[okfn-discuss] Local History Portal

Mon Jun 29 12:16:18 UTC 2009

2009/6/26 IAN ELSOM <ian.elsom at btinternet.com>:
> Hi

Great to hear from you.

[...]

> I range widely in time and space (in my home office) and whenever I fetch up
> somewhere new I would like to be able to find out quickly if it has already
> been studied, written about, mapped and/or photographed. And has anyone
> compiled data from primary sources already and made it freely available so
> that I don’t have to spend hours doing it myself! If the ground has already

So the key thing here is: a) primary sources b) that are open (so you
can use and reuse them)

> been covered I want to be able to assess how well it has been done. If I
> feel capable of adding something new I will do; otherwise I’ll learn
> something while engaging with the existing work and then move on.

Right. I guess the difficult question here is how to find out what has
been done already -- either you have to have some central repository
or you have to have some way to search effectively across
decentralized materials.

My feeling, would be to shy away from trying to create an overarching
"portal" site and focus on a more decentralized approach in which you
pull together in a looser way interested individuals and communities.
The simplest way to start I'd guess here is just a blog plus a basic
registry of what resources already exist and then use that as a basis
to reach out to what existing communities exist.

> Local history seems to be as good a subject area as any upon which to trial
> ways of creating lists, catalogues, indexes and repositories for books,
> articles, theses, images etc. I expect it would take a long time to grow
> such resources so in the meanwhile I would like to put out messages – I am
> researching This Place or Person for This Reason, can anyone help? In return
> I would look out to help others and, of course, make the final elements of
> my researches – texts, maps, photographs and datasets – open to anyone to
> use. The other day I downloaded a PDF of a PhD Thesis. No fuss, no bother.
> Great. But I happened upon it by chance. An appropriately designed and built
> Local History Portal (complementary to Local History Online and not
> duplicating their effort) may allow me to do this time and again by design.

This sounds great and we'd be delighted to help support such an effort
in whatever way would be useful. We've already got some history
related projects (e.g. http://weavinghistory.org/) but nothing close
to what you are proposing.

[...]

Rufus