2020 UMDCC+ MDL Annual Meeting

Fortepan Iowa (fortepan.us) is a nonprofit public digital photo archive established in 2015 at the University of Northern Iowa that features curated, high resolution photos taken by ordinary Iowans over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The archive is the first of its kind in the U.S., and the first sister site to the well-known Fortepan archive in Hungary (fortepan.hu), which is now considered a cultural institution with over 100,000 photographs. The Fortepan Concept, founded on the idea of openness, chronological display, and a mission to preserve and share region-based vernacular photography, is a disruption to the typical photo archive paradigm in both display, accessibility, and community engagement, and offers the archiving community an open source alternative to Omeka and ContentDM. We are at the beginning stages of planning a Fortepan archive for indigenous people across the U.S., as well as Fortepan archives in other states like Minnesota and Ohio.

Our panel will discuss the Fortepan Concept and highlight many of our initiatives and experiences with community building through the archive. These include Fortepan’s crowd-sourced tagging and public forum capabilities; our public lecture series initiative to interpret the archive; a proliferation of public library scanning hubs; public library photo exhibitions; billboard-sized public wheat paste art (taking the archival photos to the streets); creative digital projects; and a new initiative, “Mainstreet 360º,” where we’ll work with community members and K-12 schools to geo-reference historical photos of mainstreets and display them on a decade-to-decade, 360º street view display through Fortepan Iowa’s digital interface. Our overall mission is to use our archive of family snapshots to create dynamic intergenerational conversations within our local communities about culture, history, and identity.