Preserving Local History Update

We have had some exciting developments with the Preserving Local History project since our last post. We finished our photography and scanning of the items at CPUMC and have proceeded with the next steps in our process. We sent out an online survey several weeks ago asking about the needs and wants of local organizations in terms of preservation and potential cooperation with other groups. We received quite a few responses and part of the process was a planned meeting with interested groups.

 

On Tuesday, November 19 we held a community meeting at College Place United Methodist Church. We invited those who had participated in our survey to come to CPUMC and learn more about our process, expectations, and progress so far on this project. We had a great response – close to twenty people from eight organizations attended the meeting! There were representatives from churches, schools, and neighborhood organizations, which is what we were hoping for. All of the members of our team came away from the meeting with a very good feeling about the direction that the project is going in. The representatives from the different groups had a lot of energy and questions, and we had a time of sharing where they could make recommendations to us as well as to one another. After the meeting – as part of our idea for an incentive to get better participation in our project – we held drawings for local charities. One of the five $50 donations went to the UNCG Spartan Food Pantry, which operates out of CPUMC.

We are still hoping to get more responses to our survey and to see which groups and organizations are interested in the possibility of sharing their materials and preserving them in a digital format. I will be making a lot of follow up calls in the months to come and doing some work with data to see what types of needs exist in the community and what can be done to help meet those needs. Next semester Megan, along with other team members, will be visiting organizations who expressed an interest in the team seeing their situation, which will include continued camera testing by digitizing two or three of their items. There are a lot of exciting opportunities coming our way.