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.
Tag Archives: Video
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.
Video Netcast: Kaitlin O’Shea blogs the preservation world in pink
Kaitlin O’Shea used Preservation in Pink, an unmistakable pink-flamingo identity, and an online network of preservation colleagues to bring historic preservation into a more conversational public space. This video introduces the personality and community behind the project and shows how a distinctive voice, informal collaboration, and emerging social platforms could make a professional field feel more accessible without abandoning its seriousness.
Video Netcast: Folklorist Dale Jarvis talks about storytelling on the social web
Folklorist and storyteller Dale Jarvis experiments with podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, Second Life, and other digital spaces to carry traditional storytelling into new environments. This video explores what changes—and what does not—when oral tradition moves online. At its center is a question that remains central to digital heritage: can technology transmit a strong sense of story and place without severing the cultural relationships that give them meaning?
Voices of the Past Video Netcast: Genealogy Gems’ Lisa Louise Cooke on establishing roots in the social web
Lisa Louise Cooke explains how Genealogy Gems grew into a major online genealogy platform through experimentation with podcasting and other social media. This video focuses on the learning curve behind that growth and on the importance of using digital tools to create genuine connection with an audience. It captures genealogy at a moment when family-history communities were rapidly moving from individual research toward networked sharing and media production.
Voices of the Past Video Netcast: Featuring Dave Moyer, teenage new media producer and historic preservation activist
Teenage preservation advocate Dave Moyer demonstrates how digital tools could give young people a public role in historic preservation long before institutions routinely talked about youth digital engagement. The conversation brings together preservation advocacy, entrepreneurship, media production, and generational change. Its lasting value lies in showing that emerging platforms did not merely help institutions reach younger audiences; they also gave younger practitioners tools to lead and speak for themselves.
Video Netcast: Past Horizons Magazine, Heritage Travel Community, Smithsonian 2.0
This 2009 netcast captures cultural institutions testing a range of participatory digital ideas at once: online archaeology publishing, heritage-travel communities, Facebook fundraising, and the Smithsonian’s effort to imagine a more open and interactive digital future. Seen together, the stories document a moment when “2.0” thinking was moving from experimentation at the margins toward institutional strategy, with public contribution and digital access beginning to reshape expectations.
Voices of the Past Video Netcast: Taj Hotel Artworks, Kate Chopin House salvage operation
This early Voices netcast brings together stories of cultural resources under pressure from terrorism, economic downturn, fire, and long-term preservation challenges. From damaged artworks at Mumbai’s Taj Hotel to the loss of the Kate Chopin House and threats to state parks, the episode shows heritage reporting as a way to connect seemingly separate events through a shared question: what happens to cultural memory when larger social forces place it at risk?