that on the web.

Zinkham: It’s good to hear that the leadership role in visible and it’s a leadership role in two areas of course. There’s very large digital preservation programs and also lots of advice for preserving originals, photo negatives, prints, posters, books, magazines, movies. We’re dedicated to helping information resources last as long as possible while also making them accessible. When it comes to Flickr, our project is primarily about outreach and access so it helps to raise awareness and appreciation as well for the past. Based the comments that flow in still every day, many people are tripping across the pictures unexpectedly and discovering how much they enjoy that window into years long ago. We’ve loaded two collections: a set of news photographs from the 1910’s, so a century mark into the past. A very large set of color photos from the Great Depression, World War II so about 75 years ago and then a large block of color travel views. We’ll also dip into treasure views which usually are between 50 and 100 years ago. People bring to the table their own passion for the sport of polo, golfing or baseball. They love to talk about what their grandparents were doing, or their memories as a child that comes from more the octogenarians, who we can tell from the comments, people will often say things like “I printed this picture, I took it to my grandfather, and he says yes, that’s such and such building, that’s how they really flew those airplanes.” So we don’t have just awareness but a deep appreciation and affection for history and hopefully that begins to rub off on or will inspire questions. It hasn’t yet but I hope it will. How do I take care of my own pictures or how do I help my historical organization do a better job? I think the Flickr role is more built for goodwill and make it more immediately clear why the past is important to the present: because it’s interesting because it makes you think, because it helps you look twice, but it also helps you see the lessons we never quite learned. Whether it’s about war or racism or employment and labor practices, treatment of land and so the idea that 50 or 100 years ago and we’re still struggling trying to figure out fires and floods and so forth. That seems to cause people think twice about their own lives in the present.

Guin: Ok, well going back to how that concept fits into the Flickr project, I’m wondering how you engage your audience around the content and encourage the ongoing discussion that allows them to make those discoveries. I’m thinking in terms of when you post a photo, how you title it, how you describe it, tag it, those types of things.

Zinkham: Because you can interact with the pictures, you can say what you think about them instead of the traditional perhaps “museum” experience, where there a lot of the Do Not Touch labels. Going out into the social media environment is the completely the opposite. It comes with a big please do touch me, please use me and in whatever creative way you can cook up. So all so all those share buttons, blog about this, add notes, add comments, add tags,  repurpose, mix up and mesh…

Springer:  And Flickr help set that stage for that too. They helped us describe our photographs and the message of the Commons was very much to provide value. And one of the questions we had was would people provide altruistically information about these photographs. In traditional model tagging, you tag something so that you can find it later. Would people be interested in tagging something so that other people could find it and I think that we’ve answered that question so that was another part of the mix too.

Guin: Ok, so what’s your goal for this crowdsourced content? Is there any type of information in particular that you are looking for when you post something? What do you need from your audience?

Zinkham: There’s the general message of the Commons: please help us describe and make the pictures more findable. And then we’ve set back and let people interact however they please. So we have that general request for help. But I’m just amazed over and over again by what people think to do on their own, whether its bringing geotagging with latitude-longitude coordinates into the tag pools. The group requests, houses with porches, Canadian grain silos, pictures with blue, pictures with white, all about whales, vintage England, vintage kitchen utensils. There’s an enormous world of special interest activity, which we did not anticipate, but with every group request the pictures are channeled into other photo streams and  new users come and look and you can almost feel the loops back through the special interest groups.

We did post one set of pictures where we had no idea of the places and within 48 hours, all 30 pictures had been identified. They were in some areas of Switzerland and France. We got teased about one of the pictures because it showed the Paris Opera House, which is the model for the Great Hall right here at the Jefferson building and all I could say in our defense was that we were working with 6,000 pictures this one didn’t have a caption and we just didn’t look quite long enough in order to make the connection. So there’ve been some embarrassing moments too. There are fourteen million pictures here, there is more than 30 people to work with them but that’s 30 people and 14 million pictures here, the ratio just isn’t going to work out. And so we’ve chosen consciously to digitize all 6,000 color travel views put them online. They were here for almost a decade and not one of those 30 pictures had accrued a “I know where that is” reaction, and yet when we put that set into Flickr, how primed people were to help. The guys from Switzerland passed the news around really fast and they debated with each other, “is it this bridge in France?” On their own, they know they need to say why they believe something to be true. That is one of the most impressive things that has happened. It’s not a rule, it’s not control, just good old-fashioned commonsense. They’re going to want to know and other people are going to want to know.  So they will send us pictures from other libraries: “see that’s the same bridge over here in the photo from the French library is captioned.” Those are things we could have found but that would have taken hours and we don’t have that much staff time available.

And that’s a great point for the “then and now” pictures. The Flickr members have been grand. They will take a picture and go and find the spot and then photograph it and send it as a comment. The comments don’t have to be just words, they can be pictures and these then and now pairings help to see how did that building turn out today — has it been torn down, is it a landmark, has it been converted to condominiums — they’ll send the street addresses. That willingness to hunt and understand an area, it’s a lot of fun actually.

Springer: This is probably a good place to talk about in the prints and photographs catalog on the libraries website, we have added after some time we realized there was all these great reminiscences and personal history, that we wouldn’t really have incorporate that into LOC.gov but still has a lot of value so we now provide the Flickr url and additional information may be available in the record of the photograph as it appears on LOC. So you can go out to Flickr and see that thread of reminiscences. We have incorporated a lot of data for names, for surnames, descriptions. Some of this historical information stays on Flickr and so there’s a two way combination of interaction between those.

Guin: Well here’s an important concept to explore then because you have the data that you maintain on your own, the data you find and put into these photos, but you also through crowd sourcing have a lot more content coming in, some of it useful, some of it not. How do you sort through that and get it back into the Library of Congresses database for the original photos?

