Explore the History Harvest collection

The History of this History Harvest

In fall of 2018, Indiana University’s College of Arts and Sciences welcomed the inaugural Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Experience class. As part of that ASURE program, our Spring 2019 HIST-A200 Digital Public History course took on a History Harvest. This type of community-history project, which had its first iteration in the History Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, gets the public involved in the digitization and preservation of sentimental artifacts that aren’t likely to make it into museums or archives.

To kick-start that process, each person in our class started the semester by writing the history of an object of importance to us. We then invited our fellow students to identify something significant in their every day life and bring it to be digitized during one of two History Harvest events in early March of 2019. Each contributor allowed us to digitize their object, do a really short interview about it, and add it to this digital exhibit so that the object could go home with its person but its information would be preserved here with other objects that have made their way into IUB’s history.