How I Joined My Local Historical Society

Until coming to Dartmouth, I'd pretty much always lived in large cities. The politics and agencies that made these cities function were somewhat of a mystery to me - I knew work was done by people somewhere, but the processes and responsible agents felt distant and mysterious.

Strafford's Iconic Town House

Living in small town Vermont is a totally different scene. The business and services of our town, Strafford VT, population ~1000, is run by people I see at the general store, who work at the local school, who live down the street. My friends are on the Volunteer Fire Department, my husband attends meetings of the Conservation Committee, my neighbor is on the School Board.

After we settled in to town, I wanted to get involved, too. Given my experience in preservation departments big and small, the Strafford Historical Society seemed a natural fit. This past January, I emailed the chairman of the Historical Society Board, explaining my educational and professional background in preservation, as well as my current work with digital projects and digital preservation. The response was immediate and enthusiastic: "OH MY GOD WHEN CAN WE MEET WITH YOU THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED YOU ARE AN ANSWER TO OUR PRAYERS" (I've paraphrased).

The Brick Store- Home of the Historical Society

It turns out, the Strafford Historical Society has long felt a need for a more developed web presence, and has dreamed of putting their collections online. Can you, they asked, build us a website, digitize our collections and make them searchable for the world on a very small (non-existant) budget? Having never built a website, and knowing how much work, infrastructure and expertise goes into creating digital collections, I said, "Sure! But it might take us a while."

Over the past few months, we've had a few meetings of the ad hoc Technology Committee of the Strafford Historical Society. We've identified people in town with programming and systems admin skills that can help us set up an Omeka instance. People have volunteered time for "data entry" (i.e. metadata creation) so they can learn more about the collections. We even got a donation of a scanner from a generous Board member.

Building out a digital presence from scratch with few budgetary or infrastructure resources could seem daunting and overwhelming, but I'm feeling pretty optimistic we can do this thing. The past two years have shown me that this town is full of talented people willing to contribute time, willing to share knowledge and expertise, and willing to learn new skills to serve the good of the town. We've totally got this.

Written by Jenny Mullins

Road Trip to Geographies: New England Book Work, the New England Chapter of The Guild of Book Workers 2014-2015 Exhibition

On October 8^th, 2014, Stephanie Wolff and I were invited to the University of Vermont to give a talk about the Geographies: New England Book Work exhibit and to share our techniques and approaches to our own work. The event was coordinated with the recent meeting of the Book Arts Guild of Vermont at their annual meeting to view special collections material. Prudence Doherty, Public Services Librarian, was our host and very generously brought out many items from the Library’s collection which also related to the theme of New England.

Upon our arrival the exhibit space was nicely occupied by students, hopefully some of them had taken the time to consider some of the items in the cases!

Here is a 180 of the three cases displaying the work. It’s not often that exhibitors get to see what the shows look like as a whole and this one was especially well displayed, thanks to Stephanie Wolff and Linda Lembke.

The first part of the program Stephanie and I talked about the show and highlighted the various techniques and expressions of creativity that were reflected in the bindings. 

Prudence, opened up the cases so we were able to really show the books in more detail, taking turns to point out the special features of many of the bindings. The show displays a wonderful array of fine bindings as opposed to artist’s books so we had an exploratory dialogue on the nuances between those two factions of binding approaches. 

After our time at the exhibit we retreated downstairs to Special Collections where Stephanie and I talked about our work. I come from a more traditional approach where I will always select a text and create a binding that reflects the contents. Stephanie on the other hand will take great pains and process to create the whole entity of her work. She brought to share all of her “story boards” that illustrated her voyage from concept to finished product. As a look into an artist’s creativity this was a wonderful opportunity to really see how these wonderful bindings come to be.

After our talk we stayed a bit to look at the wonderful items that had been placed on the table and had a pleasant visit with many of the members. I thank Prudence and the Book Arts Guild of Vermont for this opportunity to come together.

For more information about the exhibition, check out the Guild of Book Worker’s New England Chapter website.

The exhibit will be at the Bailey/Howe Library at the University of Vermont, Burlington, VT through December 12, 2014.

Written by Deborah Howe