Introduction and Background
Digital history, no longer new, has changed how we access sources and share the products of our labor.1 Researchers now scan gigabytes of documents in the archives, students build historical web sites rather than write papers, and history curricula are taught through internet connections. Yet the effects of the digital turn have been uneven. Some departments and research centers have built outstanding, innovative programs, attracting significant grants and talented digital historians. But at regional universities, small liberal arts colleges, and community colleges—where resources are tight even in flush times—digital history has often made less of an impact. Survey data show that historians at large, research-focused universities are adopting advanced digital tools at a higher rate than historians at other institutions due largely to the availability of resources (Townsend 2017; Gold 2012; Guldi 2026). However, scholars at a range of colleges and universities have also developed scrappy, innovative methods for doing digital humanities in many different institutional contexts. This article describes one model for doing community-engaged digital history at a regional public university.
In 2016, the Department of History at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) launched Madison Historical: The Online Encyclopedia and Digital Archive for Madison County, Illinois. (SIUE’s campus is in Madison County.) Madison Historical does not offer cutting-edge technology or internationally esteemed scholars. Instead, Madison Historical combines good local history with simple digital tools and wide community engagement—involving small museums, community archives, high school social science teachers, graduate students, and local history buffs—in a package that is flexible and attuned to the realities of funding at the local level. Most importantly, Madison Historical weaves pedagogy through all aspects of the project.
In offering this overview of Madison Historical, we hope our experiences offer lessons for other community-engaged digital history projects and contribute to discussion of how community-engaged digital history is developing at institutions. The article begins with an overview of the Madison Historical project, including the project’s history and its three main components: a county encyclopedia, a digital archive, and lesson plans for k-12 teachers. Next, we describe why community-engaged digital history projects are well-suited to regional universities and how each group of stakeholders benefited from collaboration on the project. We conclude the article by describing the project’s technical infrastructure and funding sources.
An Overview of Madison Historical
Madison Historical was born in the county’s Regional Office of Education when Regional Superintendent Robert Daiber approached SIUE’s chancellor, Stephen Hansen, to alert him that a history of Madison County had not been written for more than a century.2 Located in southwestern Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Madison County was known for its riverfront industrial base, a powerful political machine, and its controversial legal system with large plaintiff judgments in class-action lawsuits (Nore 2012; Lippman 2014).
The last comprehensive history of Madison County was a two-volume survey of the region. When Chancellor Hansen, a historian, approached the Department of History with the idea of writing a book for the second hundred years of Madison County’s history, we were skeptical but intrigued by the idea of updating the old-fashioned county history compendium for the digital age.
There is a robust and growing collection of online encyclopedias at state and metropolitan levels, as well as numerous digital archives dedicated to famous individuals and events, but a county, as a municipal unit with a particular history, was a compelling possibility for its diversity and its scope. Madison County’s history offered a microcosm of the economic, ethnic, social, and political trends that swept across the Midwest during the twentieth century. A county-level history also offered the possibility of linking residents who were strangers to each other, farmers and factory workers, urban dwellers and rural residents, suburbanites and even a few hipsters, through the shared past of their county.
A county digital history could also serve as a hub for SIUE’s Department of History to connect with local heritage institutions, museums, and archives. It could introduce our students to local history as a viable research endeavor whose audience was immediate and engaged. It could be a digital space for county residents to explore their history and contribute to it. Most importantly, a digital approach to the county’s second hundred years could change and grow with the county itself. This reflects a key advantage of online encyclopedias over their print predecessors; they “have the capacity to iterate over time” (Seligman 2013, 32). We pitched the regional superintendent and the chancellor on creating an online encyclopedia and digital archive. Both were enthusiastic and the regional superintendent agreed to fund the project. Thus began Madison Historical.
The five authors of this article reflect the Madison Historical project’s diverse group of contributors. Jeffrey Manuel and Jason Stacy are professors in the Department of History at SIUE. They serve as the project’s principal investigators, coordinate the research team, and manage project finances. As tenured faculty members, they also are responsible for long-term maintenance of the project. Nichol Allen worked on the project while she was a PhD student at Southern Illinois University. As of 2026, Allen is an assistant professor of history and museum studies at Westminster College. Angela Little contributed to the project while she was an undergraduate student majoring in history at SIUE. Little now works for the US National Archives and Records Administration. Ben Ostermeier was a staff member at SIUE who worked on the project after graduating from the university with a bachelor’s degree in history and computer science. He now works as a developer focused on academic databases.
