The Public Humanities

Toolbox
Engaging Communities Online

Leah Nahmias
Al Lees
http://publichumanitiestoolbox.wordpress.com
NCPH Conference 2009
Providence, Rhode Island

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 The Public Humanities Toolbox:
Engaging Communities Online

Table of Contents

Welcome 2
• The Present…and the Future 2
• What We Do and Don’t Do 3
• Our Goals 5
• Vocabulary 7

Worksheets
• Self-Assessment: My Organization’s Online Presence 10
• Checklist: Envisioning an Engaging Online Presence 12

Our Model: The Public Humanities Toolbox 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 14
• A Note on Metadata 15

Choosing Tools 16
• Our many biases 17

How do I use…
• Wordpress 20
• Widgets 22
• Flickr 23
• Google Maps 28
• Scribd 33
• Audio and Video Files 37
• (A Note on) Wikis 40
• (A Note on) Facebook and Social Networking 42
• (A Note on) Podcasts 44

About This Project 47

• Our Model 48
• Framework 48
• Our prototype 49

About Us & Acknowledgements 50

Appendix I: WordPress Grunt Work 51

Appendix II: WordPress Plug-Ins and Recommendations 57

Appendix III: Examples of Tools used by Public Humanities Organizations 61

Appendix IV: Other Cool Tools 65

• Twitter
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• Lulu books
• LibraryThing
• Greenstone.org

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Welcome

This website and handbook seek to show small cultural heritage organizations how to use easy web tools
to create great websites. We present a set of tools that can be combined in different ways depending on
what type of web presence your organization needs. We start with the basic blog1 and explain how to
include various other features to make a dynamic website. If you already have a website, these tools can
be used in addition to it or as a replacement for it. You may want to use these tools to build a web
presence for one specific project and then link to it from your main website. You may not have any
website at all, in which case it is time to get started.

We have developed a model of an organization’s online presence based on the free or very inexpensive
tools that have been developed in the last few years. These features do not enable every type of online
activity possible (though they come darn close!). However, we have identified the most common
functions that a small cultural heritage organization might expect of its website and some of the most
exciting possibilities among recent web applications. We developed the Public Humanities Toolbox also
knowing that not all features would be equally desirable to different users. We were also aware that our
tools should be easy for the novice to build and for the end-user to navigate.
We begin with a series of checklists to help you decide which tools you want to use. Then, we focus on
several tools and show you how to use them:

• Flickr: sharing photographs

• Google Maps: making maps
• Scribd: sharing documents
• YouTube: sharing video

We finish with some great examples that show you these tools in action in organizations like yours.

Our principal goal is to create a rich interactive web-based framework of existing free and open source
applications that can be used by small cultural heritage organizations to develop an engaging web
presence. We hope that our ideas and model are, above all, useful. We hope that they help small
organizations find and build audiences and that in doing so they and their collections become a vital part
of their communities.

The Present . . . and the Future

With good intentions but often limited capacity, many small cultural heritage organizations let their
collections lay unexplored in attics, closets, and storage boxes. They may only be open to the public a few
days a week for a few hours at a time. With physical needs dominating, it is hardly surprising that few
small cultural heritage organizations have developed a web presence, let alone one that engages visitors.
They often lack the time, money, and expertise needed to imagine and build a website that shares
information and solicits memories, feedback, and artifacts. Unfortunately, this is happening just as new
media is creating expectations that institutions will invite such participation and the American Association
of Museums has established community engagement as its core value for the 21st century.

While local history organizations face increasing pressures, the public history community has come better

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A blog is a chronologically ordered webpage where the author posts musings, photos, documents, and
links to other sites. Several free software applications allow people to set up customizable blogs with
minimal technical expertise.
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to recognize that most Americans understand history as a local and localized process. What new media
applications, we wondered, could help small historical societies build and engage an audience to
appreciate and contribute to its local history collection? As we explored this problem, we saw the
potential that free and open source software and applications, many of them of a Web 2.0-style nature,
could be bundled as a package. Such a product would be easy to add and edit content for staff or
volunteers. It would cheap or free! Though we recommend and demonstrate a few standard features, we
recognize that such a package would also be easy to customize. It would allow institutions to become a
resource and a community center not tied to a particular physical location.

We are not recommending closing the actual doors, however; rather we are encouraging small
organizations to take advantage of the web’s unique capacity of being unrestricted by geography. We
think these tools will root organizations more strongly in their local communities while helping them
extend their presences without spending more funds. On the web, the cost of making an engaging web
presence for the local community is the same as making one for a global community.

Beyond their ease of use, there is another advantage to tools like Flickr, Google Maps, and Scribd that we
present here. Because users of those sites can search and find images and documents an organization has
uploaded, or maps it has created, new users can find an organization’s collections all the time. They do
not have to be directed to a specific URL. In other words, they do not have to know a local historical
society (like our example organization, the Westport Historical Society) exists in order to access its
collections. The potential audience for a society’s collections grows exponentially by using applications
that already have a large following.
This toolbox then functions in two ways:

• Helps small cultural organizations to easily organize and present information, including
collections, on-line

• Harnesses the interactive web (sometimes called Web 2.0) to help small organizations
communicate to, to hear back from, and to create communities, locally, nationally and
internationally
But we can’t do everything! Here’s what the Public Humanities Toolbox is NOT:

• a one-way communication tool. Although you will see that some of the strategies and applications
we suggest can be modified so that they are one-way, or “flat” communication tools, we
envisioned the Public Humanities Toolbox as two-way: the organization makes itself more
accessible to the public, the public can comment on, interpret, or modify the organization’s
resources, and hopefully, co-create new experiences and resources with the organization. The
Toolbox, we hope, will be a way for small cultural heritage organizations to invite broader
participation and deeper engagement with their resources.

• an archival database. First of all, there are already resources for building databases. We are not
experts at building databases. And databases are essentially flat; they, necessarily we understand,
are carefully managed according to professional standards. Databases entail various barriers to
casual perusal, let alone manipulation of the content. Our tools do not replace a traditional
database or archive.

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Before we get started we have these two words of advice:

• Social media is like a free kitten: easy to get one, but then you have to take care of it.
The tools we recommend in the Public Humanities Toolbox, though relatively simple to set up and
use, do require maintenance from time to time. In fact, because we built this framework in order
for small cultural heritage organizations to better connect with and engage their communities,
maintenance should be a regular part of your staff or volunteers’ commitment to the organization.
If folks don’t think anyone is listening or recognizing how they use your resources, they will
probably lose interest. When planning to undertake any or some of the projects described in this
handbook, include estimates for who will manage your future online presence.

• The tools are all there for the taking, but it is up to you to make them relevant and accessible.
Choose your online projects carefully according to what you want them to accomplish. Do you
want to find new supporters or reinforce relationships with existing supporters? Does your
organization plan for the needs of changing demographics in your community? How can you use
these tools to document and collect underrepresented stories and recent history? Will your design
be straightforward and intuitive so that folks can easily find what you have created? The answers
to these questions will guide your choice of tools as you build a website. (See Function Checklist
below.)

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Our Goals

Nonprofit organizations, particularly small to medium sized cultural institutions, are under enormous
pressure. Declining visitation, contracting financial support from previously reliable sources, and shifting
generational leisure interests are but some of the formidable challenges facing these institutions. Creating
and maintaining an engaging web presence is one clear opportunity that these organizations have to
expand their reach, potentially gaining a crucial share of audience. Hopefully one result would be greater
financial and human resource support.

Most historical and cultural institutions lack the funds or the skills to develop a compelling web presence
for their organization. They embrace the need, but cannot get to the next step of actual idea execution.
That’s why we created the Public Humanities Toolbox—to help cultural heritage organizations execute
their visions.

With these ideas in mind, we would like to sketch out a few of our visions of the future for small cultural
heritage organizations using the Public Humanities Toolbox model.

• We envision a future where local history is instantly and constantly accessible; the end of
frustration over the limited hours or inaccessible locations of small historical societies and
museums.

• We envision a broadened scope for the audience of local history. The artifacts and stories of a
particular place may inform the work of scholars, artists, or enthusiasts in far-flung places. Too
often local societies assume that their assets are not of value to any beyond the city limits. Our
experiences creating a demonstration site, Uncovering Westport, has led to—surprisingly!—
contact with a French scholar working on industrial workers’ housing in a comparative context. In
eight days, 60 people viewed a map of Westport’s historic resorts and tourist sites; this with
virtually no promotion of our project beyond a few advisers and classmates. Choosing online
applications that are easily searchable and widely used makes such connections possible.

• We envision new manipulations of data to draw new conclusions. The particular capacity of maps
to show the relationship between people and the environment, events and places, and
communication, trade, and social networks is hardly a new idea. However, the interactivity of
digital maps allows users to discover these things for themselves, all in a local context.

• We envision the ability of teachers and students to incorporate local history into their teaching and
learning. In an era of standardized tests over broad national themes and events, the local
perspective is increasingly lost. Having an easily navigable web presence will create opportunity
for teachers and students to trace how national and local history intersect and contrast.

• On that note, we envision a younger audience for local history! The staff, docents, volunteers, and
members of historical societies are aging (and how)! Putting content on the web, using
applications that are familiar and comfortable for Gen Xers and Millennials, meets new audiences
where they are.

• We envision the collection and documentation of unheard voices. For instance: As the director of
the Westport Historical Society is aware, its collection focuses on seventeenth through mid-
twentieth century history. The Yankee families who settled and remained in the town are well
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 documented. However, the North Westport community, which was more socio-economically
diverse, and which was more or less dispersed by the construction of I-195, is not well represented
in the society’s collections. New media may be the first step in soliciting the stories and even
artifacts of these traditionally silent and invisible Westporters. We suspect that this will be true for
other communities’ underrepresented histories.

• We envision a collaborative network of small historical societies contributing content and expertise
to a shared digital platform. The Public Humanities Toolbox evolved as an intensively and
inherently collaborative project, and we suggest that successful digital initiatives will follow this
pattern.

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First, a Few Definitions

This handbook will introduce you to many new terms and ideas, but a few are so fundamental to the idea
of the Public Humanities Toolbox, we want to define them right at the beginning.

• Web 2.0
The term “Web 2.0” dates to the O’Reilley Media Conference in 2004. 2 “Web 2.0” encapsulates a
lot of ideas about…

o the types of interactive, collaborative, and interoperable web applications developed after
the dot-com bust of 2000-2001.
o the ways users interact with each other and with content enabled by these applications.

Web 2.0 applications take advantage of the unique features of the internet—the ability to
hyperlink, to search vast streams of data and information, to connect to a community of people not
limited by geography. In the world of Web 2.0, users do more than just retrieve information; they
participate in creating, comparing, editing, commenting on, and sharing information. Many Web
2.0 applications are characterized by the ease with which non-experts (those without extensive
programming skills) can add content (upload photos or videos, post musings on a blog, etc.) to the
web. The ease of use and interactivity make these tools perfect for community organizations.

There’s no way to provide an exhaustive list of Web 2.0 characteristics (people who think about
these things are constantly coming up with new definitions) or actual applications, but here are a
few you might be familiar with: blogs, tags, comments features, YouTube, Google Maps,
Facebook. If you’re not familiar with them now, you will be after exploring the Public Humanities
Toolbox.

• Applications
We talk about applications a lot in the Handbook. An application is a tool. For the purposes of the
Public Humanities Toolbox, an application is something built by a very smart and creative
computer programmer and hosted on an internet browser that you can use by setting up an account,
downloading a plug-in, or embedding it in your own website. It features an interface that allows
you to use it without knowing all the complicated programming or coding that goes on behind the
scenes to enable its existence. We want to emphasize the “tool” aspect of the applications in this
handbook. Rather than knowing a lot about how they work or why they developed in a certain
way, we will focus on their utilitarian aspects—how they enable your organization to develop an
engaging and accessible web presence. Yay, applications!

• To embed
To embed an application means to insert a tiny bit of code which makes the tool appear as if it is
part of your own website. In a sense, it now is part of your website. We especially love that most
Web 2.0 applications automatically generate their own embedding code so you can easily copy and
paste them into your own site. Voila! Elegant, seamless, integrated website!

Often users can click on the embedded tool and it will hyperlink to wherever the tool originates.
Google Maps is a common example of an embedded application; many sites embed a Google Map
that shows their location. You’ve probably seen embedded videos on news and other sites.

2
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
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 Figure 1: Embedded video on The Brooklyn Museum's
website. Here, the embedded video is hosted on YouTube
(note the logo in the lower right-hand corner).

• “Third Space”
This term comes from people interested in community building. Where the home is the “first
place,” and work is the “second space,” third spaces are places where people choose to go to
socialize with others. These are the places where serendipitous encounters happen—sometimes
with people we know, sometimes with strangers. You go there to discuss events, encounter new
people and ideas, eventually build consensus, to engage in the public sphere. Historically third
spaces have been defined by the ease with which people can access them—they are usually within
walking distance—the community of regulars who habitually congregate there, and the presence of
food and drink. In the past European sidewalk cafes, beer halls, labor or church halls, even
bowling alleys have served this purpose. Starbucks tries to brand itself as the third space in many
communities where it does business. Ray Oldenburg and others argue that third spaces are the
anchors of communities and fundamental to civic engagement and democracy.

Originally, third spaces were understood as physical places. Some theorize that “third space”
activity today has largely migrated to the web. On a site like Facebook or on a blog with a regular
set of contributors, readers, and commenters, people share and discuss ideas and keep up with
events in ways similar to the old physical third spaces. Many Web 2.0 applications are
characterized by the ways they enable some typical third space behaviors.

It’s worth considering the extent to which you want your website to be a third space for your
community. If this is among your goals, you will want to build features that allow folks to share
their thoughts with you and each other. You may also consider asking questions or posting items to
provoke discussion.

• Blog
A blog is a chronologically ordered webpage where the author posts musings, photos, documents,
and links to other sites. Several free software applications allow people to set up customizable
blogs with minimal technical expertise. Blogs are a form of web publishing—probably the easiest
form of web publishing. Blogs run the gamut from online journal to serious tools of social change
when they engage a large community around a single purpose. Some blogs, especially during
election years, have drawn a lot of attention for the work of citizen journalists and the capacity for
rapidly spreading stories to a large and vocal community of readers. Other blogs arise around
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 special interests that might otherwise not have an easy way to find like-minded folks, share news,
or meet in a physical location. As with many aspects of the digital age, blogs enable serious
“amateur experts” to compete with professionals for attention and readers.

• Interoperability
Interoperability is one of those web words that has been borrowed from another discipline, in this
case engineering. It refers to the capacity of diverse systems to work together. On the web, this
specifically refers to the ability of various web-publishing platforms, such as blogs, and
applications, like Flickr or Google Maps, to work together without “special effort” from the user.
The user just sees the finished product—a dynamic website where pictures and maps appear, where
hyperlinks easily take you back and forth among pages—without seeing all the complicated coding
that enables interoperability. The idea of interoperability goes hand-in-hand with embedding.

