Project Showcase: Building Histories of the National Mall

12 November 2015 – editors

Ever wondered how a digital project came to be?

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) shares how they built their NCPH-award winning project in a new free digital publication, Building Histories of the National Mall: A Guide to Creating a Digital Public History Project.

For institutions eager to begin developing their own version of Histories using Omeka, the technical specifications and code are available for download now. For organizations embarking on a new digital public history project, Building Histories of the National Mall offers an open source and replicable example for history and cultural heritage professionals wanting a cost-effective solution for developing and delivering mobile content.

Co-authored by the team that developed Histories of the National Mall, this guide is divided into seven main sections, including the project’s rationale; content development and interpretative approach; user experience and design; and outreach and publicity, including the social media strategy. This publication shares the project team’s decision to build for the mobile web and not a single-use, platform-specific native app. The guide also offers lessons learned and challenges faced throughout the project’s development, as well as how the team measured success for this digital public history project.

Building Histories of the National Mall and the website were funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.