Carolyn Goldstein coordinates the Mass. Memories Road Show and teaches public history at UMass Boston. Together with Andrew Elder, she is the co-developer of RoPA, the Roadmap for Participatory Archiving. RoPA is an online resource that guides libraries and cultural organizations through the process of collaborating with community members to plan engaging and inclusive participatory archiving events and to create digital collections.
As historical organizations increasingly take on the role of relevance to a wider audience, we need to collect different “stuff” from a more diverse population. Perhaps your town has changed over the past century and your collections do not reflect the local histories of people and groups who are now a vital part of your community. How do you go about enriching your collections with their stories and connecting them to older histories? What are the obstacles and successes you have met with? How have you partnered with different individuals and groups to make sure your collections do not only speak to the distant past? Join us on Dec. 9, 12:00-1:30 for a conversation on the art of proactive collecting of community history in the twenty-first century.