Last week’s blog post, “Two Broken Hips Away from Closing,” was inspired by a tweet from historian Larry Cebula. This week’s post is inspired by a tweet from historian David Grabitske (as seen above) in response to that post. Last year around about this time, I came to the realization that history is part of a community’s infrastructure and I wrote about it here. Since then, any time I have the opportunity, I tell people…
This tweet by public historian Larry Cebula out of Spokane, Washington, is painful in that there are far too many small museum situations where this is true. Often local history museums have been started by older people in a community, folks at or near retirement who are thinking of their personal legacies or the legacies of their community. They’ve got the time and motivation to start a collection or save a building and put together…
Upon the recommendation of others, my husband started watching The Curse of Oak Island recently. This is a reality show series from The History Channel wherein a couple of brothers and their team search a 140-acre island off the coast of Nova Scotia for a supposed buried treasure. The search for this treasure has occurred by various parties over the past 200 years. My husband got a few episodes in before I sat down to…
Leading a local historical society, as I do, creating long-term financial stability for the organization is always on my mind. At this time of year, so is membership, particularly figuring out how to increase the number of members. Members, especially those who remain members over a long period of time, are not only the lifeblood of historical societies, they add immeasurably to the organization in terms of moral, financial, and other forms of support. Colleen…
Welcome to Round 2 in the cage match between libraries and museums. In March 2019 in a post called “Libraries Versus Museums,” I discussed an article from CityLab about how public and private data should be handled by the highly trusted public libraries because there was no other model out there for handling such data … except that there is. History museums regularly handle public and private data. That, apparently, was Round 1 in the…