After initial planning meetings, we settled on a three-part division of the project: an online encyclopedia, a digital archive, and lesson plans for k-12 teachers. Each section of the site integrated with the others. For example, an encyclopedia article would include images from related primary sources in the digital archive. Those primary sources would be included in lesson plans for students, who could draw on the encyclopedia article for background. And each section created opportunities for teaching and training students, from middle school social studies students to PhD candidates, in local and public history methods.
The Encyclopedia
An encyclopedia of significant people, places, and events in Madison County history was important for several reasons. There was little comprehensive coverage of the county’s twentieth-century history, and the encyclopedia offers an authoritative yet accessible space to research and write this history. This aspect of the project fits the growing historiographical trend of developing urban and state encyclopedia projects (Grabowski 2013, 40). Beginning in the 1990s, many states, regions, and cities created digital encyclopedias. Online encyclopedias have since proven to be valuable reference resources and over half of US states now have them. They combine scholarly authority, accessibility, and flexibility in a package that is increasingly important as funding cuts and artificial intelligence threaten other sources of online historical information (Beatty et al. 2011, 3; Wiley 2025).
We had ambitious goals for our encyclopedia. We hoped that compiling the county’s history online could spur civic engagement with its past, present, and future. We were inspired by Amanda Seligman’s elegant defense of the regional encyclopedia as “an essential public history project” (Seligman 2013, 25). We purposely did not begin with a meeting of scholars outlining entries or a table of contents. Instead, we sought to take advantage of the web’s abilities to create organic, iterative, and bottom-up forms of knowledge. Yet our editorial process is designed to distinguish the encyclopedia from community-moderated forums such as Wikipedia (Grabowski 2013, 37). We found that the public—at least in southwestern Illinois—remains skeptical of Wikipedia’s accuracy. We ultimately created an encyclopedia that is open to community contributions via signed articles, but we do not allow wiki-style editing. Our goal was to share the county’s history and create a hub for heritage projects that were frustratingly siloed in their own communities. This was a noble goal, but we soon encountered challenges. While many local historians expressed enthusiasm, they were busy or hesitant to research and write an article for free. As a solution, we sought and received funding to commission several articles from local historians. Offering an honorarium was a tangible acknowledgment of local historians’ expertise and time. Even with a monetary incentive, however, we had difficulty getting historians outside SIUE to contribute articles.
As of May 2026, the encyclopedia has 65 articles. They are idiosyncratic; some focus on a single restaurant with a long history in the community, while others describe trends such slavery and servitude in early Illinois. Once money for honorariums ran out, we relied on graduate assistants to research and write most articles. Productive graduate students could research and write three or four articles per semester. The addition of new articles slowed once grant funding ran out. As of 2026, students in an undergraduate summer course have the option of writing an encyclopedia article for the site as one of their assignments. Although most students choose an easier option, one or two students usually take on the challenge and their articles are added to the site. Having students contribute content as optional course assignments allows Madison Historical to continue growing and evolving—even if slowly—over the long run.
The Digital Archive
Digitizing collections from small museums and local archives is the second core feature of Madison Historical and it became one of the project’s most dynamic aspects. When we launched the project, we surveyed existing museums and archives in Madison County, expecting to find a few local historical societies. To our surprise, we discovered more than a dozen such institutions in the county, from professional archives to small groups that meet in someone’s dining room to swap pictures and stories about the old days.
These small museums and archives have rich, largely unknown collections but often lack the staff and technology to digitize them. We contacted these organizations and offered access to technology, especially the server and content management infrastructure to publish collections on the web, and the personnel to scan materials and enter metadata. We do not keep collections of our own and therefore developed partnerships to scan the collections of small museums and archives throughout Madison County and publish them on our site.
Madison Historical is hardly unique in offering a digital hub for scattered midwestern archival collections. In Minnesota, for instance, the Minnesota Digital Library makes available digitized material from nearly two hundred local historical societies and archives. Illinois also has a statewide digital archives project—the Illinois Digital Archives—yet it had languished due to budgetary woes when we began the project. Madison Historical stands out from these state-level initiatives because a county is an accessible scale for close collaboration; our collecting reaches beneath the holdings of even small archives to include community contributions. We straddle the boundary between larger, formal digital collections at the state level and entirely grassroots community scanning or history harvest projects. We also emphasize training graduate, undergraduate, and k-12 students how to scan archival items and write metadata. Though this means our digital collections occasionally have more flaws than what is ideal, we believe this tradeoff is worthwhile given our educational mission.
