The Mount Vernon Historic Preservation Commission (MVHPC) wanted to take their digital archives and make them much more accessible to the average person. Their prior website used a very task oriented archive software system that was difficult to use, both as a viewer and as a volunteer trying to add content to it.
I migrated over 1300 pieces of digital content over to use WordPress and a very image-friendly theme allowing them to easily update and present the history of the Mount Vernon, Iowa community to the rest of the world. The design focused on intentionally being sparse, the intent is to let the archived material have center stage.
As with many of my projects over 10 hours of coaching and instruction were also included in this project to help bring the volunteer staff up to speed and capable of adding new material, including adding audio and elements to pages and presentations.
We also created a YouTube channel to show dozens of hours of lectures and seminars that the organization has held over the years and video taped. In addition, we recently digitized several hours of audio tapes which will be combined with several of the archived images to create an online audio slideshow describing events that occurred almost 100 years ago.