Zinkham: We do it by hand. There’s a crew of about 10 people in the prints and photographs division so that’s almost 25 percent of our staff and we take turns. It’s a real mix of people by the way — reference librarians, catalogers, digital library specialists. They adopt the Flickr account for one week and scroll through all the comments that come over the door sill. So if it’s fan mail, that’s great. We don’t always need to respond. Sometimes there’ll be a particular question asked to us. They might see a question and step in to say if you’re interested in that kind of subject we also have additional materials so you can be proactive about pointing people to in depth resources. But for folks who are saying it’s a different street, a different name, a different date going beyond the telling of a story and “now” pairing of a photo. They take the information and the Flickr community almost always provides a link that makes it easier for you to verify. So if a descendent of Jay Gould says “that’s not my grandfather, that’s my great uncle and here’s how I know,” we can follow that link and in this case it wasn’t a particular physical portrait it was more the birth and death dates in the obituary and the guessing of the age of the man in the scene. So we also then checked on our own portrait file to see how many Jay Gould’s we have and sure enough the name on the glass negative on the news photos had gotten mixed up. We straightened it out and credit the Flickr community as the source for the new information. It’s a sifting through, finding the changes that will make a substance of difference in the basic identification of the image, and then we spend some time verifying. We’ll go in by hand and edit our records.

Guin: Well now I’m even more impressed because I assumed there is some level of automation there, I didn’t realize that there was a staff member from the Library of Congress going back and reviewing all of those changes for  the inclusion of that information back in the database. Moving on a bit, I wonder if you have any tips for people or organizations on how they could use your Flickr media on their own websites, or their social outlets and can you give me some examples of some creative uses of these photos that are out there.

Zinkham: We have plenty of examples of special interest groups or blogs, newspapers, podcasts, webcasts coming across the Flickr pictures, whether they came across them in a basic Google search or were inside of Flickr themselves. They might be writing about paper recycling. So they’ll dip in for a World War II photo about their recycling efforts during the war and the past used to illustrate the importance of continuing the efforts for today. So that published illustration use seems to be going on strong. We’ve talked sometimes within the Commons that sometimes institutions have portions of collections, so I would imagine for example with the Civil War in the United States, many of us would probably load our holdings and then there might begin to be more overlap. The Smithsonian and the Library of Congress partnered up for Western survey exploration photos from the 1870’s to 1880’s We’ve had an across-the-Commons effort for international women’s day, for what we call in the United States, Veterans day, Remembrance day. So there have been some efforts to collaborate in that way. But I guess the bottom line message would be if someone anyone finds any of the pictures useful then please, go ahead and use them.

Guin: Well continuing on that line of thought I’m wondering if you have any people or heritage organizations that are planning to use photo sharing as part of their own social media strategy.

Zinkham: The very first thing is to be clear about the reason for participating. Is it to build awareness, gather good will, to collect information, to acquire new pictures for your collection? There can be so many different purposes. It gets confusing and it can be counterproductive. It takes the prints and photographs division anywhere between 8 and 15 hours every week to moderate the count updates of records. When we look at the institutional-wide investments, including everything from policy decision making time to actually loading the photos in the technology area it floats between 10 and 20 hours a week. That’s a way of saying it’s a serious level of investment and you don’t want to just put the pictures out there and let them sit. It’s a garden to tend; you need to water it for it to flourish. The point is to interact. Awareness is good but sometimes you need to be ready to have special themes  or a challenge to send in photos. The Flickr bloggers do that beautifully. Challenge people to find pictures related to a particular theme and then react to them.  Not as difficult as a homework assignment but not as frivolous as find me every hat with a feather. Just being prepared to step in and encourage the engagement. That’s a part of being a real person not being some big imposing institution. You’re not there to control it but you’re there to participate. It’s not a lot of rules about don’t say this, don’t do that. It’s open to everyone’s creativity to bring to the table and then sometimes you want to be ready to stir the pot.

Guin: Helena I think you touch on an important reason why so many people have responded so favorably to this project. We don’t usually associate government with the concepts of either listening or stirring the pot. Michelle what do you have to say about that?

Springer: There is a lot more movement in the government towards the open data movement — to make information sharable, to make it portable. So I think it’s continuing. We happen to be at the beginning of the bell curve on this but I’ll just add a few more things to what culture heritage institutions should look at: Talk to your lawyer, that’s one of the first parts. Look at the terms of service. Sometimes its easy for institutions and people on personal accounts click through that user agreement and say yes I’ll create that account but often you don’t really read it and you don’t really notice the policies. If you’re doing this on behalf of an institution you’re going to have to look at those terms of service with different eyes than you do as an individual. Also be aware of the rights statement, the default all rights reserved. Is that appropriate for the content you’re placing? Some institutions place current photographs of events that took place at their institution. That’s a totally different model than historical photographs from their collections.

Look at what it is that you are trying to do. The resources that Helena talked about, part of the message about that is that’s a measure of engagement. A lot of time is spent because people are so engaged with our photographs. You can really look like that as a measure of success, not just as a resource requirement because if people weren’t engaging and sending us information and we didn’t have new content all the time that we didn’t have to moderate then our resource requirements would go down in the time. It won’t be that level for everyone because of that level of engagement is very high for the Library of Congress account. One of the things that feeds that is the fact that so many Flickr members (I think it’s over 17 thousand now) have made us a contact. So every time we load new photos, it automatically loads in their personal accounts and say “oh, I should come back to the Library of Congress and see those new photographs. It’s kind of self perpetuating. You want people to make you a contact so we have these other ways of sort of getting the word out when we load new content. But because the Library of Congress has the most photographs of any participating institution in Flickr, we have a lot of photographs embedded in Flickr throughout various groups and whatnot. People come across them serendipitously not just by coming to the Library of Congress account, and that leads them back and they discover more. That’s kind of that trial.

Guin: That’s the social medium trail of breadcrumbs. So what are the lessons to be learned from this project?