Another component of Madison Historical’s online archive is its oral history collection. Students in Manuel’s oral history seminar conducted a dozen oral history interviews to launch the collection and social studies teachers later added more. Fellow teachers soon imagined ways they could incorporate oral history interviews into their classrooms. For example, a Spanish-language professor at SIUE assigned her students to conduct interviews with Mexican immigrants (in Spanish) for the project. Oral history interviews with recent Mexican immigrants added crucial—and typically ignored—voices to the county’s history while also providing community-engaged experiential learning for students studying a foreign language.
Madison Historical has also had success digitizing older oral history collections. While new oral histories are often “born digital,” many of the county’s twentieth-century oral history interviews were stored on magnetic tape. By digitizing these cassette tapes and archiving them, we are preserving vulnerable audio-visual materials and sharing largely unknown collections with the public in ways that can be put to use in local classrooms.
Pedagogical Connections
Teaching and pedagogical applications have been woven throughout the project. Graduate students received technical training on digitization, metadata creation, oral history, and other digital history skills that proved applicable in future research or public history careers. Several MA students who worked on the project have gone on to complete PhDs and continue working in public history. Undergraduate history students were also trained in scanning methods, oral history, the basics of local history research, and how to turn primary sources into encyclopedia articles. Several former undergraduate researchers continue working in archives and libraries, including the National Archives and Records Administration.
More ambitiously, secondary teachers were brought into the project as contributors and designers of lessons for middle- and high-school students, who, in turn, contributed to the project. In the summer of 2017, the Madison County Regional Office of Education provided funding for nine k-12 teachers to take a class devoted to Madison Historical free of tuition and fees. During the class, Manuel and Stacy trained teachers on archival-quality digitizing, metadata creation, oral history interviewing, and researching local history to write encyclopedia articles. The teachers then created lesson plans for their own classrooms that incorporated oral history and encyclopedia articles. Teachers trained during summer 2017 began incorporating Madison Historical into their classrooms during the 2017-2018 academic year. This class was so successful that it became a regular offering of SIUE’s Department of History. The class is taught online every summer and has now trained over one hundred students, many of them k-12 teachers.
We also developed lesson plans for social science classes at the elementary, middle, and high school level and trained graduate students to present these lessons in area schools. Over the course of three-day lessons, Madison Historical staff worked with participating teachers to introduce digital public history to middle and secondary school students. Students brought in historical artifacts from home and learned how to scan them to archival standards, create metadata, and publish to the online archive. Students at the high school level also created short oral history interviews to contextualize their artifacts. Lesson plans were designed to meet the Illinois social science standards so teachers could integrate them into their standing curriculum. These sessions were well-received by teachers and students, although they required substantial time from staff and added to an already-packed secondary-school curriculum. We later had to curtail the classroom visits due to budget cuts, but the lesson plans remain freely available on the website.
Beyond its contribution to local history in southwest Illinois, Madison Historical contributes to broader discussions within digital humanities pedagogy by demonstrating the value of adopting the ethos of minimalist computing when building community-engaged digital projects. When choosing technologies for the project, we emphasized the simplest, most sustainable hardware and software suitable for local users and contributors, with the goal of “redirecting attention from novelty, scale, and speed toward care, access, and sustainability” (Belen et al. 2025; Risam and Gil 2022).
The Madison Historical project also highlights the value of digital platforms for reviving venerable scholarly outputs such as county history books. Madison Historical updated the old-fashioned county history for the twenty-first century. Nineteenth-century county histories are valuable reference works, but the publishing technology available at the time limited them to text and the occasional illustration or map (Conzen 1984). Digital publishing, however, can easily incorporate extensive visual and multimedia elements (Brier 2012) at a cost that would be prohibitive in print, a boon for local history publications in which nonacademic readers prefer richly illustrated publications. Digital platforms also allow for easy integration of local history into k-12 classrooms, such as how multimedia-rich digital editions and projects allow instructors to reinvigorate introductory history courses (Harbison and Waltzer 2012).
The Regional University as a Digital Hub
As noted above, no individual aspect of Madison Historical is new to digital or public historians. Yet hosting a county-level community-engaged digital history project at a regional public university has proven a worthwhile model. The regional public university—the unglamorous workhorse of US higher education—offers a blend of authority and accessibility that is valuable for hosting such projects and sharing them with the public.
