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On Friday, March 5th, three of us, Audra Eagle, Rachel Hoff (UNC-CH Medical Sciences Library) and I gave presentations at the Society of North Carolina Archivists Conference in Pinehurst, NC. A good-sized group of SNCA attendees were very welcoming to us as we described the instruction we’ve been doing in Preserving Forsyth’s Past.

Audra began by asking each of the attendees to describe their job and what they hoped to get from our presentation. Many of the people were interested in outreach and ways to enhance outreach at their institutions. This gave us a good idea of how to direct our presentation. Audra described how the project got started as a follow on to the Digital Forsyth grant. She gave a great overview of the planning and intent of the follow on grant project in which we are trying to help local institutions preserve and digitize their collections.

I described planning the educational component of Preserving Forsyth’s Past (PFP) and the Pilot Training Session of the grant. I covered the concept behind the first two components of our training: Preservation Concepts and Theory and Hands-on Preservation. Rachel described teaching the public and how much more challenging that can be than teaching to a library crowd. Barry Davis, who teaches the third component of PFP was given a ‘shout out’ as we described the digitization component of the program. During the presentation, we showed the attendees a link to all the presentations we used for PFP and ran a short video clip of our teaching on the screen above us.

We are half-way through the grant for Preserving Forsyth’s Past. We’ve taught two sessions at the Central and Lewisville Branches of Forsyth Public Library. Presentations will be made at the branches in Walkertown in April and back at Central in June. This presentation gave the three of us an opportunity to discuss what we’ve been doing in this project with colleagues. In addition, we were able to think together about how we want to go forward, what things we want to improve and hopefully make this project more successful and meaningful for the attendees.