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The purpose of this paper is to examine issues associated with user engagement on social media with local history in the North East of Scotland and to focus on a case study of the Buckie and District Fishing Heritage Society, a small but very successful and professionally-run community-based local heritage organisation.

A qualitative approach using photo elicitation on social media was deployed in conjunction with analysis of the user interactions and the reach insights provided by Facebook to the page manager. Additionally, a focus group was used.

The research, although focussed on an individual case study, offers significant lessons which are more widely applicable in the local history and cultural heritage social media domain. Key aspects include user engagement and how digital storytelling can assist in the documentation of local communities ultimately contributing to local history research and the broader cultural memory. The significance of the image and the photo elicitation methodology is also explored.

The research demonstrates new opportunities for engaging users and displaying historical content that can be successfully exploited by community heritage organisations. These are themes which will be developed within the paper. The research also demonstrates the value of photo elicitation in both historical and wider information science fields as a means of obtaining in-depth quality engagement and interaction with users and communities.

The research explored the underutilised method of photo elicitation in a local history context with a community possessed of a strong sense of local identity. In addition to exploring the benefits of this method, it presents transferable lessons for how small, community-based history and heritage organisation can engage effectively with their audience.

Personal readers’ histories have long had a respected place in reading research. They add a human, personalized dimension to the studies of reading practices, often reported through aggregate findings and generalized conclusions. Moreover, they introduce a private context of readers’ lives, which complements other reading contexts (e.g. historical, socio-economic and cultural) required for an understanding of reading behaviours. The purpose of this paper, based on a selected data set from a larger reading study, is to introduce a gallery of portraits of immigrant readers with the aim to facilitate the library practice with immigrant communities.

Qualitative face-to-face intensive interviews with immigrant readers.

The knowledge of reading contexts and the opportunity to see readers as individuals rather than anonymous statistics are crucial for librarians who come in contact with multicultural populations. Personal histories can also serve as a step in building interpersonal relationships between librarians and community members.

The value of the study is in introducing a methodological approach which, through collecting and writing reading histories, allows librarians to gain insight into the cultural practices of multicultural communities and to adjust their work accordingly. This approach can also be used as a prototype for researching other community groups.

The increasing availability and popularity of ways to capture personal memories using technologies such as digital cameras is beginning to alter the way in which personal memory images are produced, retained and circulated. Unlike the analog technologies, it is now possible to create an immediately available presence on the Internet. When examined from the perspective of voice, this phenomenon expands the potential of creating personal history narratives that could be collated together to produce a non‐institutional history of an era. This paper explores the ways in which the digital technologies can facilitate the production of such histories and what the technologies could do the sense of presence of an individual in the realm of the virtual.

This article explores memory work and storytelling as an organising tool through family histories, offering theoretical and methodological implications and extending existing conceptualisations of memory work as a feminist method. This approach is termed as impressionist memory work.

To illustrate impressionistic memory work in action, the article presents two family histories set during Second World War and invite the reader to engage in the “undoing” of these stories and dominant ways of knowing through storytelling. This method challenges the taken-for-granted roles, plots and detail of family histories to uncover the obscured or silenced stories within, together with feminine, affective and embodied subjectivities, marginalisation and social inequalities.

This study argues that impressionistic memory work as a feminist method can challenge the silencing and gendering of experiences in co-constructed and co-interpreted narratives (both formal and informal ones).

This study shows that engagement with impressionistic memory work can challenge taken-for-granted stories with prominent male actors and masculine narratives to reveal the female actors and feminine narratives within. This approach will offer a more inclusive perspective on family histories and deeper engagement with the marginalised or neglected actors and aspects of our histories.

For geographers doing qualitative research, autobiographical narratives offer a discrete avenue into life experiences, everyday lived geographies, and intimate connections between places and identities. Yet these valuable sources remain mostly untapped by geographers and largely unconsidered in methodological treatises. This article seeks to elicit the benefits of using autobiographical data, especially with regard to stigmatised sexual minorities in Western societies. Qualitative research among gay men, lesbians and bisexuals (GLB) is sometimes difficult; due to the ongoing marginalisation experienced by sexual minorities in contemporary Western societies, subjects are often difficult to locate and reticent to participate in research. But autobiographical writing has a long history in Western GLB subcultures, and offers an unobtrusive means to explore the interpenetration of stigmatised sexuality and space, of GLB identity and place. A keen awareness of the power of geography of spaces of concealment, resistance, connection, emergence and affirmation underpins the content and form of GLB autobiographical writing. I demonstrate this in part through the example of my own research into gay male spatiality in Australia. At the same time we need to be aware of the generic limitations of autobiographies. Nevertheless, this article calls for wider attention to autobiographical sources, especially for geographical research into marginalised groups.