• Tagging
Tags are words or short phrases that describe a blog post, a photo, or a document. Tags function
like keywords that help people search for specific topics later on. Some librarians have called
these keywords “folksonomies” because they function like taxonomies by, for, and of the people.
Tags help users search for content. Tags may be related to content area or format. For instance, a
transcription of a World War II veteran’s oral history may have the following tags: interview,
World War II, WWII, veteran, soldier, oral history, transcription, history, local history. Users can
view your profile and see what tags you commonly use to get a sense of your collection or
archive’s strengths.

• Metadata
Metadata literally means “data about data.” Metadata identifies items in a collection and includes
information such as accession number, date of creation, creator (if known), title (if applicable),
materials, culture of origin, donor, purchasing fund, and size. Cataloguers may then apply further
classification terms to an item. Organizations have and use standard systems and terms as
metadata.

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 My Organization’s Online Presence
Self-Assessment

Yes No
My organization…

Has a website

Has a website with content that staff and volunteers can easily change.
Has a website with an appealing, easily navigable layout.

My organization’s website… Yes No

Has up-to-date information on location, hours, admission, and other visitor
information.
Has directions or a map showing the location of our site.
Allows staff or volunteers to post announcements such as exhibit openings, programs,
job openings, volunteer opportunities, etc., easily.
Allows staff or volunteers to share links to other organizations or post news items that
may be of interest to our community easily.
Has an option for sharing part or all of our collection, including…
• Photographs and images of 3-D objects
• Documents or transcriptions
• Video or audio files
Allows visitors to comment on announcements, posted articles, or featured items from
the collection.
Has a designated space for visitors to share memories about a particular topic or in
response to a posted question.
Invites visitors to submit photographs, documents, or pictures of 3-D objects that may
be of interest to your organization or your organization’s community.
Allows users to edit content, e.g., a page describing the local history.

My organization… Yes No

Has some or all of its collection digitized.

Uses the web-publishing feature on Past Perfect.

Has a blog.

Maintains a Flickr page.

Uses Scribd.

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Has a Facebook profile.

Uses Google Maps.

Has a corps of staff or volunteers with basic internet skills (email, search engines,
navigation from page to page, downloading and installing software).

As for me,… Yes No

I have used at least one: blog, Flickr, Facebook.

I have created at least one: blog, Flickr account, Facebook profile.

I am the most tech/web-savvy person among my organization’s dedicated staff and
regular volunteers.
I am paid staff at my organization.
I have time (or can designate someone else’s time) to build and maintain a more
engaging website (let’s say 10-15 hours initially, 1-2 hours/week after that).
I know at least one teenager who could help my organization build a more engaging
website, either as a school assignment, as a volunteer, as an intern, or as paid part-
time staff.
I know what a Creative Commons license is.

I am more overwhelmed than intrigued by all this Web 2.0 interactivity!

I am more intrigued than overwhelmed by all this Web 2.0 interactivity!

My boss will be supportive of using new media.

My board will be supportive of using new media.

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Envisioning an Engaging Online Presence

How do you know what kind of online presence you want to have? It is important to assess what
functions you want your website to perform. Read through the various functions below and rate whether
having it is important, somewhat important, or not very important. Your ratings will determine what tools
you will need to learn how to use to build your website.

Very Somewhat Not

Function
Important Important Important

“Have a website”

List hours/location/directions/admissions

Post announcements about upcoming events, volunteer

opportunities, etc.

Link to other sites or news articles that may be of interest to

our community.

Share a calendar of upcoming events.

Share photographs from the collection (or images of 3-D

objects in the collection).

Share documents or transcripts of documents from the

collection.

Share organization publications, such as brochures, walking

tours, catalogues, etc.
Share resources for educators, such as lesson plans, pre- or
post-visit activities, or field trip information and reservation
forms.

Share audio or video files of recordings in the collection.

Build modified exhibits/maintain an online presence of a

physical exhibit once it has been taken down.

Maintain a profile on popular social networking sites like

Facebook.

Share podcasts, such as audio tours of the community or

interviews with interesting locals or curators.

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 Invite community members to help identify unknown people,
places, or events in your photographs collection.

Collect personal histories from community members.

Collect memories of specific events or people from

community members

Collect “objects” from community members by allowing

them to share a digital copy.
Facilitate discussion boards related to your organization’s
interests (e.g. local history for an historical society, nearby
arts events for a theater group, etc.).
Maintain a wiki (of local history, for instance), allowing
community members to post and edit encyclopedia entries
about your local community.
Collect and document underrepresented stories or people in
the community.

Collect and document recent (past 40 years) history.

Find new supporters online.

Maintain or strengthen relationships with existing supporters.

Explanation of Functions

In general, as the Functions chart progresses, the software and skills needed to perform them get more
complex. They also get a little harder to learn how to use. This may be good news if your “very
important” functions were clustered near the beginning!

Another thing to note about the chart is that you can cherry-pick which things are most important to you
and only add those to your basic website. So, let’s say you want to share photographs but not audio or
documents. You can do that! Let’s say you want a regular website with a beefed up educators’ resources
section, but have no interest in putting any items from your collection online. You can do that too!

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The Public Humanities Toolbox: 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0

In addition to going from relatively easy to relatively difficult to build and maintain, the Functions chart is
organized theoretically according to how communication happens on your website. Is communication
one-way or two-ways? Do you retain control of the content or can your public add to or edit the content?
Here’s what that looks like in chart form:

Three Versions of the Public Humanities Toolbox

Toolbox 1.0
“Flat”
Communication is one-way; you
as the institution post information but you are putting more of your communication is two-way. Your
(about yourself) so that people
can find your building and learn
about programs and exhibits.
Toolbox 1.5
“Carefully Managed Content”
Communication is still one-way,
collections “out there” for the public comments on your content
public to find. You may simply
be putting your collections
database online or building
simple online exhibits. You
retain control of the content but
potentially reach a larger
audience than a collection or
exhibit housed in a physical
location can.
Toolbox 2.0
“Free for All Third Space”
The key difference here is that
and discusses it among
themselves in a forum you have
created. Other tools might allow
users to create their own content
in a variety of ways: by sharing
images or documents held in their
private collections, by creating
and editing encyclopedia entries
about your community, or by
sharing their personal memories.

We theorize Toolbox 2.0 with the following question: What is the difference between availability and
accessibility?

Here you don’t merely create an online version of your physical presence but rather use tools and create
platforms that make your collections easier to find, easier to navigate, and open for reflection, discussion,
and personal meaning-making. Replicating bricks and mortar? That’s availability. Allowing users to
interact with you and your collection, to take the helm in navigating and interpreting the collection?
That’s accessibility.

They—the public—might index the content according to their own set of reference points by tagging an
image or document. They may highlight the details of an image (using the “Add Note” feature of Flickr,
for example) that is interesting, disturbing, or beautiful to them. They may link back to your content in
their own blogs and web pages. No doubt they will navigate your exhibits and collections according to
their own routes. They will find what matters to them and explore what matters to others. In all of these
ways, they will make your content personally meaningful.

We recommend that initially you focus on building your website according to function. What do you want
to do and what tools are best for helping you accomplish your goals? However, we encourage you to
spend some time thinking about what kind of organization you are and what you would like to be. Will
you be open to engaging with new audiences who are used to the ease and flexibility of navigating an
online world? Your collections, with sound financial management, will probably always be available, as
long as your doors are open at least one day a week. However, we believe your varied resources—
collections, expertise, your role as a center of the community—should be accessible, too. We encourage
small cultural heritage organizations to imagine a deeper connection with a wider portion of the
community, of the sort enabled in the world of Web 2.0.
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A Note on Metadata

Folks who work with collections, especially registering, accessioning, or de-accessioning items, are no
doubt very familiar with metadata already. Metadata literally means “data about data.” Metadata refers to
items in a collection and includes information such as accession number, date of creation, creator (if
known), title (if applicable), materials, culture of origin, donor, purchasing fund, and size. Cataloguers
may then apply further classification terms to an item. Organizations have and use standard systems and
terms as metadata.

In contrast to official taxonomies, or systems of classification employed by trained cataloguers, archivists,

and librarians, Web 2.0 is characterized by the ability of the general public to create their own labels—
usually called tags—to describe documents, articles, pictures, objects, and songs, for example. Some folks
call these tags “folksonomies” to describe how they are generated by an untrained, if enthusiastic, general
public. These tags are essentially new metadata. Scholars are now examining folksonomies and some
cultural heritage institutions have begun to explore the usefulness of tagging for understanding how the
public thinks about their collections.3

Many trained taxonomists—librarians and museum people especially—have been very wary about the
practice and use of social tagging. Is it useful? Is it accurate? What do you do if it is inaccurate?
Librarians and museum folks have also been wary about the idea of putting their content on the web where
it may somehow be detached from its metadata. Our position is that cultural heritage organizations can
still describe their objects using the full metadata that they would normally include on a museum label or
even an object’s file. However, allowing the public to add its own metadata invites them to engage—
through careful looking, through personal meaning-making, through application of prior knowledge—with
your content. What you do with these new tags—this new metadata—is up to you. The Library of
Congress decided to incorporate the tags generated about its collection on Flickr into a separate category
of metadata in each object’s file.4 You may decide to ignore such metadata because it was generated by
non-professionals. That is up to you. But we want to reassure you that you do not “lose” metadata or
simply turn over your carefully crafted categories to the public for them to wreak havoc with when you
use the various applications we discuss in the Handbook.

Of course, you may imagine projects for which you do not want to include an object’s whole metadata, or
you may want to use a less formal method of conveying that information than one usually finds in a
museum collections database or on a wall label.

3
Steve.museum is a collaborative research project, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library
Services, that explores social tagging of art museum collections; learn more at http://www.steve.museum/.
The IMLS’s report on the project, including how some institutions are using the data generated by the
project can be found at http://www.imls.gov/profiles/Nov08.shtm.
4
The Library of Congress’s pilot project with Flickr is described elsewhere in the handbook, but it is
definitely worth reading about. We highly recommend the LOC’s report on the pilot project to learn about
how and why it started, and the organization’s analysis of its (unexpected) many successes.
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_report_final.pdf
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Choosing Tools

Choosing what tools (or applications) to include as you build your organization’s online presence depends
on what functions you want. The following chart identifies various needs a small cultural heritage
organization might have. You will see that next to each tool we have indicated whether it is an example of
Toolbox 1.0, 1.5, or 2.0.

In Appendix I, you can read about examples of various cultural heritage organizations using some of the
tools described in this chart.

We will admit we are partial to some tools over others; we have explained some of these biases after the
chart.

Functions & Tools

Toolbox
Function/What you want to do Applications
Version
WordPress 1.0*
Blogger
“Have a website” Blogspot
Typepad
Movable Type
WordPress 1.0*
Blogger
Blogspot
Hours/locations/directions and other FAQs
Typepad
Movable Type
Google Maps
WordPress 1.0*
Blogger
Announcements about upcoming programs, exhibits, changes
Blogspot
in the organization
Typepad
Movable Type
WordPress 1.0*
Blogger
Post links to projects, partner organizations, or other articles of
Blogspot
interest to your constituent community
Typepad
Movable Type
Share text of documents from the collection Scribd 1.5
Flickr 1.5
Share photographs or other images from the collection or
Internet Archive
documentation of performances or other events
Past Perfect
Google Video 1.5
Share video from the collection or documentation of
YouTube
performances or other events
Internet Archive
Share audio from the collection or documentation of Internet Archive 1.5
performances or other events Podcast

18
 FlickrΞ 1.5
Omeka
Put up exhibits
WordPressΞ
Past PerfectΞ
Share other documents, such as brochures, catalogue essays, Scribd 1.5
educator resources
Trace routes/show locations of historic places or events Google Maps 1.5
WordPress (or other 2.0
blog application)
Comments feature on
Collect personal memories; allow people to share what they • Flickr
know about the event, person, or place in question • Scribd
• Google Video
• YouTube
Collect “objects”: Allow visitors to share (digitally) photos, Flickr 2.0
documents, etc., that they retain physical ownership of YouTube
Build a wiki of local history (or whatever your area of Tikiwiki 2.0
expertise is) that allows your community to contribute content
*The advantage to all of the tools that we describe is that they can begin as flat 1.0 tools and later be
amended to include more 1.5 and 2.0 features.

Thinking Further

The last four items on the Functions chart, you’ll notice, are not represented in the chart above. As a
reminder, those functions were
• Collect and document underrepresented stories or people in the community.
• Collect and document recent (past 40 years) history.
• Find new supporters online.
• Maintain or strengthen relationships with existing supporters.

No single tool does any of these things.

We believe, though, that each goal is possible if your organization makes a strong commitment to
becoming more accessible and more relevant. The Public Humanities Toolbox explains how to use these
tools but the commitment to accomplishing these goals comes from you. As you plan an engaging web
presence, think carefully about how important such goals are and how each tool can serve them best.
Make purposeful decisions based on how the tools contribute to your organization’s overall mission and
strategic goals.

Our (many) biases

Many applications that we describe share functions with a variety of competitors. We will try to explain
why we chose certain applications over others:

Why WordPress, not Blogger, Blogspot, Moveable Type, or Typepad?

With certain features enabled or disabled
With certain features enabled or disabled
With certain features enabled or disabled
19
 • There are many blogging options. We like WordPress because it is a non-profit and open source
tool with a large community of users who are frequently adapting and improving the software.
The creative and helpful WordPress community is constantly coming up with a variety of plug-ins
that make changing the look and capacity of your website very easy. Many of the other
applications we describe have been built to seamlessly integrate into a WordPress platform.
WordPress also comes in two versions; we call them “Fast and Easy” WordPress and “Bigger and
Better” WordPress. (As you’ll read below, they vary in terms of technical expertise, flexibility, and
overall capacity.) Did we mention how helpful they are? In addition to an active forum for
posting questions, there is also 24-hour technical help available via the Internet.

Why Flickr, not Picasa or something else?

• Picasa, Google’s relatively new photosharing service, allows users to search, edit, and share one’s
photographs. It does not currently feature many of the tools that Flickr does that we like so much:
tagging, comments, notes, group pools, geotagging, viewing statistics, etc. One of the other things
we like about Flickr is the large community of users Flickr already has. There are plenty of folks
to help explain things, to look through and label photos, and to write plug-ins to make embedding
Flickr into blogs easier.

Why YouTube over Google Video?

• When we began this project, we liked Google Video better. Initially it allowed users to upload
larger and longer video files. However, recently Google Video has stopped allowing people to
upload new content. This is an example of how internet-based tools adapt and change constantly.
We say this not to discourage you from wading in, but to adequately prepare you to be flexible!

You Tube also offers the best set of social networking features (comments, like, embed code,
URLs, etc.).

Why Scribd rather than PDFs?

