Four Rivers Education Committee Presents: Improving the Visitor Experience for Visitors with Physical Disabilities. This training will provide knowledge and understanding about the experiences of people with physical disabilities, including tips on how museum professionals can enhance the visitor experience at their sites for all patrons...
Read MoreA Four Rivers Heritage Area Education Committee Workshop. This training will provide knowledge and understanding about the experiences of people with cognitive disabilities and autism, including applicable tips on how museum professionals can enhance the visitor experience at their sites for all patrons....
Read MoreOn November 14, Four Rivers sponsored a workshop by Mark Hildebrand of Make Your Mark Media about the new Annapolis history "wiki," called Annapolis Past Port. Over the summer, Mark worked with several STEM students from AACPS to develop the basic form and function of this cutting-edge technology resource. Utilizing the same open-source application used by Wikipedia, the wiki is planned to serve as a repository for local stories, photographs, documents, and much more. The goal of the project is to make local historical content free and available to anyone...
Read MoreOur colleague, Hope Stewart, wrote this post in July 2020, and it is still useful today. In a previous post about Cultural Entrepreneurship, we introduced the concept as a way for history and heritage practitioners to meet their mission through employing creative and innovative business approaches to resource development. In this post we will specifically explore Heritage Entrepreneurship as another aspect of Cultural Entrepreneurship. Heritage Entrepreneurship focuses on the preservation and promotion of cultural heritage resources, while identifying market opportunities to create value for those resources. Since all of this may...
Read MoreFour Rivers' Interim Program Director, Hope Stewart, is sharing her expertise on "Cultural Entrepreneurship" with us this summer in a new series of posts for non-profit boards, staff, and other stakeholders. When non-profits discuss their biggest challenges, they are almost always related to funding. There’s a lot to get done and never enough available resources to make it all happen. This can be especially true for organizations working in the heritage and historic preservation fields. Most non-profit missions (hopefully) have an eventual end-goal in mind, such as increased access to education,...
Read MoreOn June 6, Maria Day, Director of Special Collections and Conservation at Maryland State Archives, launched Four Rivers Heritage Area’s “Pop-Up Heritage” series with her lecture on “Preserving Digital Prints: Protecting Your Photos and Ink jet Documents from the 1980s to Now.” Maria shared with the audience her advice for preserving digitally-printed photographs created within the past 30 years. Did you think digital prints were a relatively new concern? As Maria showed in her talk, many of the photographs in your collection are probably digital prints. Although the process of digital...
Read MoreStandards and Excellence Program for History Organizations (StEPs) is offered by the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) as a self-study program designed specifically for small- to mid-sized history organizations, including volunteer-run institutions. Through a workbook, online resources, and an online community, organizations enrolled in StEPS assess their policies and practices and benchmark themselves against national museum standards. The workbook is organized into six sections that can be used in any order, according to your organization’s individual needs and priorities, including: Mission, Vision, & Governance Audience Interpretation Stewardship of...
Read MoreNEW GRANT FUND for FY18: The Maryland Historical Trust Non-Capital Grant Program provides competitive grants to nonprofit organizations and local governments for research, survey, planning, and educational activities involving architectural, archeological and other cultural resources. Eligible activities may include architectural, archeological, or cultural resource surveys; the development of preservation plans; educational outreach programs; and National Register nominations. Eligible projects should seek to preserve the tangible remains of Maryland's past in a manner that is consistent with MHT's standards and guidelines. For FY 2018, the total amount of grant funds available...
Read MoreLast week Four Rivers Heritage Area staff participated in a StEPs Lab webinar, “Steps to Environmental Sustainability,” offered by the American Association for State and Local History. Now we would love to share with our partners some steps you can take to implement environmentally sustainable practices while improving your relevance within the community. So what is “sustainability”? According to webinar leader Sarah Sutton, sustainability means caring for today’s resources so future needs can be met and present life conditions improved. It is about conservation and protection, so museums and heritage sites are...
Read MoreThe Four Rivers Education Committee is happy to share important resources with partners. Accessibility New! Information on the languages that AACPS students speak at home. AACPS Language Information Notes from Accessibility Matters! speaker Robert Forloney: “Here are materials that might be useful for the participants at the ADA/accessibility workshop. These are among the best that I pointed out but there are many more I mentioned available to download on-line by PDF. Always happy to assist the group in their efforts to improve the visitor experience.” [su_list icon="icon: caret-right"] Design-for-Accessibility – A Cultural Administrator’s Handbook Smithsonian Guidelines For Accessible...
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