Week one

I met with Judy, my project supervisor. I knew I wanted to create a program about preserving family stories, targeted towards the senior audience, but that is an awfully large subject area for a thirty to forty minute presentation. I needed to narrow it down.

We brainstormed for a while and narrowed it down to two things: raising awareness and educating people on what things they could do. We decided that I would try to start two programs. The first one would be a program to raise awareness, along with some simple things that people could do. The second one could be a more intensive workshop focusing on written history.

I won't be focusing primarily on written family stories, though. I will touch on other things that tell family stories, like photographs, recipes, letters, and diaries.

We spent the rest of the time brainstorming, as well as talking about some of the things the librarians do when answering reference requests. I will handle some of those at some point in this project.

I left with a bunch of ideas for the program and a bunch of books to read. Judy pulled a number of related books that will be helpful.

Because I am working on developing a program, we thought it would be good idea for me to attend some of their programming. So on Saturday I attended the workshop on using Heritage Quest.

I learned a lot about how to use the resources Heritage Quest offers. Using Heritage Quest, I found out more about a branch of my family tree that was very sparsely populated.