• As you’ll find out, Scribd allows you to embed documents directly into a web page. Unlike a PDF,
which users access by clicking on a small icon and being redirected to the full document, Scribd
allows users to read a full document without leaving the main page. The document maintains all of
its formatting. Users can still download and print documents housed in Scribd. Scribd also has a
host of social networking features, similar to those in YouTube. Scribd automatically generates
embed code for WordPress (and separate code for other blogging or web publishing platforms). As
with Flickr, Scribd also has a large community of users who may find your documents (by
searching your tags or descriptions) without being directed to them from your website.

Probably the best reason for choosing Scribd over PDFs, though, is that all text in Scribd
documents is indexed and therefore findable in any major search engine like Google or Yahoo.
Just as pictures in Flickr easily turn up in Google Image searches, Scribd documents can also turn
up. This makes your content easier to find.

Scribd and PDFs are not mutually exclusive. You can easily host both from your website and
allow users to determine which method makes the most sense to them.

Why not Internet Archive?

• The Internet Archive was created in 1996 to provide permanent access for researchers, historians,
and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive is working to
prevent the Internet - a new medium with major historical significance - and other "born-digital"
20
 materials from disappearing into the past. This extraordinary effort now includes 160,000 movies,
59,000 concerts, 304,000 recordings, and 1,250,000 texts. However, we have found that for
storage and retrieval purposes, the archive is cumbersome and disorganized. As a test we loaded
two documents into the archive but later had trouble searching, retrieving and linking them to our
blog. While part of the beauty of the Archive is that it does not rely on any single commercial
developer, the search and tagging capacities are haphazardly provided by individual contributors.
While we encourage you to think about adding your collections to the Internet Archive, we do not
think it has yet developed enough tools that can easily be adapted to build one’s own engaging
website.

Why not Omeka (yet)?

• Omeka is a free open-source web publishing platform that allows scholars, museums, archives,
libraries, educators, and amateur enthusiasts to share collections. Several large institutions—
especially in the academic community—have started using Omeka, but so far not many little guys
have. We are really excited about what Omeka will be in the future. However, at this point using
Omeka requires a lot of “know-how” about setting up servers, downloading extensive software,
etc. The folks at the Center for New Media and History who’ve been developing Omeka reassure
us that a newer, easier version of Omeka is in the works. Since it is not ready yet, though, we are
focusing on the tools that are ready, straightforward, and easiest for folks with limited time and
expertise to use.

Why not PastPerfect?

• This is probably the million-dollar question; in answering it we reveal our deep ambivalence, if not
antipathy for PastPerfect. PastPerfect is about objects, not about people. It’s not about the public,
or the community, or any of that. There’s a perfectly good reason for PastPerfect to exist—to help
an organization keep track of its collection. However, our interests are about what organizations
do with their objects, how they use them to engage with the public and the ways the public can
access an organization’s various resources, collections being just one type of resource. The
PastPerfect features that allow organizations to build online exhibits do not employ any of the
interactive tools that characterize Web 2.0. PastPerfect keeps it about the objects. It is the flattest
tool imaginable. Unlike the alternative tools we describe in the handbook, some of which can be
“flat,” PastPerfect’s online exhibit tools cannot ever be amended to 1.5 or 2.0 versions. We also
find PastPerfect’s tools to be neither elegant nor intuitive; in short, PastPerfect is clunky.

21
How do I use…WordPress?

WordPress is an open-source blogging software that allows users to create a website with relatively little
technical expertise. A blog (or web log) allows administrators to create posts giving updates on thoughts,
events, etc. WordPress features large community of programmers and developers have built plug-ins,
widgets and other customizable features that allow anyone to develop a unique website in an infinite
variety of ways. The Public Humanities Toolbox exploits the various capacities of WordPress—its simple
interface, its customizability—as the framework around which to build an engaging website for the small
cultural heritage organization. Whether your interest is in building a basic “bulletin board” of
announcements or in creating an interactive social network, we believe WordPress offers the depth and
breadth of communication tools to extend your organizational reach.

WordPress offers two options for building a website. The first and simplest option is to start a free blog
that will be hosted at www.wordpress.com (see “Fast and Easy WordPress” below). The second option,
which entails more steps and a higher degree of technical know-how, allows much greater versatility for
the look and features of your website; although you have to set it up on a third-party server—explained
below!—this option from www.wordpress.org is free; features a straight-forward, intuitive design; easy
set-up and management tools; and an extensive and responsive “Help” community. We explain this option
in the section “Bigger and Better WordPress” below.

We have set up The Public Humanities Toolbox website using “Fast and Easy WordPress.” We also built
the site Art+History for a student project in Brown University’s public humanities program using only the
features described in “Fast and Easy WordPress.”

Fast and Easy WordPress

1. Go to Wordpress.com.

2. Sign up for a blog. You will need a working email address (we recommend you use the same
account you’ve set up for all the various applications we explain in the Handbook).

3. Choose a name for your blog. This will set up the address of your blog as
http://yournamehere.wordpress.com. Because you have chosen the “Fast and Easy” WordPress
option, your address is not an independent domain name, hence the inclusion of “wordpress.com”
at the end of the address. That ending indicates the server where the blog is hosted.

4. Select administrators and other site management tools. (You can add additional folks later.) Also
indicate whether you want the site to be open to the public or only accessible to invited readers.
Initially, as you develop the site, we recommend the latter. This way you can keep your
“construction mess” out of view of the general public. When your site is ready to launch to the
wider public, you can change the settings to allow all members of the general public to find you.

5. Go to “My Dashboard.” All of the basic tools are arrayed for you at My Dashboard, including a
tally of the most recent posts, comments, and site visits. Start creating your blog by selecting how
it will look from among the various templates (“Appearance”) and the pages and posts you want to
create.

6. A page is a separate tab within your blog. You can enable or disable the comments features of
pages. Think of pages as organizational tools to explain different aspects of your organization,
such as “Exhibits,” “Education,” “Collections,” etc. Although it is simple to change text or images
22
 of pages, we recommend you think of pages as relatively static pieces of information. Pages will
automatically appear in alphabetical order unless you manually change the ordering.

7. Posts appear as entries on a blog. Posts appear in reverse chronological order, the most recent
posts at the top. You can enable or disable the comments features for posts. We encourage you to
use posts as a way to post announcements, topics of discussion, etc. We highly recommend
enabling comments on posts so that can garner feedback from and engage your online community.
If you find some posts offensive, as the administrator you can delete them.

8. You can embed images, sound files, short movies, etc. in posts or pages. (See “Bigger and Better
WordPress” below.) As you will read elsewhere in the Handbook, you can also embed Flickr,
Google M0aps, and Scribd documents in your blog. These options are explained in those sections.

Bigger and Better WordPress

This WordPress option requires you to have your own server and domain name. So, rather than having
your website hosted by WordPress (http://yournamehere.wordpress.com), you host it
(www.yournamehere.org). For instructions on how to set up a server and domain name, see Appendix I:
WordPress Grunt Work. The instructions below detail how to install WordPress on your own server. We
set up our demonstration project, Uncovering Westport, using Bigger and Better WordPress.

Registering a domain name and buying server space is relatively inexpensive. Our server, Bluehost, rents
space for $6.95/month; if you register a domain name through them, total cost is $10/month. GoDaddy,
another popular domain registration site, offers domain names for $9.99/year. If you do not have your
own server space, we recommend getting a package deal. The best values will be about $100/year for
server and domain name. See Appendix I: WordPress Grunt Work for more information.

1. Install File Protocol Transfer software.

File Protocol Transfer (FTP) allows you to transfer files from your computer to your host server.
You can find a variety of FTP applications; we like free, open-source Filezilla. Filezilla works for
both Macs and PCs. It allows you to drag and drop files from one location to another without
understanding complicated programming language.

2. Download the basic software.

Go to www.wordpress.org. Download the current version of the software (as of January 2009,
that’s WordPress 2.7). This will download a .zip file to your computer; we recommend
downloading it to your desktop for the time being.

WordPress offers excellent and easy-to-follow instructions for installing the software after you
have downloaded it to your desktop. Find the section “Installing WordPress” and really pay
attention to “The Famous Five Minute Installation.” Here you will find step-by-step instructions to
install WordPress on your host server.

3. Copy WordPress to Your Server.

Detailed instructions for copying WordPress to your server can be found in Appendix I: WordPress
Grunt Work. We’ve also explained some of the best plug-ins available to Bigger and Better
Wordpress users in Appendix II: Plug-Ins and Recommendations.
23
How do I use…widgets?

What can it do for you?

Widgets are navigation tools for your website. They are optional plug-ins that appear in your website’s
sidebar. Some examples include calendars, RSS feeds, or a list of recent entries. Think of WordPress
widgets as practical and useful “fashion accessories” for your blog. These cool plug-ins allow you to
develop a unique look and feel for your site by simply dragging them into the sidebars and modifying
them according to standard text and HTML code. Widgets are the simplest way for you to give your site
its own personality.

The difference between a plug-in and a widget is that a widget always appears in the sidebar, rather than
embedded in the main text of a page or post.

How do users interact with them?

Widgets, like other plug-ins appear as regular features of your website. When people visit your site, they
will see the widgets embedded into the site: search bar, calendar, RSS feed, etc. Some, such as the
Folding Pages widget, operate in the background without the visitor knowing how it organizes your
content. Most widgets appear in the sidebars of your blog.

We have chosen the following examples to illustrate a variety of possible widgets that you might consider
for your project. You can also see for yourself by going to WordPress’ Plug-In directory and select
widgets. (There are currently 610 available.) You can also just search for WordPress widgets in any
search engine.

How do you do it?

All themes come with very basic pre-installed widgets. Installing them is very simple. When on your
site’s dashboard, select Presentation from the main toolbar, then click on Widgets. Drag and drop the
widgets you want into the appropriate sidebar where you want them to appear.

Other widgets have to be downloaded from various developers. The process is the same as downloading a
plug-in. We recommend the following:

• Flash Flickr Badge Widget (see Figure 2).

This is our favorite widget that allows you to embed photos from
Flickr into your sidebar. The developer Erick Rasmussen has also
written a set of easy-to-follow instructions. For further information,
see his site at Eric’s Blog.

• Flash Mp3 Player

To embed an audio file in your sidebar, we recommend this widget.

Figure 2: Flash Flickr Badge

Widget

24
How do I use…Flickr?

Flickr is the world’s most popular photo sharing site. Every day thousands of photos are uploaded to
Flickr accounts around the globe. In January 2008, Flickr and the Library of Congress launched an effort
called “The Commons” (www.flickr.com/commons), a joint effort to share images from LOC’s American
Memory collection with a wide public and to explore the ways that institutions can benefit from
community input. While the Library of Congress is a 1,000 pound gorilla among cultural heritage
organizations, we believe that Flickr holds even more exciting prospects for smaller societies with limited
budgets, time, and web-building expertise.

We recognize that Flickr is neither perfect nor is it necessarily a permanent solution for housing digitized
materials. Flickr does not replace traditional archival methods. However, Flickr is an easy-to-use
application that can create an engaging web presence for a small organization. It can host historical
images in a forum that allows a wide audience to search for, view, and comment.

Figure 2: The first page of Uncovering Westport's photostream. Sets of photos organized around themes ("Beach
Work") are listed on the right side of the page.
What can it do for you?

New features are added to Flickr all of the time, expanding the ways photos can be organized and viewed.
We have created a free Flickr account for the Uncovering Westport project to demonstrate some of its uses
for a small cultural heritage organization. The free account allows users to upload 100MB of photos a
month and to create up to three sets (more about those below). A pro account, which costs approximately
$25/year allows users unlimited uploads, sets, collections, as well as access to various tools to track usage
and views of the account.

Unlike many other photo sharing applications, Flickr offers many tools to help you organize your images.
Its ubiquity and its superior (and constantly evolving) tools are two important reasons why we recommend
using Flickr.

25
Because Flickr is so popular, there are many people around the world figuring out bits of code that allow
Flickr images to be embedded in other applications such as WordPress or Google Maps. As with other
aspects of the Uncovering Westport model, this allows for an almost instantaneous polished and engaging
online presence. Other Flickr features are described below.

How do users interact with it?

The most basic and passive way that users interact

with Flickr is by viewing photos. Users scroll through
photos and read descriptions. Users have the option
of enlarging a photo to see details more clearly.

As the administrator of the Flickr page, you

Figure 4: Photo with description. Description has links to
related articles around the shipwreck depicted in the
photo.
historical society to facilitate learning (See Figure 4). It also creates new knowledge about the
collections as staff (and the public) make connections impossible to imagine when materials sit in
a storeroom.
can include as much or as little information
about an image. The Library of Congress has
labeled each of its photos with all of its
metadata. On Uncovering Westport’s
photostream, we tried to include a short
description of what was happening in the
photo and how it was related to larger themes
in Westport’s history. We also noted what
collection each photo came from, although we
did not include each photo’s full metadata. In
some cases, we provided links to articles or
maps that provided more information about a
topic. Depending on the theme (Mill site,
beach) of the map, we also created links to the
Google Maps that displayed other sites and
photos associated with that theme. The ability
to create interconnected, hyperlinked labels is
one of the most useful features for a small

Users can also comment on the photo. This “talk back” feature of Flickr is not only good for creating a
more engaging web environment, but can also be useful for
soliciting information about people, places, or events that
you would like to know more about.

In addition to the description and comments functions, the

administrator or users can place notes directly on a photo.
Notes function somewhat like Post-its. They are useful for
directing the viewer’s attention to a detail or for adding
more information about one aspect of an image. The notes
feature can make images come alive by providing rich and
layered context for any particular image (See Figure 5).

Users can tag a photo with a short phrase that describes the
image. Tags can be created and limited by the administrator. Figure 5: Each box, which only appears when you
move your mouse over the image, is a note. This
note identifies the estate hidden under the trees.26
Tags function like keywords that help people search for specific topics later on. Some librarians have
called these keywords “folksonomies” because they function like taxonomies by, for, and of the people.
Tags make your collection more searchable both internally and externally, among the millions of images
hosted by Flickr. When a user clicks on a hyperlinked tag, she can choose to search for other pictures in
your collection or among all collections that share the same tag.

As the administrator, when you are signed in you can also see how many times an image has been viewed
and whether anyone has called it a favorite. With the pro account, Flickr administrators can view daily
statistics for their photostream, including how many times it has been viewed, daily and all time stats for
each image, what search terms people are using to find images, and URLs for any websites that link to
your photostream or images. Users can select favorites to indicate that they found it interesting, beautiful,
or relevant to their lives.

Don’t be surprised when people find you. Depending on how you label or tag your photos, people from
around the world may look at, comment on, favorite, or ask to learn more about your images. Uncovering
Westport’s map of Westport Factory was favorited by someone in France who is interested in industrial
workers’ housing. We were then able to share more information and direct him to other images of historic
workers’ houses from our collections. A note on an image pointing out a cat boat helped a group of cat
boat enthusiasts find our photostream; they asked if they could add that particular photo to their group
pool. The potential for a society to use Flickr to engage with a wide public and to learn more about what
is in its own collection are endless!