Springer: We learned by doing. We started out not sure about groups. What’s the time investment if we agree to groups requests and what does that mean to accept a group. Once we became more comfortable and understood what that meant, we accept group requests now for public groups, safe groups. You don’t have to have absolutely everything thought-out in the beginning when you start. I think we certainly learned by doing. One of the things is we do a lot of presentations about this project, and at the end of the presentation we often have a benefits and challenges list. One of the challenges is the comfort of releasing the photographs into the wild as it were. In Flickr, if you allow tagging in your photographs you have to allow notes. Notes are annotations that are actually made on the photo. There are differing levels of comfort about that. It can sometimes be wonderfully beneficial when you have tiny little text, someone will point out in a large crowd scene, “there’s President Taft,” or when you have cars going down the street and someone will transcribe all of those signs on the street corner and all of the signs that are on the placards. You may also attract snarky humor and some people are not comfortable with that. You don’t have that ability to turn that functionality off without turning off tagging and tagging is a really important part of this project for us, at least for our model. Also another thing we didn’t quite mention is that all of that extra metadata that the users are adding: that adds weight in all of the search engines. The same photograph on Flickr will come up higher in the search results than it will come up on the Library of Congresses version of the photograph–sometimes by several pages. We encourage all of that metadata and the comfort of that caution level, being aware that that is going to occur. When you’ve said yes to one thing you’ve said yes to another. We pretty much have our settings as open as they can be. You can blog about, you can print out, you can make copies, you can do all of these various things on our account. But not everyone and every institution will be comfortable with those settings, and you’re not required. You have to think about that as you kind of evaluate what you want to do.

Guin: Michelle and Helena, I appreciate you doing the podcast. Amazing stuff, it was good talking to you.

That was Michelle Springer and Helena Zinkham. If you’d like to learn more about their efforts involving social media and the Flickr project at the Library of Congress you can learn more about it at our show notes site. That’s voicesofthepast.org. There you’ll find a transcript of this interview and several others we’ve done with folks in the heritage field using social media to make a difference in their worlds. That’s it for this edition of the Voices of the Past podcast. Until next time, we’ll see you online.

Intro: And welcome to Voices of the Past. The podcast that helps you use the web to advocate for the preservation of cultural heritage. I’m Jeff Guin and today we’re going to join Bethany Frank as she interviews Jennifer Souers Chevraux of the blog MuseoBlogger. Now Jennifer helps museums and cultural organizations engage their audiences by developing compelling experiences and using new media to cultivate a new generation of patrons. Here’s that interview.

Frank: Hey Jennifer, thanks so much for joining us for the podcast.

Chevraux: Hi, glad to be here.

Frank: So, to go ahead and get started. How did you get involved with museums?

Chevraux: When I was in undergrad, I volunteered at a couple of museums because I was an art history and anthropology major, so it made sense to go to both of those museums. And that was the only access I had to artifacts and original artwork. So I volunteered there, and I thought that it may be something that I would want to do. And then my first job out of college, I worked for a traveling museum on a train. It’s called the Art Train, still in existence, and I worked with them. And being on the train and working there wasn’t exactly your typical museum experience. So then I thought maybe it wasn’t what I wanted to do. But I tried archeology, that’s what I went to graduate school in. And then I tried teaching, which I did like, but I kind of wanted everyday to be a little bit different. And so I went back to museum work. Kind of went through the back door deciding that this was a good way for me to work in a place where I got a little bit of education, a little bit of working with artifacts, a little bit of outreach and talking with the public and volunteer training. I got all of that, and everybody thought my job was really cool.

Frank: Wonderful. So could you go ahead and tell us some about Illumine Creative Solutions?

Chevraux: Illumine Creative Solutions, that is my consulting business that I have. What happened is, I was on staff at several different museums. At the time that I founded Illumine Creative Solutions, I was on staff as the director of exhibits at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and I was pregnant with my first baby. And I was working about, I would say, averaging 50 hours a week, sometimes 60 hours a week. And realized that I didn’t really think that was going to jive so well with motherhood. So it came to pass that I had the opportunity to help another smaller museum here in Cleveland with a project they were doing while I was still on staff with the Natural History Museum. And it was really a great opportunity to come into a place that didn’t really have an exhibit instructor. They needed some new ideas and a fresh approach, and so they reached out to a colleague of mine who said, “You should talk to Jennifer.” And I was doing this project, and it really seemed that I could balance that with my job that I already had with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and so I thought that maybe I could balance some consulting work with being a mom too. And pretty soon, people started calling me. My phone was ringing for other projects saying, “Well now that you don’t work at the Natural History Museum, can you help us with this project? Would you have time to do this?” And so it kind of blossomed that way. So now, i do for museums what I used to do on staff. I do on a project basis.

Frank: You mentioned that you got into museums because you wanted each day to be different. So what all would a general week pertain for what you do?

Chevraux: I generally work about three days a week. I dedicate two days to my kids and going to museums and orchestra performances and fun things they want to do. Spending time being a museum consumer, and a consumer of cultural events and organizations and living history places. Because they love that, and that gives me the opportunity to see it from the visitors perspective. And then the other days, I am working on projects. Some of what I do is helping museums engage audiences, and I do some visitor evaluation and project/program evaluation. I’ve helped some nonprofit clients, who are not museums with grant support because they don’t have as large of a staff. Often they are only two people, and they get snowed under. And so I help them put together surveys and assessments and help them show that the programs that they are doing are reaching people in a meaningful way. And meeting their missions. And I do that with museums too. And so any given week, I could be putting together an exhibition working on developing a traveling exhibition program, which I am doing right now with a museum. I am working with an artist to put together a traveling retrospective exhibit of his work that’s going to go to museums. So I am reaching out to some of my museum clients and colleagues to see if we can form good partnerships for that. It’s very diverse, and it makes me feel like I still get to contribute to the field that means so much to me. And  I get to also balance that with enjoying museums and historical centers with my kids.

Frank: So, what role does your blog play with all of this?

