Sharing Information on the Web: The Hopewell Valley History Project

If you’re interested in local history, this talk will provide an overview of the Hopewell Valley History Project, explain how the site is organized, and show how you can use the different elements to explore your interests in local places and history.

Or if you’re interested in in the larger issue of how to share large amounts of information on the Web – for your group or organization or family – this talk will use the History Project as an example of the design decisions and trade-offs made in building a site to share hundreds of documents and thousands of images in ways that are both convenient to access and reasonable to manage.

• See the History Project Site Index for a breakdown of the different types of materials hosted on the site, and the associated web interfaces used to explore them.

Registration: PMUG has kindly made a limited number of non-member audience “seats” available for this meeting, on a first-come, first-serve basis. If you wish to attend, see the announcement or e-mail pres@pmug-nj.org, and include your full name for an invitation with connection information.

Abstract

We, and our organizations, have a bounty of digital information that would be nice to share online – if there were useful and efficient ways to do so.

For example, the Hopewell Valley History Project is a volunteer effort to collect, digitize, and share the history of the Hopewell Valley in Mercer County, New Jersey (HopewellHistoryProject.org). It is currently hosting several hundred historic documents and several thousand historic images. That’s a lot of digital files, and of very different types – documents and images, books and pamphlets, maps and aerials, images and panoramas. So the challenge is not only to organize all this material, but to present it in useful ways depending on its format and content.

In this talk, Doug will explore the approaches used on the History Project site to present these different types of materials using various web technologies. While some of these do require custom programming, most use off-the-shelf web components that could be applied to your own projects. Or you may have other ideas to discuss.

Doug Dixon is an independent technology consultant and writer, specializing in Web technology, databases, and digital media. He created and developed the Hopewell Valley History Project, which is assembling digital copies of local historical materials. Previously, he consulted to the Aberdeen Test Center doing large data testing and visualization, and was a product manager and software developer at Intel and Sarnoff. Doug is a board member of the Hopewell Valley Historical Society and the Hopewell Museum, and is managing the HVHS website along with the Hopewell Public Library website. He has authored four books on digital media, published hundreds of feature articles, and presented over a hundred seminars and talks.