How did the Nostalgia Project begin?

Nostalgia is an offshoot of the Web Storybase, a project developed by Dave Mesner. Dave maintained the site for about a year and then graduated. Dr. Rosson needed someone to help with the UNIX portion so she asked John Kelso for help. John was in contact with a senior citizen -- she's not quite sure if it was Keith Furr, or not, and she is not quite sure exactly how everything evolved, but she knows there were some senior citizens interested in archiving memories about Blacksburg. John thought they could use a type of Web Storybase. Keith looked at the Web Storybase and thought it was a good idea. John generalized the Web Storybase and then made a special version -- Nostalgia. Joe Reiss came in and designed the homepage.

They then met with Keith to see if he had any changes. Initially, the seniors were concerned about protecting the site, but they eventually put a link to it from the Blacksburg Electronic Villiage (BEV) pages. There has been a little bit of outreach beyond the Blacksburg community, but they never did anything systematic about studying it. Recently someone contacted John looking for someplace to host a lot of pictures. They put him in touch with Dr.Edward Fox a couple of months ago, but they don't know what ever resulted.

John Kelso was working with Dr. Rosson on the Web Storybase modifying Perl code. He was on the seniors list of BEV to help a friend moving into Blacksburg. He found out that the BEV senior s were exchanging pictures of Blacksburg (old ones), so he put forth the idea of using a version of the Web Storybase. The seniors liked it and John put together their e-mails which had stories, anecdotes etc., and discussed this idea with Dr. Rosson.

Dr. Carroll forgot how the first contact occurred - he believed it came by way of John Kelso. He knew John was very involved in community groups, perhaps connecting him somehow to the beginning of the project. Personally, Dr. Carroll had been interacting with Connie Anderson gathering some info on people's impressions of the BEV for a presentation he was going to make at a panel for the conference on the future of computing. Connie replied to his questionnaire. He thinks she was part of the group of seniors that originated the idea for Nostalgia and that that was how he got involved.

An individual planning to move to Blacksburg asked if the BEV-Seniors would share their memories of Blacksburg with her so she could get a feel for the roots of the current community. Several responded, Keith noting himself as being probably the most wordy (as usual). Several curren t members thought it would be a good idea to continue the effort and the Nostalgia Project was born. Keith was semi-drafted to honcho the effort.

What kind of problems did you run into?

John Kelso had generalized code for both web Storybase and Nostalgia. Dr. Rosson had Rob Loadwick add some search fields on the web Storybase, so this changed a field in the index causing the other fields to be off by one. This wasn't discovered for sometime. Later, Dr. Rosson discovered this error when she wanted to get some information for Dr. Carroll. She manually added the parti cular field for the 12 stories which were stored on the system. The design team did not have any oth er technical glitches.

The main problem they ran into was with the pictures. Some of the seniors had high resolution screens, and some had small screens. It was very difficult to find a size that satisfied everyone.

Dr. Carroll couldn't recall much of this -- but he did know that Dr. Rosson logged a bunch of things. He remembered there was one problem that was triggered by reusing the StoryBase code. Contributions were getting displayed in the wrong order, or something to that effect. He believes that this particular problem wa s discovered when they were printing screen for a talk.

The technical problems were handled by John Kelso and Dr. Rosson. The only problem is getting people to continue to contribute. This is supposed to be a self sustaining project. Keith feels that some people seem to be expecting that he or some other person do the research to add to the project.

Were there any features that were thought of, but not implemented?

They thought about finding a way to make it easier to submit pictures rather than giving a link to the picture in the form using HTML. They thought about providing a means by which people who did not know HTML could still add links or pictures/images to their stories. They also thought about a different level of organization. The Web Storybase has a different level of organization -- categories. They felt that there was no need to add this since the site is so small.

There was talk about adding a picture gallery. This hasn't been done because no one has had the time to sit down and do it.

Dr. Carroll thought that the database aspects of Nostalgia are not sufficiently scalable. He thought that this has not been a pr oblem because the database is so small, but it's something they have let slide.

The seniors hoped to have many more photos included but the Town Bicentennial sort of preempted that effort. Keith hopes that eventually that aspect will go forward.

If you could have one feature added to Nostalgia, what would it be?

Dr. Rosson would add a search engine. This was Done in the Web Storybase. She felt that they should have it search the stories and their annotations.

John Kelso thought the addition of a picture gallery would have done a lot for the site. He thought this would help people remember things and prompt them to write more, and to write about things they had possibly forgotten.

Dr. Carroll would like a simple way to "submit" images (video, sound files, etc). He felt that it's boring to have only text submissions.

Keith Furr would add an overlay of the original town plan updated every 10 years or so with changes occuring during the decade being added.

Do you feel there is a need for a site monitor/Web Master?

Dr. Rosson monitors both the Nostalgia site and the Web Storybase. She feels that Nostalgia is a well behaved site and has to have little involvement. It wasn't requested, but it could have been.