Historic Preservation @ Wooster

My I.S. has now gone fully digital. After talking with my two advisers about the direction my career and interests are headed, we have decided to tweak the concept of my project. Instead of writing a traditional paper, my I.S. is going to be a digital product, a public history website of sorts. We are still working out the particulars about what all I will be expected to produce. Right now, for this week I was charged with surfing the web and looking at various other history related websites to see what elements I liked, didn’t like, how they were organized, and what software they used.

First thing I found was this great web-based software called Omeka. It was developed by the folks at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Its very easy to use, free, and many different history sites have been developed by libraries, colleges, and museums using Omeka. Some of the websites that I liked that were developed using Omeka include:

Creating Holyoke and Digital Amherst are websites that explores the history of two New England towns, through use of digital exhibits. You can browse several exhibits based around themes in each town’s history, or just browse through the entire digital collection.

Memorial Stadium is a website also developed through Omeka that explores the history of  a stadium on the University of Minnesota’s campus. Its a lot alike the previous two, but it also has a place where it collects the stories of its website viewers. You can use this website to record and preserve your story, connecting it to the larger story as well.

The last site I looked at is the Vassar Encyclopedia.  This site is an awesome guide to everything Vassar. When I think of what I want my website to look like, this website is the closest reality to what I have been brainstorming.

As I am envision my website now, I would like to have it centered around exhibits that explore certain themes – or questions, like the Holyoke and Amherst sites are laid out. I also want the site to have tons of resources – documents, photographs, recollections easily accessible, like the Vassar site. I also like the ideas of linking this blog to be part of the site, and maybe some podcast walking tours of COW.  I want my website to be more though than just a digital collection of history and documents. I want it to be jumping off point for discussion – a place that explores questions, out in the open on the web,  for others to help build, comment on, and reflect on. I want it to be a truly ‘public’ history and historic preservation site, one that is continuously growing, not only in breadth and depth of historic documents, but also in real time as it follows community growth, questions and issues.

I have already had several meetings with both of my advisors.  Now, I am really trying to focus on nailing down the scope and conception of my IS. As I noted in my first post, for my Senior IS, I am studying historic preservation at the College of Wooster.

More specifically I want to ask whether the College has a comprehensive historic preservation plan that it follows when constructing new buildings on campus. If there is one, when was it implemented? What did the College do, before there was a plan in place? If the College has not been operating with a historic preservation plan, how have historic preservation issues been handled? – Case-by-case? Only when convenient?  How have the decisions that have been made over the years affected the image and feel of campus from an historic preservation approach? These are just some of the questions I will be exploring in the coming weeks.

For this project I will be using The College of Wooster Special Collections’ extensive holdings on the many buildings of campus.  Special Collections has documents ranging from memos, business letters, meeting minutes, and blue prints from many of the structures on the grounds. Special Collections also has tons of historic photographs of campus, that I would love to incorporate into my IS, as some digital component, but I am not too sure on how I am going to do that just yet. I think it would be a nice component to not only be able to tell and explain how historic preservation has occurred at the College, but to also show in photographs, taken over the years, how the campus has changed.

Attached to this post is my “agreement” that my advisors and I drew up to combine aspects of both of my major fields into a double Senior IS. We thought it was a good idea to draw it up on paper so everyone involved knew what was expected.

Jacob Dinkelaker Senior IS Archaeology and History Double Major

Howdy, Jacob Dinkelaker here, and this is my new blog- Historic Preservation @ Wooster. My Senior Independent Study project at the College of Wooster is on historic preservation at the college. Expect to find updates on my research and IS, musings on historic preservation and CRM issues around Wooster and the rest of the U.S. as well as other things that fit my interests – the National Park Service, Civil War History, and Public History issues.