The Exploration Place is offering Prince George residents the opportunity to participate in creating the ultimate scrapbook.
On Thursday, the city's 99th birthday, museum CEO Tracy Calogheros unveiled the organization's newest version of its online database. It now has the ability to share records on social media and leave comments about the records on the museum's website (www.theexplorationplace.com).
"It's a tough thing to explain," said Calogheros. "The gist of it is, it's a Facebook page for the museum world - but we get to keep all the data."
Calling it a 100th birthday present to the city, Calogheros said the idea was born out of a request from a Prince George 100th anniversary committee request to create a social media outlet for the community to share their memories and information.
"We didn't want to have the community spend all this time thinking about the past and telling us their stories only to have to transcribe it all from a Facebook page," Calogheros said. "So once we got talking about it we thought, well we've already got this great database the community can search. It's online, why don't we see if there's some way that we can make that more user friendly for the next millennium."
To do that, Exploration Place teamed up with Noratek Solutions to create a system where users - by creating an account on the museum website - can upload their own information or photos directly to the database and share records via Facebook and Twitter.
It's an idea that's unique in her industry, said Calogheros, and Exploration Place will be touring the database on the speaking circuit to promote the idea and hopefully push it as a new industry standard.
Her museum counterparts are wary, the CEO acknowledged, but many have also simply never considered the possibility.
"We're all about history and we like things to be collected and safe," she said. "A lot of my colleagues are a whole lot older than I am - and I'm 44 - I'm the youngest when I go to my CEO-type places. I just don't think it's occurred to a lot of these other institutions."
Prince George is also in a special position given its relatively short history. Attempting to do something like this in an older city would be more difficult, Calogheros said.
"One of the really neat things about Prince George is that we're only 100 years old," she said. "It might sound old, but consider that for a municipality to be able to go right back to their roots and, in theory, there could still be people around or first-generation descendants of people who were around when that was formed, it allows us to start from scratch."
With the destruction of the museum's collection in the 1970s due to fire, there is a lot unknown about the subjects photos and documents it currently has.
What they would ultimately like to see is people interacting with the collection, identifying connections and perhaps providing additional artifacts.
"We want the person that says 'hey that's my grandpa,' to click on that photo, share it to their family, tell us who grandpa is, because a lot of the photos we don't even know who's in them or what the whole detailed story is about them," Calogheros said.
That thread of interaction and input will be reviewed by the museum's archival department and saved for future users to see.
"The goal is to deepen our collection, to strengthen our own knowledge of our pioneers and our innovators and to really make sure that's captured and expanded on," said Calogheros.