Jennifer Chevraux and daughter

Chevraux: I started my blog not really knowing where it was going to lead. Once my daughter was born, I realized I wouldn’t do nearly as much writing as I did as director of exhibits, when I was putting together exhibits and having to write text and interpretive panels. And I wanted to keep my skills sharp, so I started a personal blog. And then I realized quickly that I didn’t have enough that I thought anybody would want to say. And about a year later, I thought, “Now I really want a place to say things that normally, on staff, I would say to colleagues.” Conversations we would have. Discussions we would have. Things that I would encounter with my work with clients. Things that would come up and I would have something that I wanted to say about that, but instead of coming home or coming back to an office with a museum where I had lots of colleagues were we could talk about that, I would come to my house and nobody really wanted to talk about my day job. So I needed a place that even when nobody was listening, I could pour out my perspective on certain issues that came up. So I started my job to sort of give me a place to not vent, but share. Because I had all these things in my head, and I no longer had a director of exhibits or director of education or a marketing director, where I could go in a say, “What do you think about this?” And the MuseoBlogger site that I have, gives me that opportunity. And then I realized that it didn’t take long before a lot of my clients and my former colleagues and people that I knew through the Ohio Museum Association were following me, and then I would get these emails from them saying, “Oh, I really liked your perspective about this, I really liked what you had to say.” And it was funny to me because I didn’t realize that they were reading it. It’s definitely allowed me to make new connections that I never would have expected.

Frank: What all goes into creating your blog?

Chevraux: My blog is not museum specific, I would say, although most of what I put in there has to do with museum work. Some of it has to do with just cultural organizations and the challenges that they face today. The world changes so quickly that I think sometimes museums have that institutional glacier effect, where we hear about something that we want to change…orchestras, operas, all those organizations, they are very traditional. And they have traditional boards and traditional constituencies, and so when all of a sudden something like Twitter comes along, “Ooo! Twitter! Ooo! What’s that? Let’s get on that!” And they don’t know who in their organization is going to be that person. Or “Oh! There is all this social media, we should have marketing do it!” And marketing says, “But we’re already doing so much. We don’t really have time for anything.” But I think my blog gave me an opportunity to say from the outside, some observations I thought would help them keep in touch with the average person. Because sometimes, I think, they are looking at a constituency that’s no longer average.

Frank: And so, in your blog you discuss the future of museums. Can you explain to me where you see museums going in the next so many years?

Chevraux: That’s a tough question because I think there’s the place that I would like to see them going, and then the place some of them are going to end up. I think museums are coming to a crossroads where they’ll have to decide who they are going to be in the future and is that who they’ve always been. I think some museums will dare to reinvent themselves the way they do their own business. in terms of the way they meet visitor expectations. They way they reach people. Maybe even the way that they staff museums. And then certainly the way that they find funding. I think some museums will resist the change and become more and more disconnect with their own communities. Because the community is changing. It is no longer just wealthy while industrialists who are looking for the Andrew Carnegie approach to funding a worthy adventure. We don’t have any of those people anymore. And when you look at what Bill Gates funds, he isn’t just making a museum anymore. He’s funding human rights projects or world health projects. And museums can’t be the ones who are missing out at the table. They need to look at their sustainability and find a way within their own communities to become sustainable. And I hope that that means they’re going to become more visitor focused. And it’s a delicate balance. When you have collections of historic artifacts, you have to be collections focused. You have an academic curatorial staff. You have to be focused on their needs and their important research. But all of that has to be balanced very carefully with what people in your community expect from you. What do they need from you. And if you are always answering that question the way that we answered it 20 to 25 years ago, pretty soon you become irrelevant to a large selection of your constituency.

Frank: How do you think social media plays into this and into museum’s futures?

Chevraux: I think social media is a wonderful way for little expense. I say that accepting that you probably need to have a staffer these days just dedicated to it. But I think it’s relatively inexpensive compared to traditional media for having constant access to your potential visitors and your museum members and funding base. It’s like having your own TV station in your museum. You might not be able to constantly broadcast a visual image, but you can continuously broadcast events, upcoming activities and programs. You can tell your audience and your community and even your funders, if you’re here (I’m in Cleveland), the Cleveland Foundation is on Twitter. If you put something up there and they’re following you, which they do for most of the museums and nonprofit organizations that they support. They want to know that you’re out there. They hear about the good work you’re doing. How wonderful is that? You didn’t have to put a stamp on anything. They get it right away, and I think you’re constantly in touch. Now, they might not be watching at the very moment that you post that, and that happens. People turn off their TV too. But I think, in a general sense, it gives you a constant access to those people who could potentially be your visitors and patrons.

Frank: Speaking of patrons, in what ways do you use new media to cultivate the next generation of enthusiastic patrons?

Chevraux: The web has become the go-to resource for so many people in today’s culture that it’s a first stop for people. They no longer check their mail to see if they got a recent museum publication. They’re not looking for the museum magazine or the latest newsletter in their mail. If they want to know what’s going on with the museum, they click on the museum’s website and hope that there’s an updated calendar. This is a little note to all museums: make sure your calendar is up to date. Because that is where people go. And I think that today, helping museums understand their visitors behavior and propensities just by looking at their own. I was talking to a museum colleague a few weeks ago who works at a small decorative arts museum at an historic home, and we were talking about how we tend to go to Wikipedia. And sometimes that’s a bad thing because we go there first, and we take that information and we don’t want to internalize it too much. And how we were looking for an answer about when something was coming, and the first thing we went to was that particular website. And then she said, “You know, this makes me think that I need to make sure that our calendar is up to date.” And that’s one of those things, sometimes, that I think there’s a disconnect: between the way people use the web themselves and the way their websites for their museums or their cultural organizations are kept. If yours wouldn’t make sense to you or you were frustrated because it wasn’t up to date or it didn’t have enough content on it, then maybe you need to take a hard look at who else is using it. And maybe you need to make sure that it is giving you lots of good content, and that it is completely fresh.

Frank: You mentioned in your Lent post different things museums could do with their exhibits to make themselves become more relevant. What kind of things can they do?

