Other than money, the one thing that historical organizations tend to lack is time. Instead of focusing on that lack, I thought it might be a good idea to share ways in which we’ve learned how to make efficient use of our time, thus giving us more time for other tasks. How do you save time during your work in local history?

To start your wheels turning, here are a couple of things we do at the Morrison County Historical Society:

• Make a list of things to do for the day or week. Absolutely critical for me, or I’d never stay focused.
• When going through the mail, sort items out by order of importance. Junk mail goes in the recycling bin immediately. Bills go in the “to be paid” basket. Research requests go to whoever is in charge of answering them. Etc. Etc. Once sorted, deal with the easy stuff first. The point is to get through the mail in such a way that you are not having to handle unnecessary items more than once. Ditto on this for email.

Okay, your turn to share your time-saving tips. I’ve got a bunch more to prod you with if you get stuck.

Recently the Grants Office fielded a call from a county historical society considering a grant for an exhibit that would include a SMART Board. That recalled to mind the wonderful and nationally award-winning exhibit “Eating Out in Clay County” and the Clay County Historical Society. For that exhibit staff included blank notebooks wherein a visitor could respond to the exhibit as prompted by a question. The SMART Board would allow for the same kind of interaction electronically.

On the web, the Minnesota Historical Society recently began using Write on the Record, or WOTR (pronounced “water”), to enable visitors to annotate digital content, much like a reader of this blog can respond to the blog. For example, a researcher can annotate a database record using WOTR to let other researchers know of potential errors in the original, without altering the original record.

It’s encouraging to see how repositories of public trusts now more openly trust the public to add to the overall record. Your thoughts? What are ways that the public can add content by interacting with a local historical organization’s product?