History Harvest at the University of Illinois is a collaborative public history project in which students engage with members of the public to collect and digitize documents and artifacts of historical interest for scholarly and community research. Originally developed at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, History Harvests engage with individuals, communities and institutions to digitize important historical documents and facilitate deeper scholarly and community research into topics that sometimes only these materials can illuminate. At harvest events, students digitize materials brought by the public, record oral histories about about the significance of those materials, and collect information to serve as metadata for a digital collection. In the weeks that follow, students edit and upload their materials to a site like this one and prepare exhibits based on further public collaboration, research, and connections between materials.
Our first History Harvest course, History 358, was held Fall 2019 on the topic of “Spatial Change in Champaign Urbana.” The History Harvest site features our digitization of items brought to our main History Harvest on October 26 and to later in-class harvest events
Visit the Illinois History Harvest !