Graduate student Mark Miller listened intently as Sanford resident Walt Smith shared stories about Seminole County\u2019s past during last weekend\u2019s History Harvest at UCF\u2019s Public History Center.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe makes history come alive,\u201d said Miller, who was one of the students helping collect and digitally archive artifacts for the History Harvest.<\/p>\n
Smith and others participated in the event by bringing school-related artifacts for the students to scan and providing oral-history interviews.<\/p>\n
The event in Sanford marked the culmination of a year\u2019s worth of planning for UCF graduate history classes. Dr. Scot French\u2019s Local and Community History class hosted the event March 2.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s all about giving them the opportunity to have hands-on experience. It also gives them a focus for a research project on a specific community,\u201d said Dr. Rosalind J. Beiler, director of Public History at UCF.<\/p>\n
The plans for History Harvest began more than a year ago when guest speaker Douglas Seefeldt from the University of Nebraska visited Beiler\u2019s Introduction to Public History class. Seefeldt, who now teaches at Ball State University, experienced a colleague\u2019s History Harvest in Nebraska and shared the idea with Beiler.<\/p>\n
The artifacts and histories collected by French\u2019s class will be entered into the university\u2019s RICHES Mosaic, an interactive web interface, and made available to the public.<\/p>\n
Digital scanning company i\/o Trak, which is based in Central Florida but has worked on similar projects around the country, donated equipment for scanning. Rick Lippert, a longtime Seminole County resident and president of i\/oTrak, said the students \u201cdid an excellent job interacting with people and in making the objects come alive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lippert said the Public History Center represents a great potential for future digital history projects. The university leases the 1902 building that previously served as a high school, elementary school and Student Museum for Seminole County Public Schools. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cThey are a treasure trove of our history. I grew up in Seminole County \u2026 and I can just walk through [the building], and this is a living history,\u201d Lippert said.<\/p>\n
The History Harvest represented something larger than an academic project to those who contributed donations. For the Seminole County residents, the event provided an opportunity to become closer to their own histories.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never been to one of these before. I didn\u2019t know what to expect,\u201d said resident Algerine Miller, who brought many photos of her family and other African-Americans in Seminole County.<\/p>\n
\u00a0When Winter Springs resident Linda Moscato read about History Harvest in a newspaper account, she immediately recognized the location of the event and decided to bring in some documents for scanning.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been here many times. I love this place so much and I\u2019m so glad UCF is part of it now,\u201d said Moscato, who said she hopes more people come to realize how important the building is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Graduate student Mark Miller listened intently as Sanford resident Walt Smith shared stories about Seminole County\u2019s past during last weekend\u2019s History Harvest at UCF\u2019s Public History Center. \u201cHe makes history come alive,\u201d said Miller, who was one of the students helping collect and digitally archive artifacts for the History Harvest. Smith and others participated in the event by bringing school-related…","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":46730,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"template-twocol.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"lazy_load_responsive_images_disabled":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":"","_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[9570],"tu_author":[],"class_list":["post-46729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colleges","category-community","tag-scot-french"],"yoast_head":"\n