We will have a meeting this coming Tuesday evening (November 18) at Ashford Manor 7pm. Below is a brief summary of the minutes of the last meeting. Come help us discuss future events and activities.
Peggy
Business Meeting:
1. Evaluation of History on the Lawn: We got a lot of positive feed back from participations who said they had a good time. One person reported that she had been gathering things ever since she heard about the event and that she couldn't wait to come. There were also positive comments about this year's panel.
We have gotten one new member since the event.
Suggestions for next year: (1) We need some sort of sign in system or way to count participants. One suggestion was to offer some sort of prize for which people needed to fill out information that gets put into a jar, which we can draw a winner from. (2) We need to consider the elderly and use the golf cart of set up scanning etc. closer to the entrance (3) the sun signing on the tent made it difficult for folks to see the videos shown on it. (4) maybe we should get the panelists to visit with people before the program (with someone recording it) (5) we should look into some way of turning it into a fund raiser. Concessions selling food was one suggestion (6) if we are serious about getting more sponsors that the University of North Georgia we need to start in January. Dave brought up the need to provide some sort of package for the sponsor and statistics about the number of oral histories collects, photos scanned etc. It was suggested we organize a committee to work on this package. Another suggestion was some sort of newspaper insert for which we provide copy and the newspaper sells ads to pay for the insert. (7) It was suggested that we create of time line for when things needed to be done and establish committees to work on things.
2. Update on SPLOST: Melissa and Peggy attended the first meeting of the subcommittee on History and Scenic Sites of the Oconee County Citizens Advisory Committee on recreational Affairs/Cultural Affairs and Tourism.
The purpose of the committee is to give the county ideas for how to spend funds currently in the SPLOST account designated to be spent on Historic and Scenic sites. (More money will be added if the next SPLOST passes in November.)
The committee will continue to meet until we come to a consensus that we can present to the BOC. Currently there is not deadline for making a decision.
Representatives there were from the tourism office, the clean and beautiful commission, the recreation department and the historical society. We had a wide ranging discussion of possible projects, what was and what wasn't included. Suggestions were better signs with landscaping, flowers around town, turning the Eagle Tavern into a 'real' museum vs the current mixture of stuff there, an archive/museum for the county, fixing up current structures so that we don't loose them (strengthening Central School house and or adding heat & air, a new roof for the Eagle Tavern, an archive/museum to store and share county artifacts, and a rails to trails greenway or river walk. History Village and what the county wanted to do about that was also briefly discussed.
5. Working with other organizations:
Maggie Collins of the Bogart Historical Society was there and she reported their current activities. They have a salute to Veterans on Nov 8 on Main Street 11:00am; a Christmas on Main Street (with tree lighting). They have been working on setting up a museum in the old school building on Thomas Street. There will be a grand opening sometime in December.
Allison introduced Christian Lopez, the lead oral history and media archivist at the Richard Russell Library at UGA. He is interested in training us, the UNG students etc. so that they can follow best practices for collecting oral histories. The goal would be to have a product that would be easier for Allison to work with. He could give us help figuring out how to use what we collect and to deal with legal issues that might come up. We agreed to let him work with Allison, UNG and a representative of the society (to keep us in the loop – We thought of George Justice).
6. A Christmas Party. We decided that Christmas is a busy season and that getting together in January might be better.
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