As the primary public university serving several metropolitan counties in southwestern Illinois, SIUE is seen as both accessible and permanent. Many small institutions in the region have personal connections to the university. Thus, small museums and archives embraced the opportunity to archive their local history efforts with an institution that promised greater permanence than they could muster on their own. For instance, residents in the small mining and farming town of Livingston, Illinois, wrote a 2005 book celebrating the town’s centennial. The book was published by a local printing company and sold modestly, but the group was concerned about the sustainability of their old website. They were happy to let us include the book in our digital archive to further share the town’s history and preserve a digital copy into the future.
Madison Historical also benefited academic historians who worked on the project. By pulling small, hidden, and local stories into the swift channel of national and global history, new insights emerge about the interplay between the local and the global (Lloyd and Moore 2015). In our experience, running a local digital history project has provided a generative space for research. This contrasts with simplistic rhetoric about community engagement that, at its worst, can be top-down and paternalistic, with academics sharing their insights in a one-way flow to the public (King and Rivett 2015, 223).
Additionally, our digital history project developed into a valuable service to showcase digital technologies for small museums and archives in the region. Local librarians and archivists are aware of the technical advances transforming libraries and archives but may not know how to begin incorporating these technologies into their small institutions, especially in rural or underprivileged areas. By arriving with simple, accessible technology and emphasizing a process of ongoing learning at all levels, we try to demystify these technologies for our community collaborators by demonstrating that digital technologies best serve community engagement when paired with traditional public engagement techniques (Hurley 2016).
In some ways, Madison Historical served as an impetus for local archival digitization projects. By digitizing some of their collections, we hoped to excite them about putting more of their holdings online. During the project’s first ten years, this proved true. Several of the small museums and archives we worked with developed their own digital collections and invested in archival content management systems such as Past Perfect or CONTENTdm. Although this limits the need for digitization by Madison Historical, it contributes to our overall goal of making the county’s history more accessible and visible.
Benefits of Collaboration
As a community-engaged digital history project involving administrators, faculty, staff, graduate, and undergraduate students, Madison Historical has created opportunities for collaboration at several levels. At the institutional level, Madison Historical contributes to SIUE’s teaching, research, and public service mission by collaborating with area school districts, historical societies, and museums. Madison Historical also brought new funding to the university during a severe budget impasse in Illinois. The project paid for graduate student assistantships and stipends for undergraduate students at a time when funding was in jeopardy due to budget cuts. Overall, Madison Historical increased the Department of History’s vitality, quality, and productivity in the eyes of university administrators, which is no small accomplishment in an era of department closures and strained budgets.
Faculty editors also found that the project provided experience in project management. Digital history requires academic historians to shift from working independently to working collaboratively (Nawrotzki and Dougherty 2013). Practically, faculty editors shifted from the model of the lone scholar responsible for all aspects of a project to leaders of a collaborative team involving other faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate researchers. Project management is essential to coordinating a team project, yet academic historians get surprisingly little training in managing a team during graduate school. In the project’s early years, staff held weekly one-hour meetings to discuss progress on specific projects and discuss any bottlenecks.
The faculty editors also learned a great deal about fundraising while building the project. They wrote grants to national, state, and local funding organizations, a process familiar to most academic historians. But county-level history required them to get involved with hands-on fundraising directly from local donors. They passed the hat, so to speak, at community forums and met with local donors to ask for funding. Operating on smaller, local grants required faculty editors to remain constantly alert to new potential collaborations and partnerships that might lead to funding.
The funding landscape for Madison Historical became more challenging after 2020. Core funding for project staff, including technical support, was gone and SIUE’s College of Arts and Sciences stopped funding graduate assistantships for the history department. At this point, the faculty editors chose to put the project into “standby mode;” the online archive and encyclopedia remain available on the web, but new material is only added as time and funding permit.
One solution to continue adding to the site without dedicated funding has been to incorporate assignments tied to Madison Historical into existing classes. Project leaders co-teach an online summer course where students create digitized items, with metadata, oral history interviews, and lesson plans based on these techniques. Any items or interviews relevant to Madison County are added to the site by the editors. This has allowed the site to continue growing, but the project’s growth has slowed significantly. Nonetheless, the project remains alive and could be easily expanded if funding returns in the future.
