Presentation to the Archives Association of Ontario, June 16, 2011, looking at different approaches to outreach in a small municipal archive service.

1. Losing control:experiments in outreach Amanda Hill Hillbraith Ltd. [Deseronto Archives]

2. Pushing the boundaries Existing outreach Blog Twitter Flickr site for images Bi-monthly town newsletters (delivered to every home in Deseronto) All mediated by the Archives How to take it further?

3. User-generated content? Grant of $16,000 from Museums and Technology Fund, 2010 with matched funding of $4,000 from the Town of Deseronto Used to build and generate content for a new website: ‘About Deseronto’ Inspiration: http://ournewhaven.org.uk

5. Absence… Physical distance from home town Feelings of affection for home town with apologies to Jessica Hagy of ‘Indexed’ http://thisisindexed.com

6. Low-cost, sustainable approach Just launching a beta version of their hosted service in April 2010

7. Omeka.org and Omeka.net

8. Omeka.net plans

11. Disadvantages Initially, Omeka.net did not offer an option for users to upload materials direct Which had been the whole point of ‘About Deseronto’ Hard to get people to engage Very small population, which doesn’t help!

12. New direction Oral histories Archives Board members helped to identify potential interviewees 10 interviews conducted during the course of the project Big learning curve – technology, technique

13. Christmas in the funeral home

14. Memories

15. ‘About Deseronto’ Partial success ‘Contribute’ option now available, but not really being used!

16. Other outreach experiments Family/Heritage Day competition

17. Self-guided tour 110 downloads

18. Doors Open Partnership between Napanee and Deseronto Benefits of Napanee’s previous experience Recycled earlier work: Flickr images for display boards and brochures Plan to use these materials in future events - Waterfront Festival on July 2nd

21. Facebook Set up a Facebook account for the Archives to help promote Doors Open through an event page An unexpected success (yet another site to maintain…) Also used Twitter to do a daily tweet on Doors Open

22. Doors Open verdict A lot of work, but good to meet people on the day who had never used the archives 1,000 people visited sites in Deseronto Identified some more potential oral history interviewees Even accessioned some new materials for the archives!

23. Conclusions on experiments Try different things to see what happens Some things work better than others Some are more work than others Digitization groundwork (lots of images on Flickr) was a real boon

24. Contact details deserontoarchives@gmail.com http://deserontoarchives.wordpress.com @DeserontoArch on Twitter