(Resubmitted because subject lines are always helpful!)

Everyone,

We’re are very proud to announce a new initiative here at MoMS to encourage participating communities to tell us more about themselves and to be a partner with us in spreading that information. MoMS received grant support from the Smithsonian’s Web 2.0 Fund to develop the “Stories from Main Street” project, a three-pronged effort to deliver story-gathering tools to host organizations. The project kicked off publicly with the debut of The Way We Worked in September and has been growing by leaps and bounds since then. It’s perhaps most exciting because the Stories project comes straight from the heart of the Museum on Main Street program, giving the Smithsonian and all of you, our state partners, another way to help communities extend their capacity to interpret their history and culture for the public.

The grant enabled us to develop three elements under the "Stories from Main Street" banner, each designed to encourage the contribution of stories about life in rural America: 1) the new Stories from Main Street website at www.storiesfrommainstreet.org, a digital archive of stories from rural American communities that also allows MoMS communities to develop online exhibitions from the collections they contribute; 2) an oral history collection project via the new Stories from Main Street application for iPhone and iPad; and 3) a cell phone-based audio tour for The Way We Worked that includes capacity for exhibition visitors to record their own stories and reactions based on questions about their communities posed in the audio segments. The audio tour also allowed us to include audio segments developed with host councils, delivering content about each visitor’s home state directly to their telephones, within the context of the exhibition – an exciting new development for MoMS.

So far, it's been a great success. The website is open for business and the number of unique visitors is rising. As the five copies of The Way We Worked opened in Idaho, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, and West Virginia, use of the audio tour is also rising. And, far and away, the app is going gangbusters. We’ve had more than 12,000 downloads from the iTunes App Store. Apple featured the app as “New and Noteworthy,” and declared it “What’s Hot” the following week, helping it rise to the top 25 on the free education downloads chart. And, we even got a review in the Los Angeles Times. Wow. The app makes it easy for host communities and the general public to have a connection to MoMS. And, that's a big part of the Museum on Main Street experience.

Stay tuned for more – we’re working on enhancements for the website and the app now. By spring, we’ll have a version of the app for Android-based smartphones and we’re exploring opportunities for recording data and audio directly over the website.

If you would like to know more, an information sheet is attached. For those of you joining us next week for Journey Stories and The Way We Worked meetings, we’ll provide a thorough introduction and demonstration of the project. But, if you’ll be in St. Petersburg and won’t be in the meetings, just track me down, I would be happy to demonstrate the app and website for you. If you have communities that you think might like to get involved, let us know. We can organize an online tutorial for them.

Like all MoMS projects, this gives us another exciting avenue for working with you and the communities you represent. I’m really excited to see where this will take us.

All the best,

RD