History of the Project
Our East Lothian is a place where people can share their pictures and stories of life in East Lothian, both today and in the past. The pictures may be copies of old family photographs, or pictures of objects or places - the important thing is to tell the story (or stories) that go with the picture, and share it with visitors to the site.
How does it work?
If you want to take part in Our East Lothian, get in touch with the Museums Service by phone to 01620 828225 or by email to scowie@eastlothian.gov.uk . We are recruiting contributors now. No knowledge of programming or any technical skills are needed, just a desire to share your pictures and stories of living in East Lothian.
We will use Flickr to store the images – if you don’t have a Flickr account (and they are free), we will help you set one up. You will then be able to join the Our East Lothian group on Flickr, and add whatever pictures you choose to the group’s photo pool (where you can see the photos everybody’s added together in one place).
To tell the stories we will use this site. You can write as many (or as few) stories as you like, and comment on other people’s contributions, and illustrate your stories with images from the group pool (your own or somebody else’s).
Training and support
This project is also part of a larger project with partners in England, Italy and Hungary. The funding we have is for training and travel. We will organise training sessions in East Lothian for anyone who wants to find out how to go about making digital images and writing for the web. Contributors will also be able to travel to meet the partners in the similar projects in Compton Verney, Rome and Budapest to exchange experiences, to pass on our knowledge and to learn from them.
Our East Lothian is also part of a larger project with partners in England, Italy and Hungary. The funding we have is for training and travel, and the last partner meeting was organised by Archivio della memoria and took place in Rome. I think we now have our guidelines in place for how the - in some ways very different - projects can also enable searching across all of the partners’ images by recording the most important basic information about the images and the related stories, without getting participants bogged down in excessive levels of technical detail and description. While the exact process used to produce a picture may be of interest to curators of photographic collections, most people are more interested in what is in the picture!