How do you do it?

Flickr provides very simple instructions and has a very easy interface to use for uploading images. These
directions are the most basic options, but if you have trouble there is an FAQ section and a Flickr blog to
post queries (or search old queries). (See http://www.flickr.com/help/faq/ and http://blog.flickr.net/en).

1. Create an account.

You will need a Yahoo account to create a Flickr account, so if you do not already have one,
register for a free account. The Uncovering Westport project required us to create accounts to use
various applications. We recommend creating a common username and password for all accounts.

2. At any time you can create your profile.

In your profile, explain who you are, what your interests are, and why you have created the
account. Here is where you can describe your organization, provide your website’s address, your
street address, hours, etc. Of course, you can always choose not to create a profile.

3. Upload pictures.

Under “You” scroll down to the “Upload Photos and Videos” option. You will see a place for you
to browse files on your computer to select and upload photos. At this stage you can also choose to
add tags to the entire batch of photos and to mark the images as private or public.

4. Label and describe photos.

You can do this when you upload the pictures. At this point you can also add more tags to
individual pictures. If you ever desire to change a label, description, or tag, you just click the text
27
 you want to change when you are signed into your account and you will be able to edit. Always
remember to save changes.

5. Add notes, change display, or delete.

When you click on the individual photo in your photostream, it will appear larger with a comments
section below. Across the top of the image, you will see options to change sizes, rotate, delete, etc.
You can also add notes. When you click “Add note” a small box will appear on the photo. You
can click and drag the box to whatever you wish to highlight. You can drag the corners of the box
to change its size. You can then type your note in the dialogue box that appears. Notes only
appear when the user moves his mouse over the photo.

6. Add tags.

Add tags to your photo to make them more searchable by content or style. Each word in the tags
box will be a separate tag, so if you have a multi-word tag (such as “Westport Historical Society”),
include it in quotes.

Other features of note

You can upload any image (JPEG, GIF, etc.) file to Flickr. In Uncovering Westport, we used this
capacity to include not only photographs but also crops of maps that illustrate particular themes (mill sites
in Westport Factory) or places (Central Village, East Beach, etc.).

Flickr is available in many languages, including Spanish, Chinese, French, and Portuguese. This may
be useful depending on the community you represent.

You can select from a variety of licensing and restrictions options when
you upload an image to Flickr. You can restrict whether people are allowed
to use your photo for commercial or non-commercial purposes, to display your
images on their own sites (popular among bloggers), and whether they have to
give you credit if they do use your images. (See Figure 6.)

Your photos will appear in the order that you upload them into Flickr. (You
can change this order with a lot of tedious editing of the photo’s metadata.)
Since your photostream does not necessarily have any organizational principle,
users can create sets and collections to display a complete series of images
organized around a central topic. One way to think of a set is as an online
exhibit of images. To create a set, choose the “Organizr” feature at the top of
the screen. The choose “Create New Set.” All of your photos will appear as a
scroll bar along the bottom of the page. Click and drag photos into the set.
You can move pictures to change the order. You can also choose which image
you want to appear as the set’s cover. You can create a short description
identifying the set as well. Finally, as you add new images later, you can also
choose to add them to an existing set.

Figure 6: Various copyrighting
options.
One possibility for a set is to create a group of photos for which you do not
know enough detail. Think of the unidentified people or places that people in
your community may be able to name. In the case of Uncovering Westport, the
community can help us label places, people, boats, and houses. Or think of the
28
particular types of knowledge you can tap into by allowing others to explain more. They can give us
context for, say, the photo of a man harpooning a swordfish, to fully elucidate the community of sport
fishermen in the town. You might consider creating a set entitled “Help Us Identify” or “Mysteries” to
include these images. Not only will such a set help identify obscure artifacts, but it can also engage a
participatory community of history-makers.

Collections are basically sets of sets. Think of the collections feature as a way to organize around very
broad themes, such as “People” or “Architecture.” Images and sets can belong to more than one set or
collection at the same time.

You can also create groups in Flickr. Unless you share your username and password, other users who
may have images related to yours cannot upload into your account. Of course, you may be fine with this!
But if you are interested in discovering other images of your community’s history, you might consider
creating a group. Groups allow you to find people who share your interests. Groups have pools of photos
that users can contribute their own photos to. You can be specific about what content you seek or how
many images you want people to contribute. Further, you can set groups as Public, Public (Invitation
Only), or Private to control who may join and add photos. As a group administrator, you can also search
for content and ask people to contribute their photos to your group’s pool of photos.

One final feature of note is the ability to place your photos on a map. This may seem somewhat
redundant if you are using the Google Maps option. If you do place photos on a map (or “geotag” them),
then people who are searching Flickr’s map will see them. Also, people can download applications to
Google Maps or other map services to see Flickr images appear as they search the map. You can add
photos to a map as a batch operation in Organizr or individually by choosing the “Add this picture to a
map?” option on the lower right hand side of the individual photo’s page.

29
How do I use…Google Maps?

Many people are already familiar with Google Maps if they have ever searched for a place in Google and
had it return an address and a map. They may have also used Google Maps to get driving directions.
However, in spring 2007, Google Maps added a new feature, “My Maps,” (www.maps.google.com) that
allows users to create and share their own maps. This section will discuss the My Maps feature and how it
was used in the Uncovering Westport project.

What can it do for you?

My Maps allows anyone who has registered for a free account with Google to create a map showing
points of interest organized around a theme. An historical society can create maps to show where the
locations of historic sites. One can create different maps for different aspects of a place’s history, which is
what we did in Uncovering Westport. We selected themes suggested by the 2006 Archaeological Survey
such as “agriculture,” “resorts and tourism,” and “mill sites” (see Figure 7).

Figure 7: Westport's Agricultural Activities Map in Google Maps

Other organizational strategies might include creating different maps illustrating a particular moment in
time (i.e., “Revolutionary War Westport” or “19th Century”) or the experiences of a particular race, class,
or gender (“19th Century Immigrants in Providence,” or “Jim Crow Charlotte”). Another exciting
possibility is creating a map drawn from the oral history testimony of an individual, mapping out the sites
she or he describes in an interview.

Each map is essentially a different “layer” of markers. Different layers can be viewed separately or
concurrently. Showing different themes at the same time can lead to insights about the relationship
between communities, individuals, and the environment. The points on the map can be described in
captions and illustrated with historical maps or photographs (see Figure 8). One can also provide links to
30
articles that further describe the site, its past or present uses, or its restoration.

Google’s My Maps is the option we used and

recommend. It is free to start an account and very
easy to add and edit content. Once you have created
a public map, it is available for any user exploring
the area to find, not just users guided directly from
your main page or with a direct URL. Further, most
users will already be familiar with Google Maps.

How do users interact with it?

Users can manipulate your maps in several ways.

The basic feature is the ability to click on the icon
that marks a place and have it open up a dialogue
Figure 8: Westport Factory Mill Site Detail
box with a caption, image, link, or some
combination of the three. As explained earlier, an
image in the dialogue box can be linked to a photostream in Flickr so that the user is directed there when
she or he clicks on the image.

The other basic interaction that will already be familiar to most users is the ability to zoom in and out and
to move about the map. This interactive activity can be performed in Map, Satellite, or Terrain mode.
Depending on the site you have selected, you may recommend to users that they view it in one mode or
the other. For instance, the satellite view of Westport Factory shows the remains of an old amusement
park and its large wooden roller coaster. A marker in Map mode would not indicate the actual lay of the
land of the site; in this case, the satellite version can help the user make the connection between past and
present uses of the site. Figure 9 shows a comparison between the same view in Map and Satellite modes.

Figure 9: Satellite vs. Map view of Lincoln Park, showing rollercoaster in satellite mode.

Terrain mode can also help the user visualize the natural features, such as streams or elevation, of a place
that are important in interpreting past uses, like the placement of a gristmill by a stream or windmill on a
rise, that would not occur to modern visitors.

In addition to changing the viewing mode and zooming in and out of the map, viewers can decide which
layers or maps to display. As we mentioned earlier, each map you create is essentially a different layer
that can be displayed individually or with other maps. In our case, “Resorts and Tourism” and “1938

31
Hurricane Damage” are two separate maps or layers. By displaying both maps at the same time, one gets
a sense of the terrible damage wrought by the hurricane of 1938 on Westport’s beach community (see
Figure 10). Conversely, if one were to view “1938 Hurricane Damage” and “Historic Mill Sites” at the
same time, one would conclude that the hurricane did not significantly impact Westport industry.

Figure 10: Westport's Resorts and Tourism and Hurricane Damage maps viewed concurrently. Purple markers indicate
hurricane damage.

For Uncovering Westport, we also set up all photos associated with points on the maps as links to the
Flickr page (see below). Doing so enables users to click on the image and be taken to a larger view of the
image. On the Flickr page they can post comments on an individual image or the site it depicts and share
their memories of the site. This feature has the added advantage of directing users who may have
discovered the map on their own to find your organization’s other photo collections and learn more about
your community.

How do you do it?

Setting up an account and creating maps is very simple, though it may

be time consuming. The directions for how to set up an account and
to create maps are explained on the Google My Maps Help section
(http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=68480).
This section borrows heavily from Google’s explanation.

1. Create an account.

2. Select the My Maps tab, then the “Create New Map” link.

On the left hand side of the map, you will see a place to name
and describe your map. (See Figure 11)

3. Choose a title for your map.

Figure 11: Create, name, and describe
Choose a title that describes simply the main theme or your map.
content of the map. Because public maps are available to
anyone searching in Google Maps, your title should help unfamiliar seekers quickly know what
they are looking at.

4. Add a description of your map.

32
 Here is where you can describe in more detail the theme or contents of the map, the sources you
used to create it, and the ways that you intend the public to use it. If you anticipate that new
Google Maps users will view your map, you may also want to explain the features (such as
clicking on the icons or clicking on photos to see a larger image).

5. Zoom into the area of the world where you are going to create your map.

To place items on a map, the more you have zoomed in, the more accurate the placement will be.
You can always zoom back out to get perspective or to move to other parts of the map.

6. Find the add features tools.

There are three basic objects you can add to the map.
You can add points, lines, or shapes. Use the lines to
draw routes, trace roads or waterways, etc. Use the
shapes to highlight a particular area within a larger
map, such as a neighborhood. Points correspond to
specific addresses on a map. (See Figure 12)

7. Select the point icon that looks like an upside down

teardrop.

Drag it to and drop it on the part of the map

that corresponds to a
significant place or event. After you do that, a bubble should pop up
that allows you to give a name to the point, write a caption, and
Figure 12: Add Features Tools insert a picture.

In our experience, this can be the most time consuming part of the process.
Figuring out where events or buildings were that do not correspond directly with modern street
addresses can be a challenge.

If you are lucky, the site you wish to mark will correspond to a given street address. If you type
the address in the search bar at the top of the screen, a green arrow will indicate the precise
location. Just drag and drop your point marker over the green arrow!

8. Name the point. Type the description. Include any links to outside pages that you think are
helpful.

9. Adding pictures is not hard, but it does involve a few extra steps.

First of all, the image you insert must be hosted on the web somewhere. We have used Flickr to
host images (see below) although one can use any site, including an online database if your
organization already has one. Whatever you choose, you will need to get the URL for the
individual photo. These directions describe how to import a photo from Flickr.

In the dialogue box, choose “rich text” for typing. This option allows you to highlight, bold, and
italicize text in addition to add photos easily. Click on the icon to the far right that looks like a
33
 small photo. A box will pop up that asks you to paste the URL for the image you want to insert.

To find the image URL: In Flickr click on the image you want to show in Google Maps. Choose
the photo’s “All Sizes” option at the top of the image. Scroll down until you see the option “Grab
the photo’s URL.” Copy the address. Then paste this address into the dialogue box on Google
Maps. Click OK. Shortly, your image should appear in the dialogue box. sometimes you can
right click on an image and select “Copy image’s location” to get the photo’s URL.

To link Google Map images to Flickr: There is one simple last step you can take to direct visitors
to the map towards your photostream in Flickr. Copy the URL of the photo’s page (the page that
shows the photo, its tags, and the comments section). Then, in the Google Maps dialogue box,
click on the image and then click on the Link button (that looks like a chain link) fifth from the
right in Rich text mode. A box pops up asking you to paste a link in. Paste the link from the
photo’s image page and press “Okay.” The image will then be highlighted in blue. Now it is a live
link!

10. Save. Repeat as many times as necessary. When you are completely finished, click the
“Done” button. To make changes later, you can always press edit and adjust as necessary.

Other features of note

Google Maps is a free application. Maps can be marked as private or public. Private maps can only be
viewed by you when you are logged in. Public maps, however, can be viewed by anyone who does a
search for maps or sites in a particular area or who has the direct URL of your map.

34
 How do I use…Scribd?

Scribd describes itself as the Flickr of documents. Instead of uploading photographs, however, users
upload documents. Scribd has created iPaper, which allows users to upload Word, Excel, Power Point,
PDF, and other formatted documents and then read them in their original format. Rather than having to
transcribe texts into html to make them readable and searchable on the web, users can simply upload
documents they have already created. Best of all, iPaper maintains the format of the document as it was
originally created. Documents look good on the web, and that’s why we recommend it.

iPaper can easily be embedded into other web pages, like blogs. The Scribd community boasts 50,000,000
readers and nearly 50,000 new documents uploaded daily. Although only a few museums and historical
societies have started to use Scribd, the Whitney Museum among them, many other organizations use it.
They include NASA, the IRS, the Atlantic Monthly magazine, and even Barack Obama’s campaign.

Figure 13: Two examples of iPaper. On the left, a conservation trust has uploaded its brochure, originally in a PDF
What
format. On the right, a scholar's list of archival resources, originally in Word format.
can it do
for you?

Scribd can be used in a variety of ways. Museums and historical societies can share past and present
newsletters, brochures, and other literature such as meeting minutes or annual reports. Education
departments can easily share lesson plans, pre- and post-visit materials, and registration forms.
Collections departments can share transcriptions or curatorial statements.

Scribd is entirely free. Your organization can upload as many documents it likes, where they will be
searchable within the Scribd community and via a normal web search in Google, Yahoo, or similar. These
documents, as mentioned before, can also be embedded in your host site. Because all of the text on iPaper
is indexed, users can easily search for specific phrases or topics. This makes your collections more
accessible. It also may be helpful internally, as one can easily find documents relating to a topic without
an item’s full title or other metadata.

How do users interact with it?

35
Depending on how you choose to use Scribd, your users will interact with in two different ways. We
highly recommend directly embedding iPaper documents into your host blog (WordPress, Blogger, etc.).
In this case, users will remain on your webpage but be able to read the texts hosted in Scribd. Users can
also go to your account, hosted at Scribd, and page through your posted documents. When you upload a
document, you have the option to provide a short description and any other metadata you think is
pertinent. Users can flip through all of the documents you have uploaded or search for documents on a
related theme among others’ documents.