Chevraux: I like to go to a museum and wander through the exhibits and feel like I’m not being bombarded by information all the time. It’s like a nice space where you feel comfortable and you can learn at your own pace. At the same time, if they’re doing a good job in an exhibition of getting your creative juices flowing or getting you to think about a particular topic. It also then seems logical to have someplace in the exhibition where you can tap into those creative juices or that stimulation you’ve created with your visitors. And allow them to share that. So, whether it’s just a suggestion box in the end or it’s something that’s using media or it’s encouraging them to tweet about what they’ve learned. Just giving visitors a way to feel that their impressions of the exhibition are relevant and important to the institution. People today have become very focused on themselves. Not in a negative way, but they want to know, “What does this mean to me? This Mastodon is very fascinating, but why should I care about it?” The exhibition needs to at first relate that somehow to the person’s own experience. Perhaps we talk about climate change and extinction, and relate that back to something that a person cares about in today’s world. Once you’ve made that connection, perhaps it would be nice to maybe share that meaning that you’ve created for them in a way back to the institution. Nina Simon does a great job in her recent book talking about how participatory experiences shouldn’t go just from the museum down to the individual, but the best experiences come back to the institution. And then they can even be shared with future visitors. That’s a wonderful way for the individual to feel important in a space where you are telling them that everything around them that belongs to the museum is important.

Frank: We can see in your blog ways that museums are engaging with new media and national events, like the Super Bowl and things like that. What other ways are people doing this and why is it beneficial?

Chevraux: I would say that anytime a museum takes itself a little bit less seriously and can share that with their communities, it’s never a bad thing. And I think that one of the things that we need to understand about today is that so few people go to work in a three-piece suit anymore. Ladies don’t wear gloves, men don’t wear hats, and a lot of these museums were built and their programs were built during times when people did all of those very formal things. And museums are slow to come around to the idea that we don’t have to be so buttoned up and look quite so self important to be important. And in fact, when you let your guard down a little bit, and you make a bet like the New Orleans Museum of Art did with the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which I think is what you are talking about, I put that on my blog. I thought it was wonderful. They tweeted about this and they got this wonderful bet going that they were going to basically two pieces of fine art were wagered, if you will, between these two institutions based on who would win the Super Bowl. All of a sudden it went viral, and everybody thought, “How fun is that?” And it’s art museum based. I mean, how many people who care so much about the NFL ever cared that much about those two fine arts institutions. Maybe a lot of them do, I love art museums myself, and I also happen to love NFL football, which maybe is why it struck me as so much fun. But I think that there were a lot of people on both sides of that coin who thought that was a really great way to show that they live in the same world as the rest of us. Here in Cleveland, the Cleveland Museum of Art is a very find institution with a remarkable collection, and when our Cleveland Cavaliers were in the NBA playoff, they put “Go Cavs” banners on the very front of their building where they usually have these beautiful banners that say, “free.” Because we are very lucky here that our institution is free and open to the public. But also, they took that opportunity to be a little less serious, and they took down those banners, and they put up these “Go Cavs” banners, huge banners, on the front of their building. Because I think that it gave them the opportunity to say to our community, “We live here too. We want them to win too.” And in fact the orchestra, which is very fine here, but of course plays to a very much higher brow crowd, they actually did a promotional web video for the Cavaliers as well. And it was great from my perspective to see that because it said, “We understand that not all of our people here in Cleveland are regular orchestra members. Some of them are just Cavs fans. Some of them love the Browns. And we live here too.”

Frank: So as you’ve said before, you have a presence on Facebook and Twitter. Where else are you, and why did you chose to use those mediums?

Chevraux: I have a Facebook page for my business, Illumine Creative Solutions. Although I will say I don’t have a whole lot of really exciting content on it. And that’s my fault just because I’ve gotten busy with just the blog and other things. And usually what I do is I use it as one more venue to post what I recently put up on my blog. So, and every now and then I update it saying what I’m up to. But it’s nice because that let’s people that I know outside of my professional circle know what I’m doing in my work because they think that working for a museum must be the most fascinating thing. And I also have, of course I use LinkedIn, and I think most people do these days, which is great. At the very beginning when I had a LinkedIn account, I had no idea what I would use it for. But now I use it a lot. So it’s linked to my Twitter, so when I put something on there that I am working on professionally, it shows up on my Twitter account. And then I also, I have to admit, am a newbie on FourSquare. I have FourSquare, and I sometimes check in, but I have to say, a lot of times I forget. I’ve gone to a cool place, and I realize, “Oh! I’m in the parking lot. Oh! I should have checked in while I was at the art museum. Or I should have checked in when I was at the Cleveland Clinic doing something. Or Oh Man! I was just in a really cool place that does FourSquare, and I should have clicked.” So I have yet to really make that a part of my presence if you will. And as I said, I have website, and it’s just about to be redone and relaunched, and it will be up in the next couple of weeks.

Frank: What is FourSquare?

Chevraux: FourSquare is kind of Twitter meets your GPS. When you go somewhere, you have the application on your phone, and you click on it and you tell your followers and friends where you are. So if I go to Chipotle for a burrito, I can “check in.” And it says, “I’m here, and if anybody else in my circle is around and wants to have lunch, I’m here.” And it also keeps track of where you’ve gone. And so it sort of makes that human connection between Twitter, which is “let’s communicate with all these people out in cyberspace” to now “They are in our building, let’s engage them in a meaningful way.” You know that they are there because they’ve just checked in. And people can get badges and even become the mayor of the place. So for example, because I used to work at the Natural History Museum, I go there a lot with my kids. I enjoy it so much. And I could probably be the mayor of the Natural History Museum just if I checked in every time I went there. The person that checks in the most would get to become the mayor until someone else checked in more than they did. But I would certainly earn my badge. If museums or other heritage sites that are looking at this haven’t checked out FourSquare yet, I would say check it out. Because it is sort of that step between having people know you in the virtual world and bringing them into your world on site, which is what all of us are hoping social media will do for our organizations.

Frank: So what is your advice for folks wanting to get involved with new media to promote their heritage organization or communicate their own personal heritage ideas?

