(e:lilho) and I headed down to the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society to do some research for the Remember Buffalo Project.

While we were there we found this pic of (e:joshua) and (e:jason)'s house across from spot at Cleveland and Elmwood. We also found some pics of the old trolley tracks on elmwood.



Here is a park at elmwood and Ferry along with the trolley tracks.



Here is the a shot of elmwood and North.



It is incredible what research consist of at the historical society. I cannot believe that their data is not digitized and searable on computers. You actually hold and look at original images in folder using special white gloves. You can request image photocopies for $0.25 but are not alowed to take pictures in the library which is ridiculous in my opinion. If you want to use their material you need to pay $25 per image for a six month lease to use the image. And that is the price for a non-profit project. How anti-preservation is that. If the place ever burns down or the material degrades there will be no external copies.

Hopefully using the remember buffalo primary document upload interface we will be able to collect thousands of primary documents of our own. Which I will then donate to a historical preservation group which promises free access and public domain for the contents.

Afterwards, I met with Doug Lambert from Randforce about collaborating on the project. He seems like a really creative, driven guy that will be fun to work with.

[size=m]Remember Buffalo[/size]
What I would really like to expand upon is the Remember Buffalo project but I am am a weird standstill. Will it be developed in PHP or RoR? Who will I work with? Will it be yahoo or google maps based. Will I make my own mapping software now that I am all trigonometry style. I want a project with meaning and long term information delivery and storability.

Winter makes it less exciting but it is a great time to start out collecting all the data.

I want someone to work with and go with my places to check out old data, scan pics, think up ideas, etc. It is boring working alone. I was hoping (e:mike) would be into it, but he is always busy looking for a date.

(e:matthew) began sorting some of his photos into genres for the primary doc sectio nof the site. It is a huge amount of work and we hope to have some of the primary doc section up by this weekend. (e:jim) has also joined on as a photographer on the project.

Today we added two new genres. Downtown and gardening. If anyone is interested in working on the project feel free tyo shoot me an email.

Katie helped me get all the genres ready so that now you can pick up to three genres per memory. You can also add keywords if you want, although I am not sure if I will keep that. There are currently 72 genres. While totally optional, by combining them into groups of three you should be able to fit any story.

Here they are.

The Remember Buffalo Project is pleased to announce the map beta for the memory input engine. You can add location based memories of Buffalo using the map found by clicking on the "::submit memory beta::" link at the top of the site at

For each memory you can link up to three genres and a time period. By combining three genres you should be able to classify most memories. For ones that can't be classified you can add keywords. For example, a story about my grandmother moving to America and buying a house on the west side can be classified under the genres immigration, housing, and family.



Right now you have up to five minutes to delete memories using the same computer that you inputted them form. This system may change in the future depending on feedback.

By contributing memories you are helping us shape the future interface of the project. A project description can be foudn on the front page of the site.

The next technological development phase of the project is going to be creating a system to collect thousands of genre specific primary documents to help inspire memories. The next social development phase of the project is finding a PR person, starting to advertise and finding a grant.

If you have other suggestions for the Remember Buffalo Project please add them here or if would like to volunteer, please feel free to use the contact link at the top of the site and send us an email.

I added a decades option to the year occurred list for memories that span more than one year, or for ones you can't remember the exact year.

So check it out and add some memories to this beta . As soon as I get my other paid work done I will begin adding the primary document section.

I scheduled another facilitation today for the history project. Considering that not one person I invited to help brainstorm showed up, it went well. Katie invited some people from the creativity program at school. One of them, Patrick, turned out to be someone I knew.



I definitely think that I need to get some professionals from the fields of history, teaching, information science, and PR involved. However, we produced lots of helpful ideas that I put on the suggestions page at the rememberbuffalo.org site.



One of them was to offer downloadable memory map tours for people to print and walk when they do not have access to a cell phone. Also to set up some sort of network for geocachers as we will already have the coordinates for the memory markers.

Katie's warm up activity was great. She had pictures of Buffalo and we had to create memories from them.



Thanks for all your help Katie.

Thanks Buffalo Rising for posting about the project . It brought about some good connections.

I decided to start a journal about my new project on my old project website. I think there is something to be said for making tools.

Many of you know about the new Remember Buffalo project but if you haven't checked it out, please access that page for a brief description of the project.



I has all the promise of an extremely elaborate project that should be fun for many types of Buffalonians from all age brackets. As a user, it doesn't require the same kind of time commitment as a blog and is accessible while on the go to provide mobile entertainment.

So far there are about 5 people involved in the creation and deployment of the project but it seems more like 20 are going to be needed. This Saturday we are having a brainstorming creativity facilitation lead by Mary Kelly from Buffalo State's Creativity Studies Master's program about the development process, etc. If you are interested in the being a project collaborator after reading the project site, please contact me as soon as possible, it would be great to have you at the facilitation, where we are going to officially define the project some more.

There is a pre-beta version of one form of memory collection interface available on the remeberbuffalo site. you can get there on the site by clicking on the "submit a memory" link at the top of the page.



Anyone can also post suggestions for the project on the suggestions page.



The first items that need to be addressed are who is going to be on a board of directors, how can we become an offical non-profit and how can we get some grant money. Even without grant money this project can be very successful, however, money could make it scale significantly.

(e:matthew) is going to be handling the photography for the project and I plan on taking care of most of the technical work, but there remains many other things that need to be done. For example, I would like someone to work on a documentary about the project so that people know about the project and visit the project site to ad memories. We will also need PR people, grant writers, people to take memory surveys at old folks homes. Someone to head up a Spanish speaking memory translation, people to help with organising and editing data, someone to make phone calls and write letter/press releases, etc.

(e:mike) had a great idea to get cross-generational support for the project. He suggested that we try and get middle school students involved by working with their history teachers. That way they can collect many memories from the old people that don't use computers, but have many very interested memories of Buffalo as was. It encourages both the children to learn to use computers in a non-video game like format, teaches writing skills, and promotes children talking to old people. For the old people, it can make them feel involved in something modern and technological and perhaps even inspire some of them to begin using technology that they previously hadn't considered.

Is anyone a social studies teacher, or does anyone know someone that could help us realize this goal?

On another note I am going to use the (e:strp) api to make this journal available on the rememberbuffalo.org site. If you want our journal on your site, please check out the (e:strip) api