Kentucky Association of Teachers of History

The Kentucky Association of Teachers of History, the Kentucky Historical Society and the Kentucky Virtual Library came together in 2006 to organize a new Humanities and Social Sciences Network (H-Net) network: H-Kentucky.  The H-Kentucky network focuses on “History, Heritage, and Culture in the Bluegrass State.” Just this week, the H-Kentucky listserv community has moved to the new Web2.0 platform in the H-Net Commons.  Take a look:

http://networks.h-net.org/h-kentucky

In the old listserver, members received via email information about history-related events taking place here in Kentucky, original reviews of books, articles, websites, museums and films that might be of interest to Kentucky faculty and teachers — as well as job announcements. Unlike in the old listserv community, the new H-Kentucky network has many more opportunities to use robust digital media technologies (audio clips, video, image galleries, document sharing) as well as sharing information across multiple networks seamlessly. Users may receive notices via email or via RSS feeds.

We are looking for subscribers who will help create new content.  Here is a list of the different kind of content producer roles for the new H-Kentucky:

• Subscriber – create Discussion Posts and reply to existing discussion posts (note: as with the old H-Kentucky listserv, all posts require moderation by the editor before appearing on the network).
• Blogger – these subscribers can also create Blog posts.  Blog posts DO NOT go through the moderation system, so bloggers will be vetted by the editors as an expert on their topic.
• Contributor – upload files to a network (for moderation by an editor).  On H-Kentucky all subscribers are given this role, but we may want to solicit Lead Contributors to help get projects going.
• Moderator – can help moderate and publish Discussion Posts submitted to the network – so they will be invited by the H-Kentucky network editors to serve as H-Kentucky Discussion Leaders.
• Network Editor – can create all types of content, edit their Network, create blogs and dynamic content pages featuring the latest contributions, moderate content, and manage subscribers.
• Review Editor – using the H-Net Review Management System, organizes a database of reviewers, chooses books to review and moderates book reviews submitted for publishing on H-Review.

Note: a person can have more than one role.

The goal of H-Kentucky has always been to create an online collaborative environment to facilitate communication and the exchange or scholarly and pedagogical ideas among teachers, researchers, scholars, advanced students, and related professionals (e.g. local historians, librarians, archivists, genealogists), all in an open, democratic, respectful and non-partisan manner. H-Kentucky especially welcomes those who are interested in Kentucky, as well as those in any history or humanities field who live and/or work in Kentucky.

Here are some examples of projects our new system could handle.

A Picture or A-V Gallery for H-Kentucky (our own Pinterest!): Creating an A-V Archive
There are two options for creating an image archive in the new H-Net Commons.

• By Image Category:  We can assign a “category” to any kind of Contribution (image, video or audio clip, document) you would like to appear in the archive then create a dynamic page which will automatically incorporate all images with that category (current and new) in order of most recently added. Once we set up the archive, it will require little to no maintenance since it will be constantly updated whenever an image with that particular category is published.
• Manually: We can create a new page and embed each selected Contribution into the webpage. We can embed as many items in the page as you like – and in whatever order you prefer.

A Digital Reference Guide for H-Kentucky Networkers: Creating a List of Links
Links are their own content type on the H-Net Commons. You can ask an editor to create a link that includes multiple sources of information about a particular resource that is important to H-Kentucky subscribers.  For example, a link could include both another set of links and a notation about how useful those resources are – a sort of annotated, digital bibliographical entry. If you assign a category to all the links you would like to appear on a single page, then the editor can create a dynamic page which will automatically incorporate all links categorized that way (from most current to oldest entry).  If you want to create a list that is in a particular order or incorporates links published from other networks, then we would need to create a page that embeds each of the links – and think about including sub-titles, images, etc. to take advantage of this kind of design choice.

A Digital Bibliography: Creating a Dynamic Page of Contributions
We can use H-Kentucky webpages to create a series of sources on one single page that pulls together items of a certain category.  For example, we might choose a new category which will be applied to all the sources which will appear in a digital bibliography. For example, categories like “Antebellum Kentucky Source” or “Louisville KY Source” could be applied to selected posts, blogs, contributions or other pages. The main page would then display all the sources in a digital bibliography.  We could even add the bibliography to our Network Menu on the top right of every page.  The only potential downside to this method is that sources will not appear alphabetically – they will appear in order of most recently to earliest published.

For questions about how all this works, please contact H-Kentucky at editorial-kentucky@mail.h-net.msu.edu.  Looking forward to seeing KATH members make this new network work!