Summary: My guests today are Jay Cosnett and Erin Brasell from the Oregon Historical Society, and they’re talking with me about their recently-launched blog, Dear Oregon.<br> <br> **FULL TRANSCRIPT**<br> <br> NICK: Hi, and welcome to What’s On, the Cuberis podcast. I’m Nick Faber.<br> <br> My guests today are Jay Cosnett and Erin Brasell from the Oregon Historical Society, and they’re talking with me about their recently-launched blog, Dear Oregon.<br> <br> I met Jay last year in Vancouver, at the Museums and the Web conference. It was my first time at MW, and I was co-hosting a content strategy workshop with our CEO Eric. I’d like to think that everyone in the class got something out of our session, but Jay, in particular, seemed to be especially excited to be there.<br> <br> JAY: So I walked in thinking, well I know a little about content strategy, but not focused on museums, this will be great. But then, in like the first two minutes, Nick says, “So, content strategy is a big topic, but what we’re going to do to get your feet wet in an actual project, we’re going to pretend that your organization is starting a blog. And I was like [clap, clap] awesome. Because, of course, we were…<br> <br> ERIN: We were starting a blog!<br> <br> NICK: A few months ago, I checked in on the OHS website to see how the blog was going. And I was so thrilled to see that their new blog, Dear Oregon, had not only launched but was producing some really rich collections-based content. So I reached out to Jay to see if he wanted to talk about the blog, and he insisted that I meet Erin Brasell, too, who Jay described as the brains behind the blog, and they joined me over Skype. Since I’d never been to the Oregon Historical Society, I wanted to know a little bit about what I’d find there, and that’s where we’ll pick up the conversation.<br> <br> ERIN: Our mission is to preserve our state's history and make it accessible to everyone in ways that advance knowledge and inspire curiosity about all the people, places, and events that have shaped Oregon.<br> <br> And it's a mouthful, and it's a pretty broad mission, but we do work to advance the mission in a number of ways, including, we have permanent and temporary exhibits, both here in the building and online. We have a research library, we do a number of public programs and workshops here in our downtown location. We also partner with other organizations across the state.<br> <br> And the Oregon Historical Society recently launched a digital collections site in 2017, which makes available online thousands of images. We also have oral histories and documents from our collections. And they're constantly being updated. So, like hundreds a week, usually?<br> <br> JAY: Yes, hundreds a week. There's tens of thousands of documents on there and the diversity is astounding. And there's just more and more stuff up there all the time. And part of what's important about that is that even though we're located in downtown Portland, we're the Oregon Historical Society. So we're really charged — we're not a part of the government, we're an independent nonprofit that is charged with — we have a duty to preserve and share the history of the entire state with the entire state.<br> <br> So one of the reasons that — my title is web strategist — one of the reasons I was hired almost five years ago was because we needed to do a better job providing services to people who aren't physically here. And so that's really where the web comes in. So the digital collections site has been a huge leap forward in our abilities to provide access to our materials to people who aren't just here.<br> <br> NICK: Awesome, and actually, I had this as a question later on, but Jay, since you mentioned being a web strategist, could tell me a little bit more about what you do at the Oregon Historical Society?<br> <br> JAY: Sure,
