Written for the NCPH Working Group, “Public History Online, Using the Web to Collaborate and Share” (2012)

What makes for an effective public history website? In my opinion, the best serve a distinct purpose, feature balanced content, provide simple navigation, and include various opportunities for user interaction. Until recently, museums, universities, and cultural resource centers have focused too much on presenting text-heavy, one-dimensional websites interspersed with mishmashes of media that discourage everyday users from learning, communicating, or collaborating effectively. Trained to write lengthy research papers, articles, and books, scholars are only gradually recognizing that issuing content on the web demands new modes of contextualization in line with an ever-changing digital environment. Creating a public history website that is easy to use and interact with requires identifying an audience, simplifying goals, and accounting for new forms of online consumption. Jordan Grant and I kept these criteria in mind as we built a soon to be released website for the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Community Museum: “The Community Documentation Initiative” (CDI).

The CDI website called for ACM curators to “gather, organize, and make accessible to the public historical and contemporary information on the social and economic life and development of communities east of the Anacostia River.” The initiative’s primary objectives: deepen the museum’s engagement with the local community, make the museum more relevant, and empower citizens to communicate with each other and the museum through educational activities. For curators, realizing these lofty goals meant featuring content that ranges from digital representations of exhibitions to audio and video clips of oral histories to local artist galleries and archival documents.

For all intents and purposes, the museum hired Jordan and I to transform its physical exhibitions and digital content into an online resource that embraces Web 2.0 standards of interoperability, collaboration, and user-focused design. However, building an interactive and serviceable website demands more than simply reproducing existing content and hoping for community dialogue to ensue; allowing for community input is essential to the collaborative process in all stages of a public history website’s life. For instance, our web-team never fully considered how to market the CDI site to Anacostia residents or maintain user interest/interaction before the development process began. This forces the museum to rely on a modest number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers for feedback and participation, a positive development if properly channeled and/or cultivated.

Other challenges included clarifying the CDI website’s overall purpose, winnowing down content, and figuring out how best to connect with an Anacostia community that consumes online information in new and diverse ways. Public history websites serve many purposes. They are used to collect, exhibit, collaborate, or, as is the case with CDI, all of the above. While not an inherently wrong-minded approach, meeting all three objectives requires thoughtful discussion of how best to visually represent the different elements that make up a site. Regrettably, rushed deadlines, unfinished exhibit pieces, and limited funding hampered efforts to create, in my mind, a truly effective online resource that accomplished all of the ACM’s stated goals. Nonetheless, Jordan and I waded through the various content types and settled on a site architecture based on the initiative’s four main themes: The City, The Environment, The Arts, and Cultural Encounters. In doing so, we united different content types, balancing text and media across a handful of sub-pages that served these four themes directly.

Utilizing the open-source web application WordPress to design and build the site, Jordan and I created a space for ACM curators to release new information relative to the CDI website’s thematic structure and designated specific areas on the site for user interaction. Online visitors can remark on a blog post or exhibit page using the WordPress commenting system Disqus, a “plug-in” that filters spam, provides email notification, and aggregates social mentions among other features. The CDI website’s design also features a “Community” page that aggregates public mentions of the initiative and integrates comments from different social networking platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Nevertheless, institutional inertia and security precautions barred Jordan and I from testing certain plug-ins on our WordPress dashboard, or “back-end” interface. While designing a previous WordPress site for the National Museum of American History (NMAH), we avoided this problem by hosting the website beyond the Smithsonian Institution’s own network. This gave us the ability to make quick design changes, upload new content, and test WordPress plug-ins on that site’s official HTTP address. Conversely, ACM curators wanted to ensure that the Smithsonian’s own IT professionals could fix or respond to issues on their website directly. Jordan and I welcomed the Smithsonian’s hosting of the site, since the museum hired us as temporary employees who eventually needed to leave the project for curators and IT personnel to maintain. Nonetheless, working in tandem with the Smithsonian’s IT staff presented obstacles that hindered our larger vision. In addition to not being able to test plug-ins, limited access to back-end file-types forced us to email file copies to IT whenever we made changes to the design or wanted to see how the CDI website looked live. Presently, we do not even know how our final product appears to the public.

Initially designed for the blogging community, WordPress’s ability to feed new content to RSS subscribers fits the ACM’s goal of maintaining relevancy in the digital community. Knowing that curators may be too busy to maintain weekly blog posts, we suggested scheduling release dates for newly established or existing content so that the site features new subject matter on a regular basis. Jordan and I first tested this concept working on the American Enterprise pre-exhibition website for the NMAH. Moreover, “The Cotton” WordPress theme we employed features “portfolio” layouts for certain pages, allowing us to present digital images and artistic pieces in a visually stunning way that avoids clutter.

While other content management systems (CMS) permit digital cataloging/archiving without compromising site design (i.e. Omeka), WordPress allows the more “technically challenged” museum professional to showcase new content promptly and efficiently. The platform’s easy to use back-end interface includes helpful labels and a devoted online community eager to explain how WordPress functions for new users. Still, Jordan and I drafted a comprehensive manual for ACM curators that details using WordPress and “The Cotton” theme.

Perhaps successfully connecting with local community members represents the greatest challenge when building any public history website, including the CDI. How do inner-city museums best connect with poverty-stricken communities that face online access restrictions? For example, not every family can afford the pricey packages offered by Internet service providers, let alone afford a computer. One solution presented itself last spring. While not every Anacostian can afford a laptop, recent studies show that smart-phone use is rapidly increasing in urban communities. Although building a smart-phone app that specifically caters to certain demographics would go a long way toward increasing the ACM’s technical relevancy, it would not solve the initial problem of getting community members interested in or involved with the CDI website in the first place.

Ideally, outreach efforts (for the purposes of raising interest in public history websites) should include educational components that feature collaboration with community centers, libraries, and schools. Coupled with social networking campaigns, such endeavors will almost certainly raise greater awareness for a public history website and foster more meaningful collaboration. Had we continued on with the CDI project, we would almost certainly have pushed the ACM in this direction.

All told, Jordan and I managed to help curators build a website that celebrates, explores, and asks questions of a vibrant, largely African American community within the heart of the nation’s capital. Regardless of whether or not the project accomplished its stated goals, we learned several valuable lessons throughout the development process. When designing a public history website, it is important to have a clear sense of purpose, limit text and media appropriately, and understand who your users are and how they consume online content. If your team of museum professionals faces a high technical learning curve, seek outside help from an established design or new media agency. Granted, funding an online digital history project can prove challenging. Therefore, I suggest contacting local colleges and universities with students eager to improve their own technical skill-sets and gain real-world experience. Public historians are still learning how best to communicate with their online publics. Any efforts to advance this process, no matter how the final product turns out, should ultimately prove rewarding.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2012 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.