Madison Historical also benefited graduate students who worked on the project, giving them funding, research experience, and honing their writing skills (Seligman 2013, 25). Graduate students received firsthand experience in writing clear prose for public audiences by drafting encyclopedia articles about complex topics in short, concise language readable at a tenth-grade level. Training graduates to develop different writing styles opened future vocational possibilities for MA students by giving them a platform to publish their work and showcase their skills.
Working on regional history projects inspired some graduate students to launch their own research (Seligman 2013, 31). For example, Lesley Thomson-Sasso conducted oral history interviews on the largely forgotten—or actively suppressed—history of racial segregation in Madison County. Thomson-Sasso then created a podcast about the topic that was made available to the public via SoundCloud (Thomson-Sasso 2017).
Undergraduate students working on Madison Historical contributed as equal partners of the research team, albeit with guidance from faculty and graduate students. Several undergraduate students joined the project as part of SIUE’s undergraduate research and creative activities program and others joined the project in exchange for course credit as independent study projects. They worked side-by-side with faculty and graduate students on original research and their reporting on their experiences reaffirm that “small collaborative learning experiences grounded in local history can be transformative” for students (Abel 2009).
In sum, Madison Historical has been a team effort and working on the project affirms the value of collaborative research projects in history and their benefits in training undergraduate and graduate students. Others agree that digital history projects necessitate collaboration due to their reliance on a wide variety of skills and aptitudes, including not only historical research and writing, but also project management, fundraising, web design, and photography (Seligman 2013, 30; Nowviskie 2012). The benefits of the Madison Historical project extend beyond learning opportunities for students to include the political, economic, and enrollment benefits for the faculty, the department, and the university.
Technical Infrastructure
Madison Historical could not have been accomplished without significant technical infrastructure and support. The project’s website is hosted on SIUE’s servers and was installed by the university’s Information Technology Services (ITS) staff. We decided that the project should be housed on campus servers as a sign of our commitment to building and sustaining local resources. Like many regional public universities, SIUE’s ITS has limited resources to support digital humanities projects. Digital history projects at regional universities should make an honest assessment of what the university’s (often overburdened) information technology staff can and cannot support and dedicate resources accordingly.
Technology support came from the project’s technical developer, Ben Ostermeier, who was responsible for website creation, web development, item digitization, and maintenance of the digital archive. Ostermeier also worked on the website’s functionality and interface, trained project staff on digitization, and assisted with file management. Although it may be tempting to prioritize technical skills for a project like this, it was Ostermeier’s background as an SIUE history major that was key to his success. Ostermeier describes himself as a historian who happens to have technical and web development skills.
Madison Historical uses two free open-source content management systems: Wordpress and Omeka. Built for personal publishing, Wordpress is a natural fit for the encyclopedia side of Madison Historical. Each encyclopedia article is created as a post, which allows for article-level tags. Plugins added footnotes, search features, the ability to assign articles to multiple authors, and a calendar for community events. Wordpress plugins became a source of frustration over time, however. After the project lost funding, regular maintenance of the site was difficult. Several plugins stopped working and caused significant glitches, revealing why low-budget projects need to carefully balance plugins with long-term stability.
Omeka was the obvious choice for the digital archive. Omeka is a free, open-source content management system designed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Omeka allows users to add extensive metadata to each item in a collection, making it far better suited for digital collections than Wordpress.
Placing both CMS installations on the same server was not difficult; Wordpress was installed at madison-historical.siue.edu/encyclopedia/ and Omeka was installed at madison-historical.siue.edu/archive/. It was more challenging to make the two different CMSs appear like they were part of the same website. Ostermeier used the free open-source front-end framework Material Kit, a modified version of the popular front-end framework Bootstrap. He built two themes, one for Wordpress and one for Omeka, using Material Kit. Because both CMSs used the same basic theme framework, users could navigate between Wordpress and Omeka without noticing that they were moving between two different programs.
Using two CMSs led to challenges in connecting them seamlessly. On a basic level, it was easy to link back and forth using hyperlinks. More complicated was including archive items in encyclopedia articles. Using and modifying the Omeka plugin embed codes, Ostermeier used iframes to embed the archive items and their descriptions in relevant encyclopedia articles. This allowed users to enter the archive while reading encyclopedia articles.