As the administrator of the account, you can determine whether or not to allow users to download
documents directly to their computers. This may be a concern for copyrighted or other specially licensed
materials, should you have them. If you have enabled the ability to download documents, then users will
download pertinent or meaningful documents.

One of the most attractive features of Scribd is the ability of your readers to comment on and tag
documents. Readers can also indicate whether they like a document (similar to the “Favorite” feature in
Flickr).

How do you do it?

Setting up an account and uploading documents is very straightforward. One can find a complete (and
very helpful list) of frequently asked questions and directions at http://www.scribd.com/faq. This set of
directions draws heavily on Scribd’s directions.

1. Create an account. As with Google Maps, Flickr, or one of the blog services, we recommend
using an email account that you have created especially for setting up and maintaining your
online presence.

2. Upload documents. You can upload many types of documents, including… When you have
selected documents to upload, you can indicate which ones, if any, you would like to mark as
private. Private documents cannot be indexed by Google or searched for by the general public.
They also cannot be embedded in your blog or other webpage.

3. Describe your document(s). For each document, choose a title and add a short description.
Here is where you can add metadata if the item is from your collection, or labeling text that
helps orient the reader to the context of the document.

4. Categorize your document(s). You can choose from a drop-down menu of topics and
categories to help organize your document and make it more “findable.” Examples of topics
include “Academic Work,”
“Brochures,” etc., and categories
include areas like “History” or
“Essay.” Other Scribd users can
search documents by category
and/or topic to find others like it.

5. Add tags. As in Flickr, tags help

users search for content. Tags
may be related to content area
or format. For instance, a
transcription of a World War II
Figure 14: Sharing options include Wikipedia, the document's unique
URL, and embedding code.
36
 veteran’s oral history may have the following tags: interview, World War II, WWII, veteran,
soldier, oral history, transcription, history, local history. Users can view your profile and see
what tags you commonly use to get a sense of your collection or archive’s strengths.

6. Share document, if desired. For each document you have uploaded you will have the option
to notify specific people that it is now available by filling in their email addresses. You also
will see a dialogue box that shows the document’s individual URL, and a short piece of code
that enables you to embed the iPaper version of the document into another webpage, such as a
blog. (One code option is specifically made for WordPress.) You will also see options to share
your document in a variety of other Web 2.0 sites, such as Digg, del.icio.us, and Wikipedia.
(See Figure 14)

7. Review comments, favorites, and other activity. Periodically, check the usage of your
documents. See if folks have posed questions in the comments section or have suggested
similar documents. You may be surprised to find a community of passionate amateur
historians! (See Figure 15)

Figure 15: This brochure, "Westport: A Sportsman's Paradise" has been viewed 366 times and downloaded three times.
One person calls it a favorite. It has been searched by Google, Yahoo, and MSN. One can also see what search terms
people used to find it.

Other features of note

Each time you as the administrator log in to your Scribd account, you will see a homepage detailing
“Notifications.” Notifications indicate when something has happened to one of your documents: it
has been commented on, tagged, or viewed. This is helpful for keeping track of usage, especially as you
prepare annual reports or grant applications to support continued development of your online presence.

37
You might consider creating a “one-sheet” of important facility information, such as hours that you
are open, admission or research costs, and other frequently asked questions. This allows visitors to
easily print out the information they need in a familiar Word format.

38
How do I…upload media files?

Embedding audio or video files into your blog is more than a way to “dress up” your site. Many
organizations hold collections of material from past lectures, discussions, performances, and oral histories.
Unless folks can come in during regular open hours, however, it can be difficult to share these resources
with the public. Streaming audio or video from your website is a powerful method of sharing content and
programs. Like the other applications described in the handbook, programmers have developed elegant
and simple methods for embedding video into a website.

Two basic methods exist for embedding streaming media in your blog: self-hosting from your remote
server or utilizing a third-party service. The most popular third-party service is YouTube, but it is for
video files only. We discuss the merits and drawbacks of each option below.

Why Self-Hosting?

Uploading audio and video into your own secure server may be the best option for your organization. If
copyright issues or loss of control over your content is a concern, self-hosting will minimize or eliminate
these issues. When you self-host your content it can be viewed by the public without the content entering
the public domain. In other words, others will not be able to embed your content onto their website.
While anyone can create a link to your video or audio—and we like to think that’s a good thing—the
viewer is always directed back to your site. For those concerned with carefully managing access to
objects in the collection, this option makes the most sense.

Another consideration is file size. There are no practical limitation on the amount and length of video that
can be stored on (and thus streamed from) your server. Therefore, you can deliver any message of any
length to anyone anywhere.

Why YouTube?

YouTube is a free online video service that allows users to upload video files. As with Flickr or Scribd,
your content is hosted on a third-party server and is embedded into your own site. You create a profile
when you set up your YouTube account; for each file, you can add tags, title, and description to make it
more “findable.” Millions of people use YouTube every day; you may find people stumble upon your
content more easily when it is hosted on a third-party site. (This may or may not be important to you.)

YouTube features a straightforward design that is probably familiar to many of your users already. As
with photographs in Flickr or documents in Scribd, YouTube automatically generates a URL and embed
code for each file you upload so you can easily embed or link to the file. You can choose to allow or
disallow comments. YouTube also displays how many times a file has been viewed, favorited, etc. Users
can subscribe to your YouTube channel and get updates whenever you post a new video.

YouTube files are limited to 1 gigabyte per video, or about 10 minutes of airtime. It is, however, a
completely free service. YouTube videos are indexed and turn up in searches in Google and other major
search engines. The millions of viewers who already know how to search for and view YouTube video is a
major point in its favor.

Before You Begin: Making Your Video Files Viewable

Most likely, you will have to convert your video files into a recognizable format. This is a rather simple
but tedious process. There are many low-cost or free video conversion applications available. One that we
39
have had success with is Video Converter for Mac (www.mp4converter.net). Please note that many
suitable applications are available for both Mac and Windows operating systems, and all convert files in
essentially the same manner. The following exercise illustrates the conversion process.

1. Load the video file onto your hard

drive.
The file can come from a DVD, VHS
tape or other source, but it must reside in
a file on your hard drive.

2. Open your conversion application.

For this example, we use Video
Converter for Mac. (See Figure 16.)

3. Select the add button.

This is where you search through your
hard drive to find the location of the
Figure 16: Video converter interface
video files you want to convert.

4. Select your file.

Highlight the file you want to convert, then click open (Note: In Windows, it might say “insert).
This will add your video file to the
conversion software.

Notice in Figure 17 that the name of the

file appears along with its duration,
current file top (in this case, vob, which
comes from the video camera that was
used), and the target file type. Here we
have selected to convert the file to an
MP4. There is a drop down menu on the
upper right hand side that allows you to
choose from among any imaginable file
type. MP4 is noted for its quality,
consistency, and universality.
Figure 17: Selecting file to convert and target file type.
5. Highlight the file name and select the
Encode button.
This begins the conversion process. The conversion time depends on the file type of the original
file and the target file type, as well as the quality of the desired output. You can determine the
quality of the end product from a drop-down menu.

Uploading to YouTube

Putting your video on YouTube is a simple process. As with Flickr, Scribd, etc., you will need to establish
a an account. We recommend you use the same email address you’ve used for other accounts. Make sure
to include a short description of your organization with your website’s URL so folks can find you!

There are several simple online tutorials that explain how to upload videos to YouTube. We recommend
searching YouTube for instructional videos; choose one of the video tutorials created by member of the
40
YouTube community.

When you have uploaded files to YouTube, you can easily embed them into blog posts or pages using the
embed code that is featured next to each video screen.

Uploading to Your Remote Server

Uploading video files to your remote server entails the same FTP process you are already familiar with. In
addition, you will need to create a video folder within the WordPress folder in the following manner:

1. Select the location for your video folder.

Double-click the public_html icon that appears on the right-hand screen (this is the remote server
side). The screen will change and then you will double click the WordPress icon. You will see a
list of the folders and individual files that comprise the WordPress software.

2. Create a video folder.

Place the cursor in the remote server window on your FTP screen. Click once (but not on a file
folder) so that the server recognizes that you are about to take action, then right click. A dialogue
box will appear asking you to create a new directory. (Some FTP applications will ask you to
create a folder.) Another box will pop up asking you to name the new directory (or folder). Name
your directory something easy to remember, such as “Video.” Hit “enter” to create the new
directory.

3. Add video files.

The left-hand window shows all of the files on your hard drive. Find the converted MP4 video file
you want to upload. Highlight and drag the file to the video directory you have just created. It
will take a few minutes to move the file depending on the file size. When finished, your file is
now hosted on your remote server.

4. Embed your videos via WordPress plug-in.

You can insert streaming video files into your WordPress blog via a plug-in. For detailed
instructions of how-to install and use the Flash Video Player, go to the section on Working with
WordPress Plug-ins.

Making Your Audio Files Available for Listening

The process of converting your audio files into a recognizable format and embedding a player within your
post or page is essentially that same process that we have described for video. Low or no cost conversion
software is readily available and can be found with a simple Google search. Once you have converted
your audio file(s) and before you to upload them to your remote server, make sure that you create an audio
folder within the WordPress root directory. This is the folder where your audio files will reside and be
accessed from.

For detailed instructions of how-to install and use the Audio Player, go to the section “Working with Plug-
Ins and Recommendations.”

41
(A Note on) Wikis

Most folks are aware of wikis, if only because nearly every Internet search turns up a page from
Wikipedia. Wikipedia, like all wikis, is a collaborative website that allows anyone with access to edit the
content of the page(s). Both the content and organization of the website can be added to, deleted, or edited
by the community of users. This is called “open source editing.” Wikis invite collaboration and input
probably better than any other web tool we will discuss in the Public Humanities Toolbox. They are
definitely Toolbox 2.0 in that you turn over control of the content entirely to your users.

We have found, however, that setting up a wiki is more complicated than establishing a blog. There are
some options that allow you to host your wiki on a third-party server; as with WordPress, these options are
more limited than ones you host on your own server space. More complicated wikis require you to set up
a wiki on your own server space. We like this Choice Wizard that allows you to select which capabilities
are important to you (and the level of technical expertise needed) and recommends which wiki
applications are best for you.

In this section we will briefly explain some of the opportunities afforded by wikis and point you in the
right direction for learning more and setting up your own.

What can it do for you?

Wikis allow a passionate community to pool and document its knowledge. You could create a wiki about
your community or local history. You could set up a few key pages and ask users to contribute what they
know about a particular site, event, or person. You could ask users to suggest other pages. You could set
up page stubs, which means a short description of the topic is provided and you ask for more input from
the community.

Alternatively, you could set up a wiki about a particular topic, such as “Mills of Dartmouth County.” The
wiki could feature an opening page about mills generally, separate pages for each known mill site, other
pages about the companies that ran the mills, still other sites about major events (strikes, closings, etc.) in
each mill’s history, etc. The possibilities, when you start thinking about how one idea leads to another, are
limitlessly exciting!

Wikis may be particularly useful for organizations that are interested in better documenting and collecting
more recent history because pages can be edited by those with living memories of the topics in question.

Wikis are hyperlinked, so it easy to reference among pages. These hyperlinks can take you to pages that
explain terms further. This feature of wikis takes advantage of the internet’s unique characteristics.

Perhaps our favorite aspect of wikis is that it is a forum for inviting the community to contribute to your
knowledge. Using a wiki automatically communicates that you are open to sharing authority with the
public, that you value their input, and that you understand that despite your best efforts, folks in the
community will undoubtedly know more than what ever be stored in your collections. This capacity of
wikis and other Web 2.0 tools, we hope, build relationships and trust between and institution and its
community.

We can imagine several different wiki projects for the small cultural heritage organization, such as a local
historical society:
• A wiki of local history where you set up the basic architecture of pages/topics and solicit the
community to contribute what it knows
42
 • Asking your most knowledgeable and passionate volunteers to build a wiki, either of local history
or a particular topic of interest.
• A partnership with local students, asking them to do research (in your collections) and write wiki
entries.

How do users interact with a wiki?

Users interact with wikis in two basic ways. The first is simply reading. As with Wikipedia, users can
search for articles and find information they are looking for.

Users can also become editors, which means they can add content or edit existing content. Wikipedia
allows anyone to register to become a editor. Other wiki projects can limit who has access for editing. As
an administrator, you can set the terms for whether anyone can register or if people have to be invited to
edit. You can publish your wiki so anyone can read it or only editors can read it. You may also make
settings that allow you, as administrator, to approve or disapprove of edits. (This may be a concern if you
find glaringly obvious factual errors.)5

Further information

There are several different software applications for setting up a wiki. Most are free. At this point, all
require some knowledge of how to host the wiki on a server. Some applications do not require
administrators or editors to know HTML or other programming languages, while others do. We like:

• TikiWiki: a software package recommended by our colleague Tracy Gierada, who has set up
several wikis, including one for the Providence Preservation Society’s Most Endangered Properties
list.
• TikiMatrix: a wiki that allows you compare all the different wiki options out there by features,
expertise required, and other factors. We really like the “Choice Wizard” that allows you to choose
which options you want or need (or don’t want or don’t need) and suggests which wiki option is
best for you.

5
Repeated factual errors or citations of rumors and legends as fact, though frustrating, may also be an
opportunity for an educational campaign. Some institutions, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art,
are using tags generated during the Steve.museum pilot project to determine commonly misunderstood or
misapplied terms by watching which inaccurate tags are used most often. The IMA is now retraining
docents, changing labels and strategizing ways to better educate the public in order to clear up these
misconceptions. A wiki may provide the same opportunity to create a program, exhibit or pamphlet of
“Fiction/Not Facts about YourTown’s History.”
43
(A Note on) Facebook and Social Networking Sites

Although Facebook started out on college campuses in 2004, now anyone can join. It is a rapidly
expanding social networking site. Facebook has quickly become one of the most visited websites in the
world, and many users check their Facebook page multiple times a day. Facebook is one of several social
networking sites, including MySpace and Linked In (for professionals). It has outlived some of its earlier
competitors like Friendster.

As an organization, you can create a page that users can access to find out more about you, to learn about
upcoming events, to find other fans of your organization, and to post messages letting you know how great
(or not, theoretically) you are.

What can it do for you?

Many organizations seem to believe that they can instantly reach a younger audience if they create a
Facebook profile. A few cautionary words, then, may be appropriate. Just because someone is your
Facebook fan does not necessarily mean they will visit your site or donate money. It is probably best to
think of Facebook as a way to cultivate relationships and announce events. Also, Facebook pages are not
static. Unless you intend to maintain your page by checking in at least once a week to accept fan
requests, post items, or read through and respond to messages, then joining Facebook is probably
not for you.

Those caveats aside, however, Facebook is a great way to broadcast events such as exhibit openings and
educational programs, particularly programs targeted to young adult audiences. You can post articles
related to your organization’s holdings or general interests to develop awareness—and possibly activism—
among your Facebook community. Many users may simply appreciate finding their local historical
society or arts organization is also part of the “third space” they use everyday.

