Meeting with the members of the Kentucky Historical Society on August 3 introduced The History List to another state historical historical society and another region of the country.  Executive Director Kent Whitworth kindly arranged a meeting with his staff, including Jody Blankenship, Director of Education, and Sally Warfield (left) and Chelsea Compton (right), responsible for online and marketing efforts respectively.

The conversation underscored some of the same points that have come up in discussions with organizations in other regions:

• The difficulty of maintaining ongoing communication with many of the smaller local historical societies as volunteer leaders come and go and membership ebbs and flows.
• The interest in providing a tool to local societies that would enable them to publicize their events to a broader audience with little additional effort and no additional cost.
• The challenge in incorporating a useful events calendar into an institution’s site; integrating ticket sales into the calendar; and creating a platform that would publicize the events from the many local organizations without burdening staff with entering all of the events throughout the state.

We will support their new site in any way we can, possibly through our calendar widgets, and look forward to an opportunity to work with local historical societies and other local history organizations in Kentucky interested in adding their organization and events to The History List.  (This is a helpful one-pager that any organization can use to add their organization and events.  An earlier post provided an introduction to our standard embeddable widgets that are built into every listing.  There is no cost to list an organization or event, or to use these widgets.)

The meeting took place in the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History, which currently has a large installation entitled, “Civil War: My Brother, My Enemy.”  The Center is the headquarters of the Society and is part of the Kentucky Historical Society Campus in downtown Frankfort.  The Old State Capitol (included in the pictures below) and the Kentucky Military History Museum at the State Arsenal are also part of the campus.  The 167,000-square-foot, $29-million Center for Kentucky History opened in April 1999.  The Kentucky Historical Society was founded in 1836.