PAINESDALE - A few local community members are a little more savvy when it comes to preserving history.
Jo Urion of the Keweenaw National Historical Park presented a session at the Jeffers High School library and media center Tuesday afternoon on preserving history. Fourteen people turned out to learn about oral history.
"I'm going to talk about the basics on how to conduct an oral history interview," Urion said. "That's everything from making contact with people to what kinds of questions to ask."
Urion also discussed how to store and archive information to best preserve history.
Earlier in the day, participants were welcome to look around at some of the preservation already completed. For some time now, members of the Sarah Sargent Paine Historical Research Center have been busy compiling chronoscopes, also known as the annual yearbook, comprised of pictures of students from 1951 on.
Over the years, the SSPHRC members have taking apart yearbooks and digitizing them, said Donald Heikkila said.
"The quality is better than most scanners and printable," Heikkila said. "With school reunion coming up, we're hoping to put slideshows together."
The scanner is located in the media center and scans at a higher resolution. Heikkila demonstrated how the chronoscopes work by opening pages on the computer in the library and zooming in.
"If someone sees a picture from the yearbook they want, the quality is good enough to zoom in and print it off into a photo," he said.
Frank Rugani, of the SSPHRC, said the media center has a number of resources available for people looking to trace their families histories.
"These are references they can look at," he said. "Class pictures, directories. We have it here."
The media center has a CD with class pictures from 1897 to 2010 and the photos can be reproduced.
"The can also pull out pictures from the CDs," he said.
The people at the media center also have the ability to compile class pictures onto various CDs.
"This group brings all our local history alive," said Superintendent Tim Keteri of the SSPHRC.
