The Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) is excited to share the news that the Coffee County Historical Society (CCHS) has gotten a 2023 Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) for the CCHS’s OpenTour Overcoming Segregation: A Journey Through Coffee County’s Forgotten Stories!
The CCHS created their OpenTour through our partnership between ECDS’s OpenTour Builder software and Georgia Humanities’s Digital Tour Initiative.
OpenTour Builder is an open source software platform for building geospatial tours that are optimized for mobile devices. With this tool, tour builders can easily create interactive, attractive tours that guide users from stop to stop using their smartphone’s GPS and OpenTour Builder’s native Google Maps instructions. At each location, the designer can include images, video, text, and external links to provide historical and cultural context, tying that information to the physical space. You can check out some other ECDS OpenTour projects here.
We are thrilled to see this noteworthy use of the OpenTour platform.
Please see the official press release below. Congratulations on this exciting award!
Overcoming Segregation: A Journey Through Coffee County’s Forgotten Stories
Wins Prestigious 2023 AASLH Award of Excellence
Nashville, TN – The American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) congratulates Coffee County Historical Society in association with The Coffee County Memory Project for receiving an Award of Excellence for Overcoming Segregation: A Journey Through Coffee County’s Forgotten Stories. The Award of Excellence is part of the AASLH Leadership in History Awards, the most prestigious recognition for achievement in the preservation of state and local history.
Overcoming Segregation: A Journey Through Coffee County’s Forgotten Stories is a virtual exhibition available to anyone with access to the Internet. Spanning 1965 to 1972, this oral history documentary project chronicles the experiences of those affected by federally mandated school desegregation in Coffee County, Georgia. Participants of all backgrounds shared stories of a time that few wanted to remember, but most couldn’t forget. Interviewees detailed memories of specific incidents prompting personal choices. These choices ultimately shaped the trajectory of their lives and their community. This exhibition is a self-guided tour featuring 21 locations crucial to desegregation. Sixty-two short documentaries combine newspaper articles and photographs with eyewitness accounts to offer visitors an intimate view of this transformative period. Since 2016 Coffee County volunteers have worked to make this exhibition a reality. Additional support was provided by Georgia Humanities, Georgia Tech’s Serve, Learn, Sustain Initiative, and Emory University’s Center for Digital Scholarship.
This year, AASLH is proud to confer fifty-one national awards honoring people, projects, and exhibits. The winners represent the best in the field and provide leadership for the future of state and local history.
The AASLH awards program was initiated in 1945 to establish and encourage standards of excellence in the collection, preservation, and interpretation of state and local history throughout the United States. The AASLH Leadership in History Awards not only honor significant achievement in the field of state and local history, but also bring public recognition of the opportunities for small and large organizations, institutions, and programs to make contributions in this arena. For more information about the Leadership in History Awards, contact AASLH at 615-320-3203, or go to www.aaslh.org.
###
About The Coffee County Historical Society and The Coffee County Memory Project
The Coffee County Historical Society joined forces with the Coffee County Memory Project to collect the oral histories of community members who remembered the desegregation of the county’s schools. The Coffee County Historical Society is an all-volunteer organization with a mission to collect, preserve and disseminate Coffee County’s history. The Heritage Museum is home to the Historical Society’s extensive collection and is open to the public three days a week, thanks to dedicated volunteers. The Coffee County Memory Project is an oral history project founded in 2016 with a mission to uncover the past so that we might better understand the present. It continues to collect oral histories.
About AASLH
The American Association for State and Local History (AASLH), a national nonprofit association, provides leadership and resources to help the history community thrive and make the past more meaningful for all people. AASLH serves the tens of thousands of history organizations, professionals, and volunteers around the country who help people of all ages develop critical thinking skills and understand how learning history helps society make progress toward justice. Through research, advocacy, and our field-leading professional development program, AASLH advances public history practice and connects history practitioners to critical issues in the field and to one another. For more information about AASLH visit www.aaslh.org.