The Touchstone Project: Saving and Sharing Montana's Community Heritage

FAIN: HD-51181-10

Montana Preservation Alliance (Helena, MT 59601-6200)
Kathryn Eileen Hampton (Project Director: March 2010 to December 2010)
Patty Dean (Project Director: December 2010 to August 2013)

Development of the Touchstone Project, an interactive online archive of local history and cultural heritage that links local digital repositories to the online Montana Memory Project.

The Touchstone Project is a multidisciplinary program to help communities preserve their heritage and threatened historic places, and share their human experience with a broad audience. This pioneering approach takes traditional efforts to collect and digitize historic materials and oral interviews, and makes them far more dynamic, relevant and accessible through a digital archive that will reside in a local, historical repository, and be uploaded to the state's online memory project. Additionally, we will invite new information, tap new audiences and share the content across the worldwide web through social networking. Professional historians and trained curators will pilot this innovative effort with people in four small towns, ensuring that materials are handled, housed, and digitized according to the highest curatorial standards in order to save threatened heritage while creating a hopeful model for celebrating history and reinvigorating neighborhoods and communities.