Chevraux: I have a couple of things. I would say, one of the easiest things to do if they haven’t yet done the Facebook page or if their Facebook page is lacking, is to just do that because I think that that’s the largest low-hanging fruit audience out there. People will “like” you virtually just to add you to their circle. Just because they want to see your updates. And then all of a sudden you’re getting all of these people who never really knew what you were about or just, “Oh! I went to that place. That living history site when I was in fourth grade. I haven’t been there since.” Click on them. Like them. Now they get all sorts of interesting information about what your organization does today, which we are all hoping is a lot different than somebody who’s 25 was in fourth grade. And that’s an easy one. I think the more that institutions do this, the more that they see the potential and the more that they may realize that they have to have someone in charge of maintaining it. Because I think that the best people I follow put up really great content. And for example, one of my favorites that I am happy to plug, is the Sue the T-Rex at the Field Museum. Now maybe people wouldn’t know that Sue the T-Rex tweets. But not only Sue tweet, but in the most incredible way. It’s funny. It’s new content. It meet their mission because it’s talking about paleontology and interesting dinosaur behavior. But it’s also smart and savvy and funny, and somebody, I’m sure, at the Field Museum is in charge of keeping it so. So if you want to be really good at it, you probably have to have somebody who’s dedicated to it. The other thing that I would say, is that if you’re a small organization, and you’re willing to let your guard down a little bit, you could always share it. You could make Twitter five different people’s responsibility, and you could get five different people’s input. And that’s fine. That’s a good way to start. But if you’re willing to let your director tweet, I think it’s awesome. Because I think that’s something that people really care about. The leader of an institution is somebody that’s usually respected and revered, and when they can share some of the insight about leading an organization or things that they find meaningful. For example, Max Anderson at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, he tweets. There are many directors that do. But it is great to know that that person who has a lot of professional experience and cache is sharing that not only to his colleagues, but also the museum consumers at large. I think it’s great.

Frank: Well Jennifer, it’s been so much fun talking with you today. Thank you so much!

Chevraux: Thank you so much for having me! It has really been an honor to be included in your webcast series. Thank you.

Outro: Now you can learn more about Jennifer and MuseoBlogger or Illumine Creative Solutions at our shownotes site. That’s Voices of the Past dot O-R-G. There you will find a transcript of this interview plus several others that we’ve done with other folks in the field of cultural heritage who are using social media to make a difference in their world. That’s it for this edition of the Voices of the Past podcast. And until next time, I’m Jeff Guin, and we’ll see you online.

Intro: Coming up on the Voices of the Past Podcast, we’ll meet a blogger who’s painting the preservation world in pink.

And welcome to Voices of the Past, the podcast that connects you to the world of heritage online. I’m Jeff Guin, and today I’m talking to Kaitlin O’Shea of the blog Preservation in Pink. Kaitlin uses a combination of collaborative blogging and printable media to reach her audience.

And Kaitlin, thanks for being here, and I wonder if you would just start by telling us, what is Preservation in Pink?

O’Shea: Well, it’s a long story. I am happy to share it. It was first a newsletter. When I graduated from Mary Washington in 2006, I went to work for a couple of years. And in the first six months, I realized just how much I missed my classmates and the comfort of the department, and the constant conversation that we would have anytime of the day. Whether we were in classes or studying or out drinking coffee or whatever. I suddenly had this one project that I loved. It was an oral history project. But it was only one thing. I didn’t have my buildings, I didn’t have my conversations. I was interviewing people and transcribing. And that was the extent of my day usually. So I decided that I need to do something. And I could have just read book after book, but when you get home from work, you are still kind of tired. So I have always loved to write and once upon a time, I had a dream of working with a preservation magazine. And I decided that maybe I could write about it. I have this one friend who had been blogging, but she just had a personal blog. And I thought, well, that is kind of interesting, but I didn’t start with a blog. So I decided to try a newsletter. I had four years of journalism experience in high school. I still remember all the lessons that I learned there. I did layout and editing and things like that. My very first issue, I think I only told one preservation friend about it. And she encouraged me. She’s like my preservation cheerleader. And I said, well, I am just going to write all the articles and show people what I can do. And then next time I will ask people to contribute. And she wrote one article, and I wrote six pages of stuff and sent it out to everybody I knew.

Also back in school, senior year, in one of my classes, we watched an anti-Walmart video about how Walmart came into Ashland, Virginia. And the people were fighting, and for whatever reason they chose the pink flamingo to be anti-Walmart. And the movie, it was just so heart-wrenching and by the end Ashland, Virginia lost and they got their Walmart. And my friends and I, we were distraught. We were heartbroken. Some of us were already not shopping at Walmart, and we decided we loved the pink flamingos. And so that kind of just picked up speed that last semester of school.

To fast forward again to the newsletter. This time, flamingos have just been out of control. We would send each other little flamingos and do little things like that. So I was tossing around the idea of including flamingos just for fun, and thought it was not that serious, but then I decided that it was going to be mine and I wanted it to be fun and not just “preservation.” Somehow I came up with Preservation in Pink, and it just kind of went from there.

Guin: Excellent. I think sometimes when people think preservation and they think preservationists, they think strident… obstructionists… just talking about average, everyday people. And this seems to be a reputation that has developed overtime, justified or not, but looking at your blog and even the beginnings of it, you’ve got some elements in there where you have a very strong preservation ethic, but it’s presented so well and so subtly that it has a different tone to it. Is that something that was intentional on your part?

O’Shea: I started Preservation in Pink with the mission of teaching people and showing them that preservation is not just academic, it’s not just professional, it really applies to every part of everyone’s life. Because it’s not just buildings, it’s not just battlefields. It’s quality of life, it is pride where you live, it’s heritage, it’s knowing where you came from and where you want to go in respect to the past. And all these things together, whether it is shopping locally or respecting the environment, it’s really important and if we do all that then we will all live in a better place.

And that is a lot to take in all at once, so I try to insert it here and there where it is talking about local shopping or this fun preservation activity, I mean really. I can connect anything to preservation, just give me a few minutes.

Guin: Well, how do you define historic preservation? What’s your personal definition?

