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In
Sittard (in the South of the Netherlands
near Maastricht)
a innovative project is being undertaken by a
small staf of professionals and (meanwhile) more than 60 volunteers. In
this growing ‘family’ there are (next to the principle that hardly any
money is available) seven main principles:
a)
starting from volunteers, their interests and capacities
b)
digitally excavating the history of the city
c)
doing that starting from vectorized cadastral information
d)
connecting history of people with cadastral information
e)
using only authentic (mostly archival) information
f)
make every part of information traceble to its source
g)
making use of open source programs and simple formats only
The
results are stunning. We are working together with social organizations, so
volunteers are partly people with ‘a spot’ like autism, asperger or
reintegration after burn-out. People, who never showed interest in history are now working with historical information with
fun and high quality results. Many new insights have seen the light. The
city's history is growing fast (even in 3D, so that multimedia students now
do their internship with us). Interesting is to see that sometimes even
money can be earned, (but more often can be saved) by integrating the
project in municipal policy. The costs of the volunteers are recovered
totally and more…
Side-effects
are that because the information is being presented in a very accessible
way it causes a lot of social (and political) support, and that vulnerable
people, by being volunteers, become more self-confident. Some of them even
got a paid job again because of the experience with us...
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