Transcript

Well, for me, I believe community is about people. You can have a lot of buildings, but if there are no people doing anything in these buildings, from my perspective there absolutely is no community. The community is about the active role people play in a dialogue about the purpose, or the sense of place, or the role they play in delivering on a mission.

And so that's what really this project was about was: how do you get all the different perspectives from staff, students, alumni, faculty, about what it takes, like activism to bring this mission of creating leaders that make a difference in the world, to life? And to me it was, "What does that mean, to make a difference?" You know, they are beautiful buildings. They're absolutely gorgeous buildings. But it's the people that actually do the verbs, you know? They're the action-oriented things. . . .

We have a huge historical collection that has archival material from the beginning of the history of the School. And some of it's in great condition. Some of it we've had to preserve over time, so that we can make it accessible. A lot of it has not been digitized. So we had to do a lot of work to figure out how to take this archival material that explains the history of the School, and make it accessible on the web. That's a very different model than I would have dealt with in the past.

But it was also about knitting it together, which I think is really the exciting thing about the Institutional Memory. It knits text together, it knits audio together, it knits video, it knits images together. And because of the kind of infrastructure that's available to us today for tagging, and metadata management, and content management, we're able to bring that to life in a way that you couldn't easily have done.

The other thing is what's really true is oral tradition is very important for most organizations, because most people are much more comfortable talking about what they do than taking the time to write it down. It's hard to write it down. So I think that oral tradition history that we have here is also really valuable to us. . . .

For me, the surprises were mainly very positive ones, in the sense that not only is this project about community, it honestly took a whole community to make this happen. I don't think there is a part of the School that wasn't touched in bringing this product to life. We had people from every department involved. We had a steering committee where people who have seriously busy schedules took their time to walk through the project with us. We had the Dean's Office, obviously, really interested in making sure that we were enabled to do this project effectively.

I think it's not only about community, it's by community. And that was the most wonderful surprise for me.