For our project with the Central Rappahannock Heritage Center, a paper archive in downtown Fredericksburg that stores collections from Spotsylvania, Stafford, Caroline, and King George counties, we set out to increase public engagement through a social media campaign and an Omeka site that would house an archival collection of digitized photos and postcards created in a way for the public to leave comments and help the center gather new and unknown information. We worked with our project partners at the center to gather the sources used on the Omeka site and create ideas for social media content that targeted some of their most pressing needs, such as volunteers, donations, and general public knowledge of the Heritage Center’s existence and what they do.
Building the Omeka Site
For the photograph exhibit, we began by creating an Omeka site as a subdomain of the umwhistory.org Dr. McClurken maintains, and we added plug-ins for public commenting and map creation to create that interactive experience and boost public engagement. We added items as we received them from the CRHC and listed the known metadata for each image, including the CRHC donor collection and image description. We then added these items into item type collections, divided between photographs and postcards, as well as a comprehensive exhibit consisting of an image carousel with questions on each item designed for visitors to consider their connections to the CRHC collection.
Find our main website here: The Central Rappahannock Heritage Center Omeka Site
Social Media Outreach
Using platforms such as Instagram and YouTube, we created a social media campaign centered around getting word about the Heritage Center out to the wider audience of the Fredericksburg community and surrounding counties. We used Canva to create the first team introduction post and the quotation post from an interview we did with a researcher. We also used Canva to cut video clips together, add some captions, place some images where needed, and add in some background music. To maintain accessibility standards, we used ScreenPal to generate captions, transcripts, and audio description, and the versions of all our videos with these features can be found on the ScreenPal link on the Instagram page.
In terms of content, we wanted to highlight both what makes the Heritage Center so special and what needs they currently have. To do this, we did a photo series of “Then and Now” photos, which got the most amount of public engagement out of our grid posts. For these posts, the first photo was a picture featured in the Omeka collection of a location in downtown Fredericksburg, and then one of our team members photographed that location as it is today. Our most popular form of content were Instagram Reels, particularly the video where two of our team members show you how to get to the location in downtown Fredericksburg as well as our interview series. Two of us went into the center during open hours and filmed some short interviews with the volunteers to talk about what it’s like volunteering, what resources they have at the CRHC, and what they find enjoyable or rewarding about their work. We also did an interview with the current board president to discuss some of the pressing needs of the Heritage Center.
If you want to see what we’re talking about, check out our Instagram page linked here: CRHC Instagram
Venturing into the World of YouTube
Our group didn’t initially plan on using YouTube as a platform for this project, but as we got further into the semester, we found out that our project partners had a video they wanted some adjustments to and wanted us to see if we could help. After editing the final cut on Canva, our partners wanted to be able to share the video with the public, so we thought, why don’t we just make a YouTube channel for them? So we did! We edited the video through the same process as we would the Instagram Reels and linked the ScreenPal version in the description of the post.
Check it out here: CRHC YouTube channel
It’s Time to Pass the Baton
As our semester here at UMW comes to a close, my team members and I gave our partners at the Heritage Center the log-in information to all the accounts we made as well as a guide to help them figure out how to use them and make similar posts to the ones we created. We hope that our efforts this semester help them see what can be done with the resources at the center and build onto the audience they want to grow.
You got a lifelong supporter in us CRHC!
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