Blacksburg Nostalgia: A Community History Archive

Abstract: We describe a case study of community computing: The development of an archive called “BlacksburgNostalgia”. We worked with a senior citizens to create a Web forum for publishing and discussing informal storiesabout local history. We describe the origins of our project and the design of the system; we analyze an examplestory and its annotations, as well as usage logs and a recent user survey.Keywords: public access, community networks, senior citizens, Web forums. 1 Introduction Community computing is computing support fora particular kind of organization, namely, for thevillages, towns, and neighborhoods in which peoplereside. This is a distinctive context for computing:Users and developers often are the same people;functions and services tend to pertain to non-professional aspects of life such as managing musicselection for the church choir, or discussing re-zoningproposals; pockets of development activity occur hereand there throughout the community with little overallcoordination.Community computing initiatives incorporatemany motivations. For example, building localnetwork infrastructure and expertise, and establishingpresence in the Internet is seen as a means to stimulateor attract economic development. Rural areas seenetworks as a means of virtually relocating nearerto population and commercial centers. Schools,libraries, and local governments regard placingtheir information on-line as part of their publicresponsibility. Communitarian idealism and socialactivism are also major motivations — e.g. (Schuler,1996). Community computing seeks to enhanceaccess to and participation in community life at a timein history when traditional communities appear to beeroding (Bellah et al., 1985; Putnam, 1996).Community computing raises many researchquestions. For example, what sorts of applicationsare particularly suitable for local communities?Applications that depend upon or develop localinformation or other resources, or that integrateface-to-face interaction with other channels seemplausible candidates. How can community computingprojects be appropriately and effectively developed;how can they be sustained? It seems likelythat community computing will require intensifiedforms of participatory analysis and design, and thatsustaining community systems and applications willrequire new economic models in local governmentand volunteer organizations. And finally, how cancommunity computing efforts supplement (or evenco-exist with) the overwhelming vision of globalcomputing embodied by the World Wide Web?Our community computing research is carriedout in the context of the Blacksburg ElectronicVillage (