How do users interact with it?

Users create profiles for themselves, usually detailing name, hometown, alma mater, likes or dislikes.
Each user has his or her own page where they can post pictures, messages, articles they have read and
want to share, or membership in a group. Then the real fun begins—users find people they know (and
sometimes people they would like to know) by searching for name, alma maters, interest, geographic
location, or friends in common. Users “friend” someone they know; usually, that person has to accept or
ignore a friend request. Once two users are friends, they can see a running and constantly updated feed on
what their friends are up to: when new photos have been added, when relationship status changes, when
they have joined or left groups, for instance.

Users can set different privacy levels to control who can see what parts of their profile. For instance,
someone may only want approved friends to be able to see her photos and message board, but may
maintain a basic profile of hometown and employer visible so that former classmates or colleagues can
find her.

Users can create events and invite friends to them. Event pages show information about who’s planning to
attend, as well as place and time. Event message boards can allow prospective attendees to say what they
plan to bring or ask questions about the event (ride sharing, for instance, or “what to pack” in the case of
an overnight event).

Groups can be organized around just about any interest imaginable. Some are quite silly, but many relate
44
to a cause or desired political or social outcome. Not only does membership in a group broadcast to a
user’s friends his or her likes and dislikes, each group also has a page where group members can share
messages with each other, announce upcoming events of interest, and generally keep in touch with like-
minded individuals.

As an organization, you can create a business page, not an individual’s account; users will become your
fan rather than your friend. (Even though you are probably a non-profit organization, you are still
considered a business in Facebook world.) Fans can receive feeds of events and message board posts, just
as they would with a friend, from your organization’s Facebook page.

How do you do it?

To create an official page for your organization, you must be a recognized representative of the
organization.

An incredibly thorough description of setting up a Facebook account for your non-profit organization can
be found here: http://www.knowledgeharbor.com/facebook-for-small-organizations-and-associations.

45
(A Note on) Podcasts

A podcast is a digital media file (usually audio) that can be

syndicated, or downloaded automatically, from an RSS feed.
Podcasts can be downloaded and listened to on a computer, but they
are really intended to be portable. Most folks download podcasts to
their portable MP3 player (like the ubiquitous iPod, though any
MP3 player works) and listen to them on the go. This is part of
what makes them so great; people can listen to a podcast at their
own convenience. They can also listen to a podcast as they explore
the places described in a podcast.

Whereas every podcast is a digital media file, not all digital media files are podcasts. Unless your digital
media file is syndicated (which means you add new ones periodically and folks can subscribe to the feed
and receive them), it is just a regular old digital media file. To make syndicated files easily downloadable
for people’s iPods, you need to set up an RSS feed and make sure they show up in iTunes where folks can
easily search for them.

At this point the easiest way to share a digital media file so that people can put it on their iPod or other
MP3 player is to set up an RSS feed that sends the files (as podcasts) to iTunes. Even if you intend to
create only a few audio pieces—thematic tours of the community, for instance—we still recommend
syndicating them so they will be searchable in iTunes. Though your RSS feed will not have new audio
files to send every two weeks (and thus will not technically be a podcast), this is still the best option for
making your tours available to the widest public possible.

To make a podcast, you will need some combination of the following: an RSS feed (can be incorporated
into your WordPress account), recording equipment, and audio editing software (such as Garage Band,
which comes standard on Macs). None of these are particularly expensive, but they may involve an initial
outlay of between $200--$1000∗, depending on what you have access to already and the quality of the
equipment you buy.

An excellent overview of the technical questions—how to set up a podcast, what equipment is necessary,
etc.—is available from podcaster extraordinaire Adam Weiss at his website www.podcastconsultant.net. If
you are located in New England, we also recommend Adam as a consultant as he started the Boston
Museum of Science’s award winning “Current Science & Technology” podcast and produces several
under his own name. He can be contacted through his website or directly via email at
adam@podcastconsultant.net.

So rather than reinvent the wheel (or risk plagiarizing Adam’s excellent advice) below we simply explain
some of the most basic questions about what a podcast is and its potential uses for your organization.

What can it do for you?

Whereas a broadcast is live, a podcast is pre-recorded. A podcast can be made from a live broadcast; most
NPR programs, for instance, can later be downloaded as podcasts. If you have audio recordings of
performances or lectures hosted by your organization, you may consider releasing them via podcast.
However, keep in mind that concentration factor! A live hour-long talk may not have the same appeal as a


Adam Weiss, of www.podcastconsultant.net, recommends a start-up suite of equipment that costs
approximately $1,080, including the computer for storing the files and editing the audio.
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pre-recorded audio-only lecture in podcast form. However, you might consider editing a longer lecture or
setting aside time with a featured speaker to ask two or three questions that you can edit into a 10-minute
podcast.

You can create podcasts about topics related to your organization’s collections, programs, or expertise.
Perhaps you want to highlight the story of a seldom-seen object or little known facet of your community’s
history. You can share an engaging short story about how something came into your collection, what an
object’s historic uses were, an unknown local luminary, or some other tidbit via podcasts.

If you are a local history organization, you might consider making podcasts of audio tours of your
community that people can listen to as they walk or drive around. You might discuss a theme (such as
“Schoolhouses” or “Women’s History”) and provide a map that people can pick up at your site or
download from the web. You might focus on the story of one building. If you are an arts organization,
you could feature behind-the-scenes discussion with performers, composers, or directors.

Think of podcasting as a tool for making your organization more transparent by hosting behind-the-scenes
discussion on the process of developing an exhibit or program. How, exactly, does local history get made?
What decisions do the curators make when selecting a topic or objects for display? What sources do they
consult? What do they not include, and why? You can discuss these details in short interview-style
podcasts. Sharing this discussion with your public not only promotes your organization, it also invites the
public to more critically engage with what you do and why.

Or consider podcasting as an educational program. Invite young people to script and produce podcasts
about any of the topics described above or about youth perspectives on local issues. This could be an
engaging summer program or an ongoing partnership with local schools. Young people may be quick to
learn about and become experts on the technology involved – the skills involved will be useful to them, in
any case.

Most podcasts are not much longer than 20 minutes. Folks may have difficulty maintaining their
concentration for an extended “audio lecture.” We recommend you keep your podcasts at 6—15 minutes
each. Keep in mind that for every minute of the finished program, there is preparation and post-
production time. An experienced podcaster himself, Adam says that a 10-minute interview-style podcast
takes about 2—4 hours of time to produce.

How do users interact with it?

Users download podcasts to their computers or portable MP3 players, easily through the iTunes store,
even though most podcasts (and probably yours) are free. For the listeners, there’s not a lot to it. You can
direct users to your podcasts from your main webpage. If you have created tours of your site or the local
community, you may want to include information about available podcasts on your organization’s “Hours
and Admissions” page so that folks who are planning a trip can learn about these downloads before they
come. You can also post notices of new podcasts as they are uploaded on the blog section of your website.

Users may choose to download audio tours of your site or community before coming as a way to enhance
their visit. They may listen to informational podcasts, such as interviews with the curator or excerpts of
oral histories, before visiting to get an idea of what to expect. They may want to learn more about the
topic of an exhibit or program after their visit and download podcasts then.

Users can browse your selection of podcasts and pick from among them or subscribe to your podcast, in
which case their computer will automatically download new podcasts as they are added.
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Other features of note

Setting up an account on iTunes for posting your podcasts is free. The advantage of using iTunes is that
your podcast enters the great pool of podcasts and listeners; with a good description and a catchy name,
folks may stumble across your podcast. The flipside, though, is that your podcast may get lost among the
many thousands out there. For that reason, it is important to also direct people to your podcasts directly
from your website. On the homepage of iTunes, under podcasts, there is a purple and white link that says
“Submit a Podcast.” There you will find detailed instructions for setting up an account and submitting
your podcasts.

Figure 18: iTunes podcast interface, with "Submit a Podcast" in the center of the bottom row.

Because of copyright, you have to be very careful about what music you use in your podcasts. Unless you
are featuring something from your collection (which hopefully you have some rights to use or can contact
the owner and get permission to use), we recommend visiting http://www.podsafeaudio.com/ to find
thousands of songs and other audio files that you can download and incorporate into your podcasts.

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About this Project

Two graduate students enrolled in the masters of public humanities program at Brown University, Al Lees
and Leah Nahmias, created the Public Humanities Toolbox. We started this project during a course called
“Digital Humanities Scholarship” taught in the spring of 2008 by two Brown staff members, Susan
Smulyan, Profesor, Department of American Civilizaton and Patrick Yott, Librarian, Brown University
Libraries. We developed our demonstration project, Uncovering Westport, with the support and
cooperation of the Westport Historical Society in Westport, Massachusetts.

This project has evolved from a relatively simple project of encoding, mapping, and digitally publishing a
2004 archaeological survey of Westport, Massachusetts into the development of a model for small cultural
heritage organizations to create an engaging web presence. This change occurred as we encountered the
very real needs of the small museum field and read about the theories of community participation in
cultural heritage products enabled by new media.

First, to speak of the need. On a very practical level, we recognize that while there are many small
historical and preservations societies, local history museums, and the like, there is a limited pool of
financial and human resources to sustain them. Many boards and directors face a constant struggle to
keep the doors open and the lights on. With good intentions but often limited capacity, organizations let
their collections lay unexplored in attics, closets, and storage boxes. They may only be open to the public
a few days a week for a few hours at a time. With physical needs dominating, it is hardly surprising that
few small cultural heritage organizations have developed a web presence, let alone one that engages
visitors. They often lack the time, money, and expertise needed to imagine and build a website that shares
information and solicits memories, feedback, and artifacts. Unfortunately, this is happening just as new
media is creating expectations that institutions will invite such participation and the American Association
of Museums has established community engagement as its core value for the 21st century.

While local history organizations face increasing pressures, the public history community has come better
to recognize that most Americans understand history as a local and localized process. What new media
applications, we wondered, could help small historical societies build and engage an audience to
appreciate and contribute to its local history collection? As we explored this problem, we saw the
potential that free and open source software and applications, many of them of a Web 2.0-style nature,
could be bundled as a package. Such a product would be easy to add and edit content for staff or
volunteers. It would cheap or free! Though we recommend and demonstrate a few standard features, we
recognize that such a package would also be easy to customize. It would allow institutions to become a
resource and a community center not tied to a particular physical location.

We are not recommending closing the actual doors, however; rather we are encouraging small
organizations to take advantage of the web’s unique capacity of being unrestricted by geography. We
think these tools will root organizations more strongly in their local communities while helping them
extend their presences without spending more funds. On the web, the cost of making an engaging web
presence for the local community is the same as making one for a global community.

Beyond practical needs, we have attempted to raise the theoretical considerations of what it means to
engage the public, to “do” public history, and to use new media for both. On the most basic level,
digitizing a collection and putting it online instantly makes it more accessible. We also recognized the
potential of new technologies, such as blogs and social tagging, to allow users in the community to add
and enrich our content. We heartily embrace the idea of collapsing boundaries between “professional” and
“amateur.” Perhaps it’s not even a matter of embracing this change; rather, we recognize that this is
happening. Collapsing categories, while an opportunity for encouraging community history, may make
49
trained archivists, librarians, and historians cringe. We do not suggest that they will be out of a job
anytime soon, either. But we do think that better use of new media by small cultural heritage
organizations can be a rich partnership for soliciting context and information and gathering artifacts from
the community. Further, we envision new media as a way to serve communities by meeting them where
they are, by becoming a forum for discussion, reminiscence, and personal meaning-making.

This framework eventually became The Public Humanities Toolbox. For the purpose of the class, we
created a demonstration website, Uncovering Westport. That website, while still up and running,
definitely has some rough edges! However, we deeply believe in transparency of our methods and
learning from others’ trials, so we encourage folks to take a look. As a part of Uncovering Westport, we
developed demonstration projects in Flickr, Google Maps, and Scribd. These efforts can all be explored
by linking from Uncovering Westport or by following the links here.

As we have mentioned elsewhere in this handbook, we have created two other websites using the basic
methods of the Toolbox. For the purposes of sharing our work, we created The Public Humanities
Toolbox site. To support our colleagues in the public humanities program with their exhibition and
programming series, Art+History, we created a site of the same name. Both of these sites allowed us to
continue developing the practical skills of using the Toolbox method and investigating the intellectual
questions that underlie it.

Our Model

We identified two core goals for our model of an engaging website for small cultural heritage
organizations:

• Expansion of the organization’s core mission through increased civic engagement

• Creating new opportunities for virtual collecting

Several factors prevent such organizations from building this type of web presence. Most small cultural
organizations are short-staffed, operated by an executive director, several part-time staff and dedicated
volunteers. They are also almost always critically underfunded; with little or no endowment they struggle
to support operating costs. Further, the in-house technical skills necessary to create and maintain a
compelling web site may be minimal, if not non-existent. Thus, if one chooses to offer the public a web
presence at all, development and maintenance is typically outsourced, making adding and editing content
expensive and difficult. Such is the case with the Westport Historical Society.

Recognizing the opportunity to create a new digital model, the project’s team developed its own version of
a “mash up.” We selected several free and open source applications and bundled them into a single
framework. Our goal was to create a tool that small cultural heritage organizations can use to build their
own websites.

Framework

Selection of a structural framework is never a simple process. We developed Uncovering Westport

knowing that not all features would be equally desirable to different users. We were also aware that our
tools should be easy for the novice to build and for the end-user to navigate. With that in mind, we looked
for applications that featured:

• Ease of use, requiring little or no knowledge of HTML coding

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 • Flexible design to encourage individualization
• Capacity to integrate multi-media such as documentary text, images, audio, and video
• Capacity for social interaction
• Ability to incorporate metadata, tagging, geo-tagging, and text encoding, to allow cross-platform
searching
• Potential longevity

Though ambitious goals, we are encouraged by the many available applications that meet these criteria.
Our next task was selecting what applications to use and recommend. Creation of a web presence has
been greatly facilitated with the advent of the “blog.” As defined by Wikipedia, “A blog (an abridgment
of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary,
descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.” No longer the domain of an individual
user, blogs have provided countless individuals, businesses and non-profit organizations with platforms to
communicate freely and easily with their target audiences. We chose WordPress due to its ease of use,
longevity, dominant position within the industry, and the plethora of developers focused on creating new
features for the end user.

With WordPress as the structural framework, we selected the various other tools described in this
Handbook. These current applications should be thought of as dynamic and not static. As users envision
new opportunities to enhance their audience’s web experience, appropriate widgets can be incorporated
into the framework of the web site.

There is one further advantage to applications like Flickr, Google Maps, and Scribd. Because users of
those sites can search and find images and documents an organization has uploaded, or maps it has
created, new users can find an organization’s collections all the time. They do not have to be directed to a
specific URL. In other words, they do not have to know the Westport Historical Society exists in order to
access its collections. The potential audience for a society’s collections grows exponentially by using
applications that already have a large following. Key to such use, of course, was including links to
Uncovering Westport’s main page in the descriptions of photos, maps, and documents uploaded in their
photostream.