O'Shea visits one of her favorite places: the architectural salvage shop

O’Shea: It means a lot of things to different people. For me, preservation is collectively looking toward the future with respect for the past. It’s understanding communities, the way of life, your built environment, your heritage values, in the sense that we need to remember the past in order to create a brighter future. That’s the basis of my definition. But the methods of doing that are all the facets of historic preservation, which to me is this huge umbrella term. But it involves architecture history, research, community and preservation maintenance, folklore, museum studies, economics, archeology..the list is never ending. For historic preservation, it provides us the opportunity to shape and direct a world in which people are proud of where they live even though people may be proud of different areas for different reasons. We have to respect cultures and areas and regions. When people have tried in what they and where they live and where they came from, then every action they do in a place matters. And that’s how we can create a better place and that’s how I believe historic preservation has the ability to save the world.

Guin: I guess in that same thing, taking that a step further, looking at your blog, you have a lot of things that are strictly historic preservation or strictly heritage values, but then you sometimes go into some things that are a little peripheral there. And you mentioned Walmart earlier, and actually one of your most popular posts is about Walmart. Can you talk about that?

O’Shea: Sure. That post–Save Money, Live Better–I wrote because the campaign just bugs me, and I won’t go into that. I think that one is one of the most popular because people are Googling “Walmart” or “save money, live better,” and for whatever reason, Preservation in Pink just pops up. So that remains one of the most popular posts every single day. We can get 100 views in one day, just that one.

Guin: Looking at your popular posts, and what people seem to respond to, what seems to make up a good blog post?

O’Shea: I guess I would categorize a good blog post in a few different ways. One is obviously a popular one. One like Save Money, Live Better. If that is getting a lot of people to visit Preservation in Pink, and maybe see the blog and are looking for something preservation related, and not just Walmart related, then that’s great. That helped increase the visibility.

But I guess a good blog post, from my perspective, is one that is well thought out and meaningful, and brings people to historic preservation maybe in a way that they didn’t know before. There is just some little anecdote I told that they became more interested in it. Maybe the story was interesting that day or maybe one of the guest bloggers wrote something fun, maybe broadening their horizons, and hoping that they will come back.

Sometimes I say that a good blog post is one that my sister, who is a freshman in college, will comment on. Because she is just starting to understand what I talk about and what I do. And if she found it enjoyable, then I figured that a lot of people might have enjoyed the post that day.

Guin: Well, tell me bout your favorite blog post on Preservation in Pink. What’s the must read blog post on your site?

O’Shea: I have a few that are my favorite, a lot of them relate to my oral history project, kind of just days on the job. Because they mean a lot to me and to kind of share what I do and what I did as an oral historian, and remember a fun day of what it was like to be in oral history every single day.

One of my favorite to write is called, Why they don’t let me outside. And the title is inspired because most of the time I am inside. But once in a while, in my office we would just go outside. And that day I jumped and kind of twisted my ankle and it was still a really good day, but by the time I got home and sort of fainted from a swollen ankle. And it was a mess of a day. But after I fainted and woke back up, I was fine.

Guin: And you still have good memories of that day?

O’Shea: Yeah. So kind of posts like that. Another one is Oral History and Me: It is Complicated. Not love-hate, but sibling relationship with oral history. It’s so frustrating, but you love it no matter what.

And then I have some others that are more personal reflections. One is called Old Memories: The Evolution of My Favorite Place. And that’s about my grandmother’s town in New York. And I grew up playing on the beach, but now that I’m older, I don’t play as much, but I run on the beach. And I appreciate the place in a different way. And all of those I attribute to touching out on preservation values in a non academic way that I hope people enjoy.

Guin: The reason that we have these cultural resources is because of the people and the traditions handed down. In talking with those people you get a lot more insight and context about the cultural resources themselves. So I think that’s great. Well, you mentioned earlier your newsletter and your journalism experience, and design and layout. You’ve used that in the Preservation in Pink newsletter. Now not many bloggers do this. Why did you do this, and who is this newsletter targeted to?

O’Shea: Again, the newsletter was first and the blog came after. I needed a way to keep Preservation in Pink on the web for anyone who wanted to access it because I can’t afford to print it and mail it to everybody. And that is kind of silly since everything is on the web. So the blog, at first, was just two posts a year. I need articles for the newsletter, and then in 2008, I started putting on more posts every couple of months. And then toward the end, I really wanted people to read Preservation in Pink. I really needed this to go somewhere, and so I started making it a daily blog. And the newsletter and the blog are intended for the same audience. But it is a wide audience. It is anyone who is interested in preservation because it is what they do or because they don’t know much about it. And I try to gather articles from the wonderful contributors that seem to always be willing to add something. But everyone has different experiences, and for me to just share my own on the blog is not the same as having a newsletter. Having a newsletter kind of bring out more voices than my own, which I imagine people don’t want to read all the time.

Guin: Then let’s look at how your blog has developed over time because aside from having a newsletter, which is kind of rare for a blogger, you also have multiple contributors. And that’s not that rare for a blog. For a heritage blog it is fairly rare. How did that start?

O’Shea: Really, having a 5-day per week blog was kind of hard. And to come up with something that is hopefully interesting everyday. Right now it is three to four with grad school getting in the way. But I thought maybe I could be like other bloggers. I read a lot of different blogs: running blogs, wedding blogs, friends blogs. And a lot of people have guest bloggers. And I thought that would be a good way to draw in more readers/viewers. People could say, hey I wrote for this blog, go read it.

So the guest bloggers, I guess they started out kind of slowly. People I knew, my friends from college and fellow preservationists. And it was a nice break for me, and I figured it was a nice break for the readers. It was something different. It was something I couldn’t write about because I didn’t know much about it. And now I have a permanent posting up on Preservation in Pink asking for contributors and bloggers. Some people are more willing to contribute to the blog because it seems like less pressure. I mea, it is. I always feel like the blog is less serious than the newsletter. I mean, when I talk about cats and flamingos and whatever, it is a little more fun. And it is also more time-sensitive. So, one guest blogger, Brad Hatch, he has a ton of “preservacation” blogs, as he calls them, because he has a whole series that he wrote for me. And we posted them every couple of weeks or so. Whereas keeping all that for the newsletter would be a lot. And having a series in the newsletter that’s only twice a year is hard because that is asking readers to remember or go back six months ago and follow up from that first article. Whereas on the blog, I can link from post to post and readers can find it that way.  So I guess the newsletter developed the same way, there was not a lot of people at first and now there is many many people. For this next issue, I have even different contributors than usual. It’s really just helped to bring more of an audience. And more diversity.

