Digital strategy starts less with choosing technology than with getting clear about purpose, audiences, evidence, and actual institutional needs. Drawing on advice from practitioners across the cultural sector, this piece considers visual storytelling, CRM, testing, platforms, content, and the difference between what organizations want and what their audiences need. Together, the contributions make a larger argument: strategy is the discipline of connecting technology decisions to meaningful outcomes rather than accumulating disconnected digital projects.
Tag Archives: toolkit
Toolkit for developing a community of digital history makers with your own GLAM Cyber Cafe’
The GLAM Café model was designed to give museum, library, archive, and heritage practitioners a regular place to experiment, learn, and build relationships around digital work. Drawing on models such as Wiki Salons, THATCamp, Code for America, and local maker communities, this toolkit explains how to create a low-barrier peer gathering where knowledge moves horizontally. The larger goal is not another conference, but an ongoing community capable of learning and making together.
A guide to my heritage Twitter Lists, developed over the past decade.
After more than a decade of using Twitter, Jeff Guin explains how curated lists became more useful to him than the general feed. Organized around fields such as archaeology, archives, built heritage, conservation, and digital humanities, the lists function as a lightweight professional listening system. The post is less about Twitter itself than about deliberate information architecture: creating focused channels that help practitioners find useful people, conversations, and ideas amid the noise of social media.
Timelapse Toolkit for Cultural Sites: 9 Ideas + Tools
Timelapse photography can make slow change visible, whether the subject is a blooming plant, a conservation treatment, a construction project, or a changing cultural landscape. This toolkit offers practical use cases and equipment ideas for heritage organizations interested in experimenting with the format. Its interpretive strength lies in compression: moments separated by hours, months, or years can be brought together to reveal processes that visitors would otherwise never be able to perceive.
Heritage Education: A national model for instilling cultural stewardship
Heritage Education–Louisiana was created as a congressional pilot for a national model that would help teachers use archaeological sites, historic buildings, landscapes, and other local cultural resources in the classroom. Working across education and preservation, the program combined workshops, mini-grants, publications, web resources, and curriculum development. Although federal funding eventually disappeared, the project demonstrated a durable idea: cultural stewardship becomes stronger when heritage is embedded in how young people learn rather than treated as a specialized subject encountered later.
Promote the Heritage of Your Community with Interactive Google Maps Tours
This guide shows how simple online maps can become tools for place-based interpretation, heritage tourism, volunteer coordination, and community storytelling. Using Louisiana’s Cane River region as an example, it walks through setting goals, selecting sites, adding context, and building a useful interactive tour. The central lesson is still sound: mapping works best when it does more than mark locations, helping people understand relationships among place, history, access, and story.
The strategic linchpin: transforming digital tools into an interpretive platform
A strategic linchpin is a technology or approach that solves several institutional problems at once and becomes a platform for further work. Drawing on examples including the Preservation Technology Podcast and later digital initiatives, this piece argues for experimentation followed by concentration: test broadly, learn what creates value, then invest more deeply in the approaches that connect audiences, staff, content, and organizational goals. Strategy emerges when isolated tools begin functioning as parts of a larger system.
Oral History: The enthusiast’s guide to getting started
A practical introduction to planning, recording and preserving oral-history interviews for family, community and cultural-heritage projects.
Where Technology Meets Interpretation Workshop Resources
Workshop resources on audience research, digital strategy, technology selection and interpretation for museums, gardens and cultural sites.
A 3D Documentation primer for cultural and historic sites
This primer introduces laser scanning and photogrammetry as increasingly practical tools for documenting cultural sites and objects in three dimensions. It explains how the technologies work, where their strengths and limitations differ, and how preservation data can also support interpretation through virtual experiences and interactive displays. The post marks an important convergence: documentation technology originally developed for accuracy and conservation beginning to serve public access and storytelling as well.