It should be clear that third party applications abound, creating unlimited opportunities for
experimentation and individuality. The structural framework of the Public Humanities Toolbox is stable
and solid, with adequate functionality for one to produce a compelling, attractive web presence. However,
it is only a platform for further experimentation. As new needs are discovered, new applications can be
bundled into the original framework. At least in this design context function does follow form.

We do recognize that the constantly changing new media world can be overwhelming, especially for
newcomers. Staying flexible is not always easy, but it is necessary.

Our Prototype

Uncovering Westport is an example of how a small cultural organization might use open source web tools
to engage audiences online. Though organization specific, this prototype highlights many of the features
available to achieve the goals of increased community engagement, new artifact collection, and increased
funding opportunities. Early on, we focused on building a structure. After exhaustive deliberations and
revisions, we identified and focused our attention on the overarching issues of

• Accessibility for all potential users

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• Appropriateness for a broad range of age and experience
• Interactibility
• Virtual community building through various Web 2.0 applications
• Housing a virtual collection of “objects”
• Understanding local history through collective memory.

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About Us

Al Lees holds an MBA from the University of Rhode Island. His experience in the non-profit sector
includes his tenure as Chair of the Board of Trustees-Old Dartmouth Historical Society, as well as a
current board member of the Westport Land Conservation Trust and the Community Foundation of
Southeastern Massachusetts. His interests include local history and digital humanities research and tools.
(aelees@mac.com)

Leah Nahmias graduated from Indiana University in 2004 with a B.A. in History, a certificate in Jewish
Studies, and a minor in East Asian Languages and Cultures. With all of these incredibly practical degrees
in hand and a spirit of idealism in her heart, she joined Teach For America and moved to Charlotte, North
Carolina. For three years she taught different versions of U.S. history—standard, ESL, inclusion, AP, IB
History of the Americas—and AVID at West Charlotte High School. These various experiences,
professional and personal, got her thinking about how individuals and communities think about the past,
where they encounter “history,” and the challenges of making these processes accessible and meaningful.
Leah moved to Providence, Rhode Island in 2007 to enroll in Brown University’s masters of public
humanities program. While her interests have often shot off in all directions, the core of her academic
study has been how to craft enriching educational programs and experiences that deliver humanities,
especially history, scholarship and make it relevant for diverse audiences. (leah_nahmias@yahoo.com)

Acknowledgements

We are incredibly grateful to several people who have helped us develop our ideas, given us fresh insights,
and provided invaluable feedback on early drafts of this project. There are simply no expressions kind
enough or appreciative enough for Susan Smulyan and Patrick Yott. We are really appreciate of the
afternoon that the thoughtful, enthusiastic and cool folks at George Mason University’s Center for History
and New Media. Thanks also to Steve Lubar, Tracy Gierada, Marjory O’Toole of the Little Compton
(Rhode Island) Historical Society, Adam Sparks of the St. George (Kansas) Historical Society, and Lee
Wright of Historic Marlborough (Massachusetts). Thanks to Jenny O’Neill of the Westport Historical
Society for letting us play around with photographs in the collection and no doubt overwhelm her in the
early very chaotic stages of the project. For directing us towards cool applications and websites we didn’t
already know about, thanks to Meg Rotzel and Amy Johnson. Thank you also to the National Council for
Public History and Mass Humanities for inviting us to present our ideas to your membership. No doubt
we forgot others, so we thank them too!

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 Appendix I: WordPress Grunt Work

The Basics

It may be unnecessary to state the obvious; however, before you can realize your digital goals, your
organization needs to have in place an Internet connection, a host server and a domain name. Without
these three components, you will be unable to proceed.

Domain Name

A domain is your address, the place your site resides within the virtual community. In the “old days,”
accessing an individual site required knowing its particular IP address and typing in a series of letters and
numbers that few ever remembered. Fortunately, things are a lot easier today. Renting your space within
the Internet community is as simple as going to a search engine to locate a registration service, follow a
few simple steps, and voila! your organization has an official virtual address. As with most Internet based
providers, there is no shortage of services for you to use. Try either Register.com, GoDaddy.com, or
Network Solutions.com
These or others will help you set up a unique domain name in a matter of minutes.

Host Server

A server is the computer that stores your WordPress application as well as all of the documents, audio,
video, podcasts, wikis and whatever else may be associated with your organization’s web site, but it is so
much more than that. Through a continuous virtual web, your host computer delivers information to and
receives information from every computer linked within the World Wide Web, essentially pushing and
pulling information and knowledge across the digital universe. Without a host, there is no connectivity
and no communication between you and the virtual world.

Two types of hosting options are available, self-hosting (where an organization maintains its own server)
or virtual hosting (where a third party provides hosting capabilities.) Only the largest institutions, having
the in-house expertise and financial resources to maintain a host server, should attempt to do so. If you do
wish to maintain your own server, you should contact a qualified expert in your area. It is beyond the
scope of this manual to illustrate how to set up a self-hosted server.

Most organizations will opt, and for good reason, to have their site hosted by a third party provider. There
are literally thousands of services worldwide in the business of maintaining servers for this express
purpose. Cost is certainly one consideration, but you should also consider reliability, embedded
applications that will allow your software to operate optimally, upload/download speeds, and security. You
should review the WordPress hosting requirements before selecting a compatible hosting service.

Creating a Database on Your Host Server

You must create a database on your host server to capture and store files from your WordPress application.
This is a relatively simple process requiring only a few additional steps. MySQL is the database
application used by WordPress and supported by most third party providers. The following is an example
of the steps involved:

Step 1: Locate MySQL Database Icon and click to open. Name your database and click Create Database 
(See Figure 19).  

54
 Figure 19: Creating a MySQL database
Step 2: You must create a username and a password. Multiple users can be created as the need arises;
therefore, it is unnecessary to anticipate every possible user during the initial setup. As you can see in
Figure 20, you will be able to assign database privileges by individual user.

Figure 20: Manage database; assign database privileges

Step 3: Once you have created your database and a user name with assigned privileges, the last step is to
attach the user name to a particular database (See Figure 21).

55
 Figure 21: Attach username to database

Installing WordPress on Your Host Server

Installing the WordPress application is a relatively straightforward process. Please keep in mind: a little bit
of patience upfront will pay huge dividends going forward. After all, your goal is to create a compelling
web site, not to spend unnecessary time setting up your WordPress application.

Step 1: Copying WordPress to Your Server

Double click the Icon for your FTP application (we use FileZilla in this example.) See Figure 22.

Figure 22: Open FTP

Notice the screen on your computer. The upper toolbar is how you will connect to your host server. The
blank space below that shows you the commands from your computer to the host once you begin the
connection process. The two middle boxes show all of the folders and files on your computer (Local site)
and will eventually show your folders and files on your host computer (Remote site) while the lower blank
box is for more advanced processes not needed for our purposes.

The upper toolbar is where you type the name of your website (www.yourname.org) in the Host space, and
56
the username and password that you selected when you signed up with your host provider. Leave the Port
space blank and either click on QuickConnect or press the Return (or Enter) key. You should see a screen
similar to that shown in Figure 23:

Figure 23: QuickConnect

You are now connected to your host server and ready to begin installing WordPress.

• First, double click the public_html folder on the remote server to open up this folder. This is where
you will copy the WordPress folder.

• Locate the WordPress application on your computer (Local site) by scrolling to the appropriate
folder and then finding the WordPress folder within it.

• Drag and drop the WordPress folder from the Local site to the Remote site. The file transfer will
take some time to complete. On the next screen (Figure 24) you should see a WordPress folder in
the public_html folder in your Remote site. Place the mouse curser over the WordPress folder,
hold the mouse key down (left key if you are using Windows) and drag the WordPress folder from
the Local site to the remote site.

57
 Figure 24: WordPress hosted on the remote server
If your FTP screen shows a WordPress folder on your remote site within the public_html folder
(something like above) you are ready for Step 2.

Step 2: Changing the WordPress Configuration

Take a deep breath before proceeding. The next step isn’t necessarily difficult but it will feel very
unfamiliar. Fear not, this is the final step before you begin creating your own web site with WordPress.

• Transfer the wp-config-sample.php file. This file, when modified, will link your WordPress site
to the MySQL database you created previously. Drop and drag the wp-config-sample.php from
the WordPress folder in the remote site to the local site.

• Once this file is on your computer (the local site) open it up in a text editor application, either
Notebook (on Windows) or TextEdit (on Macs). Do not open the file in Microsoft Word, as it
will do some funky things to the code! You should see the following:

<?php// ** MySQL settings ** //

define('DB_NAME', 'XXXXXXX'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'XXXXXXXX); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'XXXXXX'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

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Don’t be afraid! What you need to do is replace the XXXXX’s with the database name, user name and
password you chose when you signed onto your host provider. For example, ours looks like this (the
boldface text is our highlights):

<?php
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'uncoveri_wordpresswestport'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'uncoveri_aelees'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'a2140lees'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Now, save your file in the text editor by naming it wp-config.php. Do not name it wp-config-
sample.php! There are two reasons not to do this: 1) you should have a copy of the sample in case
you need to redo it and 2) this file name will not work in WordPress.

Go back to your Filezilla FTP application, make sure that you are in the WordPress folder and scroll down
to make sure that you see a file named wp-config-sample.php. This will let you know you are in the
correct directory. Now, it is a simple case of finding the wp-config.php file that you created on your
computer. Drag this file from the remote to the local site. The file will copy itself into the WordPress
folder and that’s it! Now you ready to begin.

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 Appendix II:
Working with Plug-Ins and Recommendations

What can it do for you?

Plug-ins are little bits of code that allow you to “plug in” a feature to your blog. For instance, there are
several Flickr plug-ins that allow you to embed photographs from a Flickr account into a blog post or
page. There are plug-ins for nearly every conceivable function you might want your blog to have:
calendars, audio players, spam filters, etc. It is beyond the scope of this manual to illustrate more than a
handful of applications that we find useful; however we encourage you to investigate the vast array
available. We have explained the basic “how-to” of downloading and embedding plug-ins and made note
of a few that we especially like.

Plug-ins can only be used in “Bigger and Better Wordpress.” In “Fast and Easy WordPress”
administrators can choose from a few universal plug-ins already hosted on WordPress’s server.

An excellent place for you to begin your own investigation is the WordPress Plug-In Directory located at
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/. Remember, WordPress is a framework for creative expression, and
plug-ins are one of your best tools.

How do users interact with it?

Visitors to your website will see a seamless finished product in which the plug-ins look like regular
features on your website. So if they want to hear audio, they just press play. If they want to check
upcoming events on the calendar, they click on it.

How do you do it?

Because plug-ins are created by a diverse community of WordPress users, each one will have its own
unique characteristics when you use them on your blog. However, uploading and installing them usually
follows the same basic procedure. As you explore the world of plug-ins, you will find that developers
have done an excellent job documenting the use of their applications. We leave the specifics to the
developers; what follows is an illustration of how to install and activate plug-ins on your blog.

1. Download the plug-ins.

Once you have identified a plug-in(s) that you want to use, follow the developer’s instructions for
downloading. Typically you will click the download icon on the developer’s site and unzip the file
from its compressed mode. (You may need to download unzipping software; we recommend
WinZip or Stuffit.) If you are asked to specify a location for the downloaded file, make sure to
pick somewhere easy to retrieve it from. We recommend downloading to your desktop. Later you
can transfer it to your remote serve and delete it from the desktop.

2. Create a plug-in folder on your remote server by following these steps:

• Open your FTP application (we use Filezilla for our examples).
• Connect to your remote server.
• Locate the file you want to transfer in the left hand window.
• Locate and open the directory wp-content. You will find this by double clicking the WordPress
60
 folder and then double clicking the wp-content folder. This is where your plug-ins will be
located.
• Before transferring, you will need to create a plug-in directory. As a review, you right click
once in the exposed right hand window (wp-content directory should be open due to the
previous step.) You will see a pop-up box with the words “Create Directory.” Click on that and
at the end of what appears add the name plugin.
• It should look like this /public_html/wordpress/wp-content/plugin.
• Click OK and what should appear in the wp-content directory is a folder entitled plugin.

3. Transfer your plug-in to the remote server.

• Double click the plug-in folder located on the right hand screen to open it up. It should be
empty of files at this point.
• From the left hand screen, locate the file to transfer. Drag the file from the left screen to the
right.

4. Activate your plug-in.

Go to your blog’s dashboard. Select Plugins from the menu bar. This will bring you to a screen
that lists all of the plug-ins you have installed and allows you to activate or de-active them (See
Figure 25).

Figure 25: Activate or deactivate plug-ins

You can see from this illustration that three plug-ins are active. The deactivate action toggles between
activate and deactivate. If this is a first time installation, you will be asked to click on the activate action.
This will automatically make the plug-in live and ready to use.

Plug-ins We Have Known and Loved

Akismet
• Spam is a notorious problem with all blogs or websites, and WordPress is no exception. Akismet is
a powerful spam filter designed to seamlessly integrate with your blog and “work in the
61
 background” to catch spam before it appears on your active site. The Akismet creators offer this
application free for personal use (this should include non-profit organizations). To obtain your free
download, go to http://akismet.com/download/.

Audio Player for WordPress

• Embedding sound files in your blog allows you to share oral histories, lectures and discussions,
even recorded minutes of committee meetings with the public. There are many plug-ins available
and we urge you to review the options available to you before committing to one type of player
over another. For this exercise, we have chosen a simple but customizable audio player developed
by Martin Laine called Audio Player WordPress plug-in. A detailed explanation of the steps to
upload and access your audio files can be found in the section entitled “How do I …. upload media
files?”

Exclude Pages from Navigation

• You may want to write a page or a series of
pages that do not appear in your site’s navigation
bar but that are linked to from the pages in the
navigation bar. WordPress does not have the built
in tools to allow you to this. If a page is a
“parent” or primary page, it will show up,
whether or not you want it to, unless you install
the Exclude Pages from Navigation Plug-In.

Downloading and installing this plug-in is

identical to all other plug-ins. Once activated, a
navigation check box will appear in the right hand Figure 26: Exclude pages from navigation
column of every Write Post or Page (see Figure
26). The default is a check mark indicating that the page is included in the navigation menu. To
exclude it, uncheck the box and save the document. Your document will be saved and accessible
but will not clutter the navigation bar of your blog.

Flickr Manager
• Tom Gardner created this plug-in for WordPress users who have a Flickr account and want to
integrate it into their blog. Information about downloading and installing this application is located
at http://tgardner.net/wordpress-flickr-manager/. Without this application, embedding pictures into
your blog is a multi-step, tedious process of opening your Flickr account, searching for the picture
that you want, copying its url, and pasting the code into your WordPress post or page. While this
may suit your needs sometime (in order to illustrate a post, for example), at other times you may
want to show many images at once. Flickr Manager allows you to easily browse your Flickr
images and drag and drop the one you want to use into the post or page you are editing.