Guin: Excellent. Well, you talked about being a grad student. I know that’s a lot of pressure. I want to hear about how you balanced being a grad student with doing such a rigorous blog schedule. Also, I am sure you are involved with other forms of online media or social networks as well. How do you balance all that?

O’Shea: I am just the type to do what I have to do. And it was a concern, maybe I wouldn’t have enough time. But I decided, no. It has come this far, it is still getting a lot of viewers. And I really enjoy it. It is kind of an outlet. So, if I don’t feel like writing my paper, maybe I can do something a little bit easier like writing a blog post. It also keeps me connected with everyone in my grad-school bubble. It’s the same of balancing anything else. I like to run a lot, I help out with the UVM track team. As far as other social networking, I have a few other blogs that are not like Preservation in Pink, they are just for fun or to keep track of running or something. Those I only do when I have the time.

Guin: Do you promote Preservation in Pink through any other networks? Do you do anything else other than consistent blogging to attract readership?

O’Shea: I do. I have a Preservation in Pink Facebook group page. And when I have a newsletter or I am asking for contributors, I pretty much email everyone who has ever met me. Any more former and current classmates have done a lot to help. They will share it with people they know. Send on the newsletter or send on the website. Last year I made business cards and postcards. So anyone who wrote for me, I send them a “thank you” with some business cards and also a Preservation in Pink magnet. Some people put it up at work so their coworkers saw the magnet and asked about the website. I try to make sure the tags and the categories are sometimes general and sometimes specific. So it could come up in photography, it could come up in preservation, and people could come across it that way. I have it on my resume. I like to share it with fellow preservationists.

Guin: Knowing that you are in graduate school right now, and knowing that you are going to have to get a job, does that affect what you blog or what you blog about?

O’Shea: It’s the same as when I started. I won’t write anything that I think is too judgmental or something that I would look back and go, “Oh geez, why did I write that?” I mean, my opinions might slightly change or my intellectual understanding of something might change, but I feel that what I put on Preservation in Pink is fit for anybody to read. And I am really honored when people way above me have read it.

Guin: Well the great thing about a blog is that if you do evolve intellectually or learn something new, you can always update the post or you can go and write another post and reference the old one. And it’s OK to show that you’ve learned something. And your readers learn along with you. So that’s great. Well, you mentioned early about using WordPress, and I use WordPress. I am active in the WordPress community. And you talked about tags and categories. And I don’t think that is something I have covered on Voices of the Past before. Can you tell me, in your opinion, what the different is between a tag and a category. And how you use those concepts to optimize your posts.

O’Shea: Well, this is just my understanding, and I might be slightly off. But from what I found, is tags are what people come across when they Google something and categories seem to be just within the site itself. I have a lot of tags because of all the posts, and I try to minimize the categories. So categories I use if someone is searching within Preservation in Pink itself. How can I find out your roadtrip posts. Whereas tags I look at as something people search on the web that could bring them to Preservation in Pink.

Guin: You said that you actually get inspiration from other blogs sometimes. What other blogs do you actively follow?

O’Shea: A new blog that you just did a feature on, My Own Time Machine by Sabra Smith. I think we are blog soulmates. Our blogs are similar, they are complimentary, they are a lot of fun. I love what she writes, so I have been following that since she started.

I follow Place Economics, which is not updated that much, but I like reading whatever he writes.

I follow Route 66 blog. Another WordPress blog. It is like the clearinghouse for Route 66 news.

Then I follow unrelated preservation blogs as well.

Guin: Obviously social media and blogging and all this stuff is growing. And a lot of heritage folks, although some have been slow in coming on board to using the social networks, that is going to change. And folks are getting on there wondering, what do they do to get started. Especially with blogging because that seems to be the heart of any social media effort. What advice do you have for those individuals or organizations getting involved in blogging for the first time?

O'Shea and the "flamingo girls."

O’Shea: I would say, if you have something that you love and you want to start a blog and write about it and talk about that subject, don’t start it expecting tons of readers and comments. Do it because you love it and keep doing it. I mean, Preservation in Pink isn’t the biggest blog out there by any means or even close to it, but the readership has grown immensely between this year and last year, and it is just consistency and I don’t really do it for anyone other than myself. I write for people who are interested in preservation, but I do it for myself too. So just keep at it and share your blog with anyone you know. I guess that’s my best advice for anyone.

Guin: OK, I want to take a step back a bit. What made you decide to use WordPress instead of any of the other blogging platforms that are out there?

O’Shea: Well, I love WordPress, let me just say that. I don’t really like Blogger for a professional looking blog. I think it is too simplistic and too kind of bubbly. You can’t create very many pages, and I don’t know much about creating your own template. Whereas WordPress had all these beautiful templates and you could change them all the time. And add all these Widgets, I think we call them. And those were really the only two I knew. I guess TypePad and so many others you have to pay for, or at least you used to. But anyone who is going to start a blog, I always recommend WordPress because it is just really easy and really fun.

Guin: Well, good. Kaitlin, thanks for being on Voices of the Past.

O’Shea: Thank you very much!

Outro: And that was Kaitlin O’Shea of blog and newsletter, Preservation in Pink.

Now, if you would like to learn more about Kaitlin and Preservation in Pink, that is at voicesofthepast.org. There you will find a transcript of this interview plus several others we have done with other folks in the heritage field using social media to make a difference in their world.

That’s all for this edition of Voices of the Past. Until next time, I’m Jeff Guin, and we’ll see you online.