Documenting
& Preserving History On-line
A lecture
by Chris
Jepsen
Presented
at the Orange County Historical Society's annual conference, 1999,
California State University, Fullerton
The chief tool I use to spread the
gospel of Googie is my website,"Googie Architecture
On-line."
The site includes a history of Googie, a description of the style and
its importance and a large gallery of illustrative images captioned with
information on the individual buildings. The site also includes current
related news, excerpts from relevant articles in print and links to
kindred websites.
We all have collections of articles, photos and other ephemera relating to our particular areas of interest. We also have a lot of knowledge that's never been written down.
Put all that information online.
Do it yourself, or offer the information to the webmaster of a good existing site. It's basically free to publish this way, and it's also free for people to access.
In terms of making information available to the public at a reasonable cost, the Internet is the next quantum leap after the invention of the printing press.
A website can be used as a tool of activism -- to call attention to threatened historic resources. The Friends of Biff's site was instrumental in saving a classic Googie coffee shop in Oakland earlier this year. The site offered historical information, news, an on-line petition and direct links to the e-mail of those in a position to save the building. 10,000 people signed their petition and the landowner, Chevron, called a halt to the building's destruction.
Educational history or architecture websites can be composed of republished materials, like the valuable Anaheim History Archive, or they can be built, like Googie On-line, of content created specifically for the site itself. Both methods have their advantages, or you can mix the two. In any case, you will have provided a valuable resource to others.
To some degree, any site that educates is an activist site. Without my knowing it, Jane was able to use my site as a key research source in developing her archive of Anaheim Googie. In turn, her project became the basis for an article that spread the word about Orange County's Googie architecture all over the nation. Suddenly, local liquor store owners and bowling alley managers realized that their buildings might have intrinsic historical value.
In short, anything you do to educate the public about their local history is valuable -- and the web is one of the best ways to share what you know.
Here are some things to consider when developing your web site:
- Make sure you're not being redundant. If similar sites exist, offer to assist rather than creating your own site
- Set goals before you begin to create your site.
- Learn hypertext markup language (HTML). You can build a fair website with a web design program or even MS Word, but a basic understanding of HTML will help tremendously. Check out a book on HTML or take a night class.
- Content is king. Simplify your design and make your information easy to access and navigate. It's the words and well-chosen illustrations that make your site valuable to others.
- Register your site. Many great sites go un-noticed because they were never registered with search engines like Yahoo. You can also ask webmasters with similar sites to offer links to yours.
Googie was the architecture of a future that never came to pass. Ironically, we're using our post-space-age technology to record the preserve what's left of Googie and its discarded dream.
(Editor's Note: The second half of this lecture has been excised, as it is redundant to information already available on this site. The missing half dealt with the elements of googie architecture, or "what makes something googie.")
Photo of C. Jepsen by M. Tucker.