Ohio Historical Society sites now accredited

Congratulations to the Ohio Historical Society on reaccreditation by American Association of Museums, as well as to the OHS sites newly accredited for the first time. Among those are the Adena Mansion (Chillicothe) and the Johnston Farm (Piqua) [check out their blog], both of which I have visited and really enjoyed. The house museums and the stories at both sites are just fascinating. Furthermore, another newly accredited site is the Armstrong Air & Space Museum (Wapakoneta), which is directed by a friend of mine - so special congrats to him as well.

The Ohio Historical Society has been reaccredited by the American Association of Museums. Six OHS historic sites and museums have been accredited for the first time: Adena Mansion Gardens in Chillicothe Armstrong Air & Space Museum in Wapakoneta Campus Martius Museum in Marietta Fort Ancient near Oregonia Fort Meigs in Perrysburg Johnston Farm & Indian Agency in Piqua Accreditation from the American Association of Museums is the highest n … Read More

via Ohio Historical Society Collections Blog

Then and Now: View from Webster St Bridge

It’s a funny thing about “historic” photos. In order for them to ever actually become “historic,” someone in the present has to capture that image!  Don’t forget, what is ordinary and commonplace today almost certainly won’t be in 50 or 100 years…maybe even less than that! So snap that picture!

I’ve recently become very interested in “then and now” photos. (I think this is sort of along the same lines as my fascination with the “before and after” photos of my home improvement projects, but on a longer timeline and grander scale!)

Here’s a good example of a Then-and-Now comparison:

I snapped this photo a few weeks ago, looking at downtown Dayton, Ohio, from the north side of the Mad River, just off the north end of the Webster Street bridge:

Dayton from Webster St, 2010

A few weeks later, as I was scanning photographs for the library’s digital collections, I ran across a photo showing the same scene. Only the photo was taken in 1901:

Dayton from Webster St, 1901

I am just fascinated by being able to make these kinds of visual comparisons. I think this is the stuff that really makes history come alive for people.

If you are interested in this sort of thing, here are a few links to other tasty nuggets of “visual history” that you might find interesting:

• CNN Special – Hurricane Katrina: Then and Now. Snapshots from the 2005 hurricane superimposed on current street views.
• Roma ieri, Roma oggi (Rome yesterday, Rome today). A Flickr site operated by a local photographer in Rome, Italy. He posts historic photos and images, and then he goes out and photographs the same scene today.
• Paul Hagon’s Flickr & Google Maps Streetview mashup (New York City). Hagon figured out how to take geotagged Flickr images and display them as icons on a Google Map, which, when you click on one of the icons in the map at left, the window at the right shows you the street view for that location. Fantastic! There are also pages for sights in New Zealand, as well as Sydney, Austrlia.

If anyone knows of any other great sites similar to these, I’d be glad to hear about them!

Funding Ohio’s libraries

Did you know: Ohio’s libraries have the highest circulation, computer usage, volume of materials, and patron traffic per capita in the country. That’s one of the highlights of the Ohio Library Council‘s white paper: “Ohio Public Libraries: Open to All”. The white paper includes quite a bit of interesting information about the history and funding of Ohio’s 251 public library systems.

This is interesting background reading in light of the upcoming change of command in the Ohio governor’s office. At the end of the year, Strickland (D) will pass the torch over to Kasich (R), who will then try his hand at dealing with the state’s budget situation. I’m not political enough to offer any speculation on what this might involve or what its impact will be to already-hurting libraries. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Montgomery County real estate mapping

I just noticed something new on the Montgomery County (Ohio) Auditor’s web site – http://www.mcrealestate.org/. They have a new app for property mapping. (It says it’s still under construction, but it does have some functions already.) 

Go to the web site, click on property search, and then search for a property. On the property page, you’ll notice a link to “New maps (under construction).” If you click on it, it will show you the parcel map with that property highlighted. I think they always had something like this, but this new map has some additional cool features. (Note: the new map takes a few seconds to load. It will display an “under construction” note at first, but after a couple of seconds, the map does appear.)

There is a tool on the new map where you can select any parcel and it will tell you the information (owner, address, value) in a little pop-up bubble.

There is also a (new) feature to show you info about a parcel you identify from the map, without knowing the owner or the exact address. To do this, click on the binoculars at the right, then select the icon that looks like a computer monitor (“identify parcel”). A little instruction bubble pops up, click “place point” to go back to the map. Then click on the parcel you are interested in, and a little red dot will appear on it, and an info bubble will pop up telling you the information about that parcel.

Pretty cool! I’ve been waiting for this! Now you don’t necessarily have to know the owner or the exact address to get the info about a piece of property. I’m very excited. I know it will be useful for local history research.

Historic photos on Flickr

This morning, I read this post from The Atlantic about a collection of Civil War photos added to Flickr by the Library of Congress. The photos look like they are all cased tintypes, many of them hand-colored…so very interesting.

I love projects like this: using Web 2.0 and new media tools to share history with the world. Many places are using Flickr for this type of project. We recently got a Flickr account for the Dayton library, in fact. It’s one more way to get your “stuff” to everyone “out there.” Plus, there’s always the hope that people will engage your content, maybe even identify a person or a place that has been up to this point “unidentified.”

Flickr has a lof of neat ways to interact with content: comments, tags, mapping, and even groups. I was interested in a place where people from the Dayton area could share their local history photos and see others’ photos…and not finding one, I created one: History in the Miami Valley (Ohio). So far it has 19 members, and I only just created it last week.

I am amazed at some of the photos people are sharing on Flickr — the way we are documenting the present, which years from now will amount to having documented the past. We have a wonderful collection like this at the library—the Lutzenberger photograph collection—full of pictures from the 1880s to 1930s. I always marvel at the way things used to look — especially the things that aren’t there anymore (and there are a lot of those!). It might seem silly to go out and take pictures of ordinary places and things, now, but in 100 years, people will look at those pictures the same way we look at pictures from 1900 today. I hope not only that these photos survive that long — oh the digital age! (but that’s for another entry) — but that some of them make it into a library or archives to be shared and studied by all.

Custer’s battle flag

Today, I read on CNN that a battle flag from the Battle of Little Bighorn will be auctioned off. Whenever I see something like this, I always hope the artifact at hand will end up in a museum, so it can be shared by all. I can only imagine the historical treasures currently resting in private hands… I’m sure some people may not even know that they have them or that they are historically significant.

Hello world! (Again)

I’ve officially moved this blog over from the Wayne U. server to a free, hosted WordPress blog……so hello again!