Hello! I’m Jodi Kiffmeyer, a student at UW-Madison’s iSchool. Last semester I rediscovered a passion for family and community history while taking a genealogy course at the iSchool. Unfortunately, I also discovered that it’s not always easy to find historical information online when your family comes from rural northern Wisconsin, as mine does.
That’s one of the reasons I’m excited to be partnering with the Barron County Historical Society in northwest Wisconsin to complete my summer practicum. My family has lived in Barron County for six generations, which means I’ll be immersing myself in my own family history throughout this project. In fact, I’ve already discovered that the historical society has an anvil that one of my ancestors donated several decades ago!
When I was growing up, it was an annual rite of passage for elementary school students to take a field trip the historical society’s Pioneer Village Museum. I’ll be working on site at the museum this summer, where they have a large collection of photos – many from the late 1800s and early 1900s – that have been digitized by local high school students and other volunteers. My role is to prepare those files for archiving and to research the best ways to store them and make them accessible online. I’ll also be developing a workflow and training manual so that future staff and volunteers can continue where I leave off.
I work at a public library in Barron County, and through my studies at iSchool I’ve become interested in finding ways that libraries and historical societies can collaborate as community digital archives. After this summer, I plan to use the CCDC training to help my library make decisions about digitizing and preserving the historical documents and photos that have been entrusted to us.
I look forward to an interesting and exciting summer!
–Posted by Jodi Kiffmeyer
Curating Community Digital Collections is supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, #RE-85-17-0127-17. Meet all of the students in the 2018 CCDC cohort here.