After spending three years as a secondary science teacher in an affluent Toronto neighborhood, I was surprisingly hired as a Literacy Teacher in my old school district just north of the city. I did not have a regular classroom; instead I was expected to work with as many teachers as I could within a cluster of elementary and secondary schools to, broadly speaking, pay explicit attention to the role of language in learning within the content areas. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze and interpret this part of my educational career by engaging in self-study via personal history; a personal history refers to becoming an accidental teacher educator, by virtue of a unique role as an in-service teacher educator with a language and literacy portfolio. Journals kept over two years reveal that, in many ways, I was a teacher educator before I knew what the term meant and that developing a pedagogy of teacher education with a focus on literacy made me increasingly frustrated with the over-simplified ways in which my school district framed issues of diversity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate possible purposes of digital storytelling and discuss practical implementation in a community-based digital storytelling project.

This case study investigates the function of digital storytelling for archiving local history, specifically by journaling experiences during a digital storytelling grant project at a public library in Southern California.

This case study details a specific example of the impact digital storytelling can have on a community, both to foster community building and also to encourage documentation of local history. The main goal of the project was to present and archive filmed stories from local community members; however, the project also led to increased awareness of digital storytelling and the associated technology both within the library and the greater community.

This article should provide best practice guidelines for administering a community-based digital storytelling project including suggestions for outreach to the larger community, dealing with technical issues, and tackling operational issues.

Digital storytelling has had a profound impact on the way that society communicates and can be used effectively for purposes of outreach and activism, to educate using technology, or to document micro-histories. This case study provides an assessment of the current uses of digital storytelling and presents a successful implementation of a local history digital storytelling project at a public library.

The threatened status of social studies instruction in elementary schools demands strong methods instruction to preserve the subject. This threatened status and other factors create issues specific to elementary social studies methods instruction. Moreover, university-level methods instruction can be idiosyncratic due to the various educational and professional backgrounds of the instructors. This study examined individuals serving in the “dual roles” of inservice teacher and elementary social studies methods instructor. While teaching the methods, participants encountered issues related to methods students, the filling of dual roles, and the status of elementary social studies and field placements. In addition, filling these dual roles facilitated their methods instruction through their ability to relate/react to methods students’ experiences and concerns.

Online/Digital cultural heritage platforms have the potential to serve as empowering sites and tools for democratic participation, and for promoting social cohesion, acting as convergence points for diverse societal groups. They enable the gathering of multiple voices, including those of minorities and groups often marginalised in mainstream cultural heritage documentation. This research paper examines the ways in which these aspirations of cultural heritage platforms as meeting, learning and dialogic spaces for connecting and empowering online communities have been realised.

Using a qualitative design, interviews were conducted with users of New Zealand’s Auckland War Memorial Museum’s Online Cenotaph. Participants shared their experiences with the platform, perceptions of it as a collective social history resource and views on its role as a participatory space for online communities. They also discussed their expectations for its development as an online space for collective memorialisation.

Interviews revealed that users value Online Cenotaph for placing personal, publicly contributed memories and narratives alongside primary military sources. Participants expressed feelings of civic responsibility, social awareness and a sense of identity and connection through their use and contribution to this online commemorative space. The shift from a one-way flow of information from the Museum towards embracing public contribution embodying a high-trust approach, was a notable finding.

This research underscores the evolving role of museums and other GLAM institutions in recognising the importance of inclusivity, diversity and community participation. It provides insights into how digital cultural heritage social platforms can contribute towards these goals and promote social cohesion. This research is also a starting point for further studies on crowdsourcing and social Web activities on digital cultural heritage platforms as sites of community building through public participation and engagement in historical/cultural heritage narratives.