FlickrPictoBrowser
• PictoBrowser allows you to effortlessly create slide presentations of your Flickr images. Check
out these sites to download the FlickrPictoBrowser and to see it in use:

Kumara Sastry – Developer of the PictoBrowser Plug-In for WordPress.

Diego Bauducco – PictoBrowser Developer
Westport Historical Society – Photographic Exhibition of the 1938 Hurricane

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Folding Pages Widget
• Depending on what theme you have chosen for the your website, all of the pages you have created
for your blog will appear listed out. (Usually this list appears in a right-hand column.) As you
create more pages, the list grows; eventually this makes an impossibly long blog page. To
eliminate this annoyance, we recommend the Folding Pages Widget. Instructions for downloading
and installing this plug-in can be found at http://navyroad.com/2007/09/04/folding-pages-widget/.

Raw HTML
• WordPress uses a very specific programming language. It is often forgiving, but sometimes it can
be a control freak and do funny things to your text or images. To maintain the integrity of the code
place in your blog, Janis Elsts has developed a plug-in called Raw HTML, a firewall of sorts that
stops WordPress in its tracks. Once you have installed and activated the Plug-In, using it is a
simple matter of prefacing and ending the code with the following:

[RAW] your code inside [/RAW]

These tags will maintain the structure of the code, regardless of how WordPress might want alter it.
Instructions for downloading and installation of this plug-in can be found at http://w-
shadow.com/blog/2007/12/13/raw-html-in-wordpress/.

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 Appendix III:
Examples of Tools being used by Public Humanities Institutions

We’ve gathered some examples of public humanities organizations—museums, historical societies,

university-based researchers, non-profit arts institutions—using some of the tools we describe in the
handbook. We’ve tried to include a range of examples from “you can do it” to “not for the faint of heart.”
We hope they inspire you to think about what’s possible and how you can adapt these ideas for your own
mission.

These and other examples can be found at our website:

http://publichumanitiestoolbox.wordpress.com/examples/

WordPress

Project The St. George, Kansas Historical Society website

URL http://stgeorgehistory.org/
Institution The St. George Historical Society (Kansas)
Purpose of • To build a low-cost, engaging website
Usage
Notes How serendipitous to find a small historical society using some of the tools we have
described in the Public Humanities Toolbox! SGHS combines WordPress and Flickr to
share historic images, announce events, and communicate the bylaws, hours, and other
FAQs of the organization.

SGHS is small—8 people, basically—and all volunteer. This format allows non-experts
to easily change content and not to have to worry about software updates. Webmaster
Adam Sparks notes that members have enthusiastically embraced Web 2.0 as a way to
keep the organization going through tough economic times and to keep in touch with
past residents of St. George.

Flickr

Project The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier, Jr.

URL http://americanimage.unm.edu/index.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johncollierjr/
Institution Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico
Purpose of • To house the museum’s collection of historic photographs taken by John Collier,
Usage Jr., making them accessible to a wider public
• To “pull” photographs into a series of educational and “directed looking”
activities hosted at the project’s main website
Notes This impressive project was partially funded by a grant from the National Endowment
for the Humanities. The project uses Flickr both to house its own collection of historic
photographs and thus make them available to a wider audience, but also to use the tags
created by Flickr users to generate images for educational activities. While the second
aspect of the project may be beyond the expertise or budget of the small cultural heritage
organization, The American Image is a good model for starting with a relatively easy
task (uploading images to Flickr) that can later be expanded upon.

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Project New Bedford Whaling Museum photostream
URL http://www.flickr.com/photos/nbwm/
Institution The New Bedford Whaling Museum
Purpose of • To share collections, exhibits, and events with a wider public
Usage
Notes NBWM’s Flickr account reflects traditional museum categories. There are collections
for “Objects,” “Photographs,” “Library Collections,” “Conservation Projects,”
“Exhibits,” “Partnerships” and “Events.” Collections are composed of sets that
correspond to a specific photographic collection, exhibit, or event. “Objects,” for
instance, is divided into Paintings, Scrimshaw, Needlework, etc. The Photographs
collection features sets organized around content (e.g. Wharves), type (e.g., Silver
Gelatin Print) and collector (Dr. Henry D. Prescott). Each image, including snapshots
from museum events, has an accession number. Full metadata is listed with each
image.

Project Indianapolis Museum of Art photostream

URL http://www.flickr.com/photos/imaitsmyart/
Institution The Indianapolis Museum of Art
Purpose of • The IMA’s Flickr collection mostly shares pictures of events around the
Usage institution.

Notes The IMA Flickr page shares behind-the-scenes pictures of installation and trips to visit
working artists. Captions explain museum work to the public, showing how curators
and other staff make decisions that affect the visitor’s experience. Other photo sets
profile a particular department and introduce the work each person contributes towards
the museum’s overall operations. These pictures contribute to other efforts, like IMA
Dashboard6, the museum has made to be more transparent about how it operates.

Others: Walker Art Center, MoMA, St. George Historical Society

Google Maps

Project A Collaborative Map of Modernism in Australia

URL http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/09/a-collaborative.html
Institution Powerhouse Museum*
Purpose of • *This map was created by an enthusiast in response to his visit to a museum
Usage exhibition about Modernist architecture in Australia. It shows the sites of
Modernist structures around the country.

6
http://dashboard.imamuseum.org/
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Notes Although this map was not created by an institution, it is an excellent example of the
type of map that a cultural heritage organization could create. We further like that it is
collaborative, employing the expertise of many people. It is also a good example of
how to extend the theme of an exhibit onto the web; it does not recreate the content of
an exhibit; rather, it takes the themes of an in-house exhibit and uses the unique features
of the internet and Google Maps to create a powerful extension experience.

Project Mapping Memories of Fox Point

URL http://dev.stg.brown.edu/projects/digital_scholarship/fox_point/mainpage.html
Institution Fox Point Oral History Project (John Nicholas Brown Center at Brown University)

Purpose of • Each map shows the places mentioned by subjects during their oral history
Usage interviews
Notes A similar initiative might be proposed as an intern or student project to mine an
institution’s collection of oral histories.

Project Bronx Rhymes map

URL http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/bronx_rhymes/map.html
Institution Bronx Rhymes (New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.)
Purpose of • A map of the South Bronx showing important places in the early history of hip-
Usage hop music. Significant sites are tagged on the map with rhymes created by the
hip-hop pioneer in question.

Notes Documenting an under-studied (and under-mapped) history using text born of the
phenomenon itself…Fantastic!

Scribd

Project n/a
URL http://www.whitney.org/www/calder/brochure.jsp and
http://www.scribd.com/people/view/3045592-whitneymuseum
Institution The Whitney Museum of American Art
Purpose of • Brochures and catalogue excerpts pertaining to recent programs and exhibits
Usage have been uploaded.

Notes The museum has also embedded YouTube and other Web 2.0 applications into the
website for its current Alexander Calder exhibit.

YouTube

Project JFK Library Channel

URL http://www.youtube.com/user/JFKLF
Institution The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

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Purpose of • The Library shares video of famous Kennedy speeches and events (“Ask not
Usage what your country can do for you…” as well as events at the institution,
including conversations with Barack Obama and John McCain. One can also
find short documentaries of edited footage about topics like campaigning,
Jackie, the 1960 Democratic National Convention, etc.

Notes This is an excellent example of using YouTube to share both content and events.
It is also an example of a large archive sharing some of its most popular or in-demand
content. One also gets the feeling that someone has selected speeches or footage that is
relevant to issues today, as with the campaign videos uploaded during the 2008 election
cycle and the videos pertaining to war.

The Library has enabled discussion features, and on some videos the posts range from
thoughtful reflections on US foreign policy to conspiracy theories!

Project The Black List Project

URL http://www.youtube.com/user/bkmuseumblacklist
Institution The Brooklyn Museum
Purpose of • Visitors in the gallery (at specially designated kiosks) shared their experiences
Usage related to race and the impact it has had on their lives and accomplishments.
These videos were then uploaded to YouTube via a specially designated channel
separate from the museum’s main channel.
Notes Powerful testimonies from visitors, generated in the museum but shared with a wide
audience.

Project Education Projects

URL http://www.youtube.com/user/MMIEducation
Institution The Museum of the Moving Image
Purpose of • Young people enrolled in the museum’s educational programs created these
Usage videos!
Notes Good example of how Web 2.0 applications can be used by one specific department or
for a particular project.

Wikis

Project Hoosier Round Barns

URL http://hoosierroundbarns.wikispaces.com/
Institution Graduate student research group at Indiana University
Purpose of • Documents a peculiar vernacular architecture style.
Usage
Notes This example demonstrates how a wiki can be used to document one small topic
extremely thoroughly, and how a small but passionate community can communicate its
knowledge to the wider world.

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 Appendix IV: Other Cool Tools

Here are some quick descriptions of other new media tools you might find useful and interesting as you
consider ways to make your organization more accessible.

Twitter

Whatever Twitter is, everyone suddenly seems to be doing it. Twitter is basically a forum for people to
post updates on what they’re doing, what they’ve recently read or talked about, or what they’re thinking.
Messages are limited to 140 characters—it’s short and sweet! Younger folks will make the easy
comparison to Facebook’s status updates or Instant Messaging’s away message.

Both people and institutions have Twitter feeds. You can read others’ Twitter feeds without having an
account yourself. If you create an account, your home page will display a running list of your contacts’
most recent updates. You can “reply” to folks by typing “@nameofcontact” to respond to their updates.
You can also choose just to read others’ Twitter feeds without posting yourself.

Some people’s tweets are pure navel-gazing: here’s what I just ate, here’s where I’m getting ready to drive.
However, we’ve seen lots of examples of public humanities institutions using Twitter. Sometimes it’s a
matter of staff members sharing their daily schedules or new developments in their field. The former,
especially, creates a great sense of transparency. We especially love the Smithsonian’s Twitter feed, which
gives quick snapshots to unusual items in the collection, updates on that day’s events (like concerts,
symposiums, exhibit openings, etc.), and even a funny interactive game where SI posts a picture and asks
followers to try to figure out where in the institution it was taken.

Twitter may seem a little overwhelming, but we especially like three possibilities it offers for small
cultural heritage organizations. First, as with all new media projects, it communicates to your community,
especially younger folks, that you are meeting them where they are. Two, it’s an easy way to instantly let
your community know about events or highlight objects from your collection. Finally, you can follow
high-level museum, new media, or other public humanities professionals (or innovators from smaller
institutions) to see what they’re doing; this seems an easy way to keep abreast of developments in the
field. When they read something, attend a conference, see an original exhibit or website, they will
probably tweet it. Now you’ll know it too.

If and when you start a Twitter feed, have clear goals for what you hope it will help you achieve. Again,
the free cat warning: new media is easy to get, but then you have to take care of it! Of course, when you
start your Twitter feed, be sure to blog about it on your website.

Lulu Books

Lulu is a service that allows you to self-publish books in a variety of formats. The big social vision of
Lulu is to help authors circumvent the commercial publishing world. Authors who have self-published
through Lulu have their works uploaded into the Lulu catalogue and anyone can order a copy. The
purchaser can choose from a variety of binding options that affect the final price.

For the small cultural heritage organization, Lulu offers many opportunities. One is to remove the onerous
costs of publishing catalogues. If you have a PDF version of your catalogue, upload it to Lulu. Then
direct your members (via your website, of course) to the correct item on Lulu and let them order from
there. This saves you the cost of printing 1,000 copies up front and the uncertainty of storing them or not
selling enough to recoup costs.
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Bring old books back to life! Lulu also offers a service of scanning and re-printing vintage books. (See
http://www.lulu.com/en/services/vintagepublishing/.) You or your members may want to reprint old
catalogues, yearbooks, scrapbooks, or genealogies you hold in your collection; this is an easy and
(relatively) inexpensive resource for doing so.

Lulu publishes many other types of products, including calendars, brochures, manuals, photobooks, CD
and DVDs, and comic books. Lulu also offers to do the design and layout of your text. These more
traditional printing-company services are not free, but they are competitively priced and have the
convenience of being transacted through the web.

You may be able to generate revenue from books or catalogues that you publish through Lulu. When you
set pricing for the document, you can set a price-per-item revenue. Lulu will then calculate a commission
for itself (about ¼ of your revenue) and generate a total cost that includes printing, shipping, revenue, and
commission.

LibraryThing

LibraryThing allows users to create a library catalogue for their personal collections. The catalogue
combines traditional library data like ISBN and date of publication with social media features like tags,
discussion threads, and reader reviews. LibraryThing is free; users create a profile and then start adding
books to their library. You can add books by title, author, or ISBN number; LibraryThing automatically
searches the online catalogues of other libraries (including the Library of Congress) and Amazon.
LibraryThing pulls traditional library data from these sites and adds it to the description of books you’ve
added in your library.

We think LibraryThing has incredibly potential with organizations that have small resource libraries or
collections of out-of-print and hard-to-find books. Your users could easily search your online catalogue
and then contact you or visit your site to borrow or read the books. Building the online catalogue, while a
little tedious, would be a simple and impactful project for volunteers or high school or college interns.

Like many of the other applications we highlight in the Public Humanities Toolkit, there is a large and
enthusiastic community of users. Periodically they turn out for Flash Mob Cataloguing events, where
LibraryThing members in the area descend upon a small organization that needs help cataloguing its
library. Folks bring their laptops, bar code scanners, eat pizza and catalogue until the job is done! Often
the LibraryThing members are joined by volunteers from the organization in question; recently the
Audubon Society of Rhode Island got flash-mobbed and digitized its 2,500 item collection in a matter of
hours. This is an excellent example of a small organization reaching out to the Web 2.0 world, both as a
way to accomplish a task (cataloguing) and engage its community (hosting the event). LibraryThing will
help you organize a Flash Mob for your organization and even provides you with free t-shirts, barcode
scanners, and laptop stickers.

Greenstone Digital Library Software

Greenstone is another digital library project. The set up is definitely more complex than LibraryThing, but
it also allows users to add more complex objects such as images, sound files, and video. Greenstone is a
free open-source multilingual software application developed by the New Zealand Digital Library Project
and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO. One of the big hairy audacious goals of Greenstone is to
increase access to knowledge and institutional resources in developing countries.

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Greenstone is designed for universities, archives, libraries and other “public service institutions”—in
short, Greenstone is for organizations that have professional digital specialists on staff. That helps to
explain why the set up is more complicated than most of the other tools we describe in the Public
Humanities Toolkit. However, we still think it’s really cool and worth keeping an eye on. Scholars are
already finding interesting ways to use Greenstone to share their research and enliven their teaching with
real-world tasks for students to build an archive. Check out the Greater Cincinnati Memory Project, for
example.

Note that, like many open-source projects, the Greenstone website is a wiki, which allows the community
of users to add their own projects and advice for how to use the software.

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