Heritage and Cultural Center Fdpc - Regular Meeting

Okay.

All right, folks, we're going to call the order and stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Thank you, folks. I know you've got a million things you could be doing on this fine summer afternoon. I appreciate you spending with us. Thank you so much. And so I will promise I try to get through things as fast as possible so folks can enjoy the nice weather because this is darn near perfect. So first of all, I just have to comment. I told Abby. We are on a torrid pace of activities. Like, we always have a lot going on. But, wow, this continues unabated from last month as far as the sheer amount of activities. Yeah, he said there's no question about it. It is definitely at a torrid pace. So going through past and upcoming events, I do want to get a recap from everybody for last month. We did have the Roberto Clemente Museum. We did have Vince Mariotti was the speaker who subbed for the previous piece. I will tell you, my opinion was he was fantastic, but I'd love to hear everybody else's opinion on what they thought about Vince and the Roberto Clemente Museum.

Very good.

Great presentation. Really, really good presentation. Thank you. I was told he was the best, and he lived up to his billing. He was the best. I thought I knew a lot about baseball, and then I met Vince. I don't think I know anything. Now, I did want to mention he did bring tickets, free tickets that we could give away, as well as hats, as well as mugs, as well as even grilling, believe it or not. And I thought those all went over very well. So Vince, in my opinion, was a big hit. I'm going to make sure I did offer to take him to lunch as a thank you. especially given that he subbed in for someone. And he was absolutely fantastic. He's a great ambassador for the museum. Yeah. He, when he said he gave, he was giving over 700 tours. I believe him, but he got it down to the seventh. It's in Lawrence.

Yes.

So he would absolutely, you can always email and request him by name and, and they'll tell you when he's going to be there. I want to check the wine cellar. Yeah, yeah, there's a wine cellar involved.

Oh, yes.

All right, so very good. Again, many thanks. We had a sold-out crowd again. Thanks for all the volunteers, again, helping out. It was fantastic, so thank you, folks. All right, going right again, talking about selling sold-out crowds. This Thursday, the Harmony Line trolley, I am really looking forward to this. And if I understand correctly, Abby, like the registrations, correct? The registration.

Probably weeks ago. So I cast the registrations online at 42. So we filled up to 42, and we have a wait list of eight people. And I've gotten a couple calls this week, too, wondering if people have dropped out. Unfortunately, no one has dropped out. So we'll have to pull out again tomorrow. So Scott Becker, the former executive director of the PA Trolling Museum, as well as Bill Bronzek, former ophthalmologist, I believe, full-time trolley enthusiast. He just wrote a book about the Harmony Line and some rail systems throughout southwestern Pennsylvania. So he'll be here tomorrow with some copies of his books available for sale. They'll be here tomorrow to discuss the Harmony Line through the North Hills, as well as the transfer of the Wexford Station to the Toronto Museum in Washington, VA. So it should be fantastic.

Now, what help do you need on getting set up? So I can be here tomorrow and breathe. I mean, I can get here. I need help with setup. It's not over 30.

Rich said that he was going to come in tomorrow afternoon and set up a lