Share YOUR Local History
How It Works
Maine Memory Network is designed to empower Maine communities to engage and share their history.
Maine Historical Society (MHS) provides training, support, and the technological infrastructure. Organizations across the state ("Contributing Partners") select items in their collections; scan or take digital photographs of those items; and then, through their own Maine Memory Network (MMN) account, use a web browser to upload, catalog, manage, and interpret the material online. All participation is free.
Why Participate?
Maine Memory is a resource and jumping off point for a broad, quickly growing audience of people interested in Maine and its history, including researchers, teachers, students, planners, professionals, tourists, and the general public. It includes contributions from more than 270 organizations, and receives 500,000 unique visitors each year.
Participation helps contributors reach new audiences within their communities and beyond, deepen local partnerships, develop a broad range of skills and capacities, and energize the practice of local history.
Get Involved
We invite your community to share its history, too. There are many ways to participate, including:
- Sharing Collections: Becoming a Contributing Partner enables organizations to digitize, catalog, and share historical collections online. Local teams select historical items, create high resolution scans or photographs, complete catalog records, and upload them to Maine Memory.
- Building an online exhibit: Once historical items have been uploaded, MMN offers a variety of flexible tools that enable contributors to create exhibits that tell stories and explore topics, themes, and events in their community's history.
- Building a website: Maine Memory also allows contributors and community teams to build their own websites within the network. Organizations use these websites to share information about their collections and programs. Local teams use these tools to gather and provide centralized access to a wide variety of information about their local history.
Getting Started
- Visit the "How to Contribute" section best suited to your organization (Collecting Organizations, Libraries, Schools).
- See the Projects from past grant recipients.
- Apply for Consultation with MHS staff for detailed project planning help.