When Sharing History Is Easier Than Preserving It

# Project Update: When Sharing History Is Easier Than Preserving It

Over the past several months, we've learned quite a bit about what people enjoy seeing from Historic Poplar Bluff. Old photographs of familiar places attract attention. The Rodgers Theatre brings back memories. Videos of downtown can reach thousands of people. A recognizable storefront, school, street or landmark can quickly start a conversation.

We love sharing those things. In many ways, that's where this project began.

But lately we've also been thinking about something more difficult: **there is a considerable difference between sharing history and preserving it.**

A historic photograph can be posted to Facebook and viewed thousands of times. People may recognize it, remember it and enjoy seeing it again. A few days later, however, it has largely disappeared down the timeline.

Preserving that same photograph is something different.

Someone has to determine when it was taken. Identify the building or people pictured. Record where the image came from. Compare it with newspapers, directories, maps and other photographs. Digitize it properly. Add names, dates, locations and keywords. Connect it to related people and places. Then it has to be stored somewhere that someone can actually find again years from now.

The first part might take a few seconds to share.

The second can take hours.

And increasingly, we're wondering whether social media has unintentionally changed the way communities think about their own history.

Facebook Is Wonderful — But It Isn't an Archive

Facebook has given local history an audience that organizations a generation ago could only have imagined. Someone can share a photograph from a family album and, within hours, hundreds or thousands of former residents may see it.

That is incredibly valuable.

But Facebook was never designed to be a permanent historical repository.

Posts disappear into timelines. Photographs become separated from their original sources. Names and dates get buried among comments. Stories are told and then become difficult to find again. Sometimes photographs are downloaded, reposted and shared repeatedly until nobody remembers where they originally came from.

Meanwhile, the things that receive the greatest attention aren't necessarily the things most important to preserve.

That realization has caused us to think more carefully about Historic Poplar Bluff and what we're actually trying to accomplish.

Building Something Beyond the Timeline

Behind the photographs and stories we share here, we've been slowly trying to build something much larger.

We've been collecting and indexing historic photographs, researching historic sites, digitizing old records, adding thousands of names and business listings from city directories, documenting families and individuals, preserving newspaper discoveries and building tools that allow all of that information to connect together.

Our Rodgers Theatre research has grown into an effort to document not only the theatre, but Isaac Walter Rodgers, his family, employees, theatres and the remarkable motion-picture circuit he developed throughout the Mississippi Valley.

We've experimented with new ways of searching those materials, including **Ask the Archives**, which allows visitors to ask ordinary questions about Poplar Bluff history and receive answers drawn from the historical material we've assembled.

None of those things fit particularly well into a Facebook post.

And perhaps that's the point.

An Experiment That Has Given Us Something to Think About

We've also been asking the community to participate.

We've asked for photographs. We've asked for memories. We've invited people to identify buildings and people. We've encouraged residents to share their own stories and historical material.

So far, we've discovered an interesting—and somewhat concerning—difference.

People clearly enjoy **seeing** Poplar Bluff history.

Far fewer seem interested in **contributing to its preservation**.

We're not saying that critically. Everyone has families, jobs and responsibilities, and historical research takes time. Historic Poplar Bluff itself is a small family project squeezed between those same responsibilities.

But the experience has made us wonder about something larger than our own project:

**What happens to local history when social media becomes the primary place where a community preserves its memories?**

A Facebook post may survive somewhere on a server for years, but that isn't the same thing as having an organized historical record that future researchers, families and residents can actually explore.

Maybe Preservation Looks Different Today

We certainly don't have all the answers.

Historic Poplar Bluff is still an experiment in many ways. We're learning as we go, usually with more ideas than time or resources to pursue them.

Perhaps the future of local preservation will be a combination of traditional museums, physical collections, digital archives, community memories and new technology. Perhaps projects like ours can help connect those pieces.

But we're increasingly convinced that simply posting old photographs isn't enough.

Someone still has to do the slower work.

Someone has to save the names.

Someone has to record the dates.

Someone has to research the stories.

Someone has to preserve the originals.

And someone has to build a place where all of those pieces can still be discovered after today's Facebook post has disappeared from everyone's feed.

That's the part of Historic Poplar Bluff we're continuing to work on—even when it isn't the part that receives the most attention.

We hope, over time, more people will decide to help.

Until then, we'll keep researching, collecting, documenting and sharing what we can.

Because **our history deserves more than a timeline.**