Copyright is a critical issue for any digital history project. We approached this issue in several ways. We first made it clear to partner institutions that we were not interested in taking physical ownership of their collections; we are a post-custodial archive—we preserve digital versions of records and their metadata but do not take physical ownership of any items—and only borrowed items as needed for digitization. We initially hoped to make everything in our digital archive available under a Creative Commons license. Yet we quickly realized it would be impossible to determine the copyright status of items from numerous institutions that were acquired in many ways.
Taking inspiration from copyright clauses used in other digital archives, we added language to items in the digital archive telling users that we had not determined the copyright status of most items. We strongly recommend they contact the institution that possesses the item for more copyright information. While establishing a system for managing copyright is important, we found that ongoing education about copyright in the digital age was needed. Students—both graduate and undergraduate—often needed training on the basics of copyright law to correct misunderstandings. And community partners appreciated guidance on digital copyright as well. Navigating rights on the web is terra incognita for many volunteers at small museums and archives. Our role was usually to give them confidence that they could navigate this system, often with help from librarians at public or academic libraries, and to reiterate that we had no plans to claim ownership of their materials. Clarifying, repeatedly, that physical ownership remained with the archive is essential in community digital archiving projects.
Funding
Seeking and receiving funding from local sources instead of national agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed us to concentrate on engaging local audiences. Community-created content was Madison Historical’s selling point, not any digital wizardry or new tools. Funding inevitably shapes the outcome of digital history projects, and we have found surprising advantages from emphasizing local funding over national grant agencies. That said, we did find that attractive web design is crucial to success in a web-based project (Grabowski 2013, 42). Our developer devoted many hours of his time to the site’s look and user experience. This paid off by giving the site immediate credibility with popular audiences. We received numerous compliments on the site’s attractiveness. Historians are not always attuned to visual impact and design, but, in our experience, it is crucial to digital humanities projects, especially those operating at the local level.
Given the precariousness of funding in humanities today, our community partners have rightfully been wary about the depth of our commitment to their institution and its collections. This is a common concern in university-community partnerships. We have tried to address it in two ways. First, we have tried to establish good personal relationships with the people at our partner institutions that will hopefully outlast the whims of funding. We were also honest about the possibility that grants could dry up at any time—as they eventually did—and it is impossible to promise permanence in such an unstable funding environment.
We thus designed the program so that partner institutions received tangible benefits at each stage. Once the initial grant-funded activities ended, the archives still benefited from the partnership, by having high-quality scans of collections that otherwise would remain untouched. It would be ideal if we could guarantee long-term funding and a sustained partnership with community archives and museums. This is a goal toward which all university-community partnerships should strive. But in a discipline with collapsing resources and uncertain public support, projects need to be realistic about the potential that funding could end at any moment and build partnerships in discrete segments. Indeed, after the main grant funding for Madison Historical ended, we have only undertaken small, standalone additions to the archive that can be fully accomplished by volunteer labor from the editors and (occasionally) students. With future funding uncertain, digital archives need to plan carefully to prevent large backlogs.
Conclusion
County histories have evolved significantly from their nineteenth-century origins as comprehensive, doorstopping compendiums of local great men of history. Yet county histories should not be consigned to the dustbin of historiography. If updated for the digital age, they offer a rich platform for community engagement and university partnerships. Madison Historical offers one model for how community-engaged digital county histories might develop. We have used simple, free digital tools, emphasized community-university partnerships, and woven pedagogy throughout the project. Reflecting on the first ten years of Madison Historical, several lessons stand out for scholars planning or managing community-engaged digital history projects. First is the importance of making technical decisions that embrace minimalist computing to ensure the longevity and flexibility of a project. Even if initial funding is generous, projects should be wary of putting bespoke or complex software at the heart of their projects. Second, in an era of precarious funding it is important to design projects that can contract or expand modularly as resources change. A project that can evolve and grow, even if slowly, if its funding goes away is a project that is sustainable over the long run. Finally, digital history projects should reflect the fundamental missions of the universities that house them. Project planners should give careful thought to who their institution serves and how best to reach them.
Madison Historical’s model of community-engaged digital history is especially appropriate for regional universities. There is great enthusiasm for digital history and the digital humanities at such universities, but this enthusiasm is tempered by tight budgets and a need to prioritize teaching over research. These are the realities facing regional universities, yet they need not be a source of despair for digital historians. Indeed, by using simple digital tools, investing in people rather than technology, emphasizing engagement with local community partners, and further developing the teaching mission of the regional university by integrating pedagogy throughout the project, the regional university’s assets can shine.
