The Maine Memory™ Network actively engages communities across the state in the process of preserving, interpreting, and promoting Maine history, and makes the unique heritage and cultural resources that each Maine community possesses accessible to all Mainers.

The project grows out of an extensive assessment of state cultural resources and needs conducted by the Cultural Affairs Council of Maine. The Council, which includes the Maine Arts Commission, Maine Historical Society, Maine Historic Preservation Commission, Maine Humanities Council, Maine State Archives, Maine State Library, and Maine State Museum, identified the Maine Memory™ Network as a key tool in a broad effort to increase the public’s access to its own heritage.

With seed funding from the Maine Communities in the New Century initiative, the support of the state legislature, and a recent grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Technology Opportunities Program, the Maine Memory team has built a dynamic database and web user interface, and is embarking on a statewide outreach campaign to recruit historical societies, schools, and libraries in local communities throughout the state.

Through its outreach activities and education programs, the Maine Memory™ Network is striving to facilitate and foster permanent, active relationships between local schools and the organizations in their communities who hold the keys to Maine history.

Distributed Input

The State of Maine has 223 local historical societies, 77 museums, 288 libraries, and 5 archives. Yet, as a rural state, people outside the cultural centers of Maine can not share in the resources of larger organizations. Rare, fragile, one of a kind documents and artifacts can only be seen if people travel to them, or if they are published. This problem works the other way as well. Urban populations don’t have easy access to or knowledge of the documents, perspectives, and interpretations of more dispersed rural communities. The stunning images of Maine's 19^th century granite operations, for instance, which helped build the great cities of America, are today isolated in small island historical societies. The history of Franco-Americans in the textile mills, upon which the economy of Maine and New England so long depended, is equally unshared. In almost every established but remote institution there are hidden treasures that help explain who we are and what we have done.

Benefit to Historical Organizations and Libraries

The Maine Memory™ Network is based on the many-to-many model of information sharing. Any state historical organization, archive, library, or cultural organization can input documents into the system, directly from their own locations. Using a web browser, organizations can catalog their documents online, directly into the system. All submissions are checked by the Maine Memory Network Project to ensure quality and validity.

The Maine Memory™ Network will generate heightened awareness of and interest in the collections of cultural organizations across Maine. Contributing Partners can use the Network’s "slide show" feature to create online exhibits drawn from and illustrated by their images and documents. Every time a user views a document or artifact, the Contributing Partner's contact information is listed as part of the cataloguing record. Contributing Partners can also take advantage of the site’s e-commerce engine to sell reproductions of photographs and other images. For small historical organizations, this is a potentially valuable revenue stream.

Maine Memory™ Network staff also provides technical support and resources for local historical societies, many of whom don’t have the staff or financial resources to undertake their own digitization process. The Network provides standards for digitizing and electronic cataloguing. Our outreach program also provides free computer training, assistance and guidance with digitizing collections, free storage of high resolution scans, and assistance with cataloguing.

Local historical societies maintain complete control over the material they upload into the Maine Memory™ Network. Each image is watermarked and displayed at low resolution, to protect from theft and misuse. Using the site’s online tools, Contributing Partners can add or remove images from their collections, make images available for sale, and catalog and update their records and scans.

Use in Schools

The Maine Memory™ Network will give teachers and students access to historical documents from their own communities, in addition to those from other parts of the state. Teachers can download lesson plans created by other Maine teachers and access information about how the Maine Memory™ Network can help achieve State Learning Results. If a teacher creates a lesson plan or album on a certain topic, he or she can submit it to the website to be used by other teachers across the state.

Teachers can also download and create ready-made albums of documents and artifacts on various topics on Maine History. A Civil War album, for example, brings together letters from Mesach P. Larry, a soldier from Windham; photographs of the 19th Maine; images of mess kits and uniforms; and the journal of a Rebecca Usher, a nurse from Hollis, who served in Virginia. These documents can easily be printed, viewed online, or adapted to the teacher's own classroom uses. Every written document in the system is fully transcribed.

Interactivity

At the heart of the Maine Memory™ Network is a powerful, web accessible mySQL database that provides flexible tools for searching, browsing, and managing items in the Maine Memory™ Network’s online archive. Visitors use simple and advanced searches, or a clickable map to find documents in the database. They can also browse lists of events, themes, people, manuscripts, and collections.

Interactive features include:

• View detailed catalog information and enlarged images;
• Save documents in a personal album;
• Arrange documents and provide accompanying text to create slideshows
• E-mail entire albums of images to other users for online collaboration in schools or the workplace;
• Send e-mail postcards;
• Listen to audio readings of letters and journal entries;
• View online documentaries on Maine history.

High quality print reproductions of many of the documents and images are available. In addition, individuals and businesses can purchase high-resolution files suitable for magazine, newspaper, internet, television, and book publishing, and download the files directly from the website.

Contact Them

The Maine Memory™ Network will draw the history of the state together in all its rich complexity, give all Maine people access to important cultural documents, and involve the maximum number of citizens in the appreciation and interpretation of their history.

Please don’t hesitate to contact them with questions, ideas, or if you are interested in contributing to the project. View the site at www.MaineMemory.net.

For more information, please contact Dan Kaplan, Project Director, at: dkaplan@mainehistory.org or at (207) 774-1822 x216