In Nicholson, Pennsylvania, residents sought to rescue an 1849 railroad station and give it a new life as a community center. Josh Stull connects the threatened building with broader patterns of rural population loss, changing economies, and attachment to hometown identity. The project shows adaptive reuse at its most community-centered: preserving a historic structure not as a frozen artifact, but as potential civic infrastructure capable of serving the town again.
Category Archives: Public Knowledge & Culture
Work about access, shared knowledge, interpretation, institutions, communities, cultural meaning, and the systems through which knowledge becomes public.
Using Wikis for heritage collaboration and outreach
How collaborative wiki platforms can help heritage practitioners document knowledge, work together and expand public access to cultural information.
Heritage Scrapbooking: Online resources to save the memories of a lifetime
Heritage scrapbooking sits at the intersection of craft, family storytelling, and preservation. This resource guide introduces archival materials and practical sources for assembling photographs, documents, and family memories into objects intended to last. The deeper concern is familiar throughout Voices of the Past: preservation is not limited to museums and professionals. Families also make choices about what survives, what context accompanies it, and how personal memory is handed forward.
Voices TV: Featuring the Library of Congress’ Flickr Strategy
This Voices TV episode examines the Library of Congress’s pioneering use of Flickr to open historic photographic collections to public participation. Interviews with Michelle Springer and Helena Zinkham explore one of the earliest large-scale social-media experiments by a U.S. federal cultural institution and the possibilities created when collections move into spaces where audiences can discover, comment on, share, and contribute knowledge about them.
Gov 2.0 Presentation: Advancing Heritage Online
An early National Park Service case study in using social media, community participation and digital strategy to expand the reach of preservation knowledge and strengthen professional networks.
Video Netcast: Jennifer Souers Chevraux on making museums relevant in the digital age
Jennifer Souers Chevraux argues that museums can remain relevant by thinking beyond their buildings and cultivating meaningful relationships with audiences through both experience design and new media. This short video introduces her broader approach to engaging a new generation of patrons and reflects an early moment when museums were beginning to treat digital participation not simply as promotion but as part of the visitor relationship itself.
Social Networking for Family History
Genealogy Gems founder Lisa Louise Cooke traces her path from sharing a research discovery on a Family History Center bulletin board to building a podcast and online network reaching genealogists around the world. Her story illustrates how social tools changed genealogy from a largely individual research pursuit into a networked practice of exchanging methods, clues, discoveries, and encouragement. The technology changed the scale, but the underlying impulse remained the same: researchers helping one another find people.
Use online photosharing to visually tell the story of heritage resources
This practical introduction to Flickr treats photographs as more than illustrations: titles, captions, tags, groups, comments, and sharing can turn an image into an entry point for public interpretation. Written when online photo communities were rapidly expanding, the piece encourages heritage organizations to think about photography as networked storytelling. The larger lesson survives the platform itself: visual collections gain public value when they are contextualized, discoverable, and open to interaction.
The 3Cs of discussing heritage online: caring, context, curation
This essay proposes three principles for communicating heritage online: caring, context, and curation. Heritage begins with deciding that something matters, deepens through understanding the people and circumstances around it, and becomes useful when information is thoughtfully selected and connected for others. Against the speed and fragmentation of the social web, the piece argues for something slower and more durable: helping people locate themselves within stories that extend beyond their own immediate experience.
Exploring Archaeology on the Social Web
David Connolly and Maggie Struckmeier survey archaeology’s uneven adoption of social media, highlighting projects that use online networks for genuine participation rather than simple self-promotion. Their examples span communities, blogs, and collaborative platforms, but the central distinction is behavioral rather than technological: the strongest projects create interaction, usefulness, and shared identity. The piece captures archaeology learning that an online presence is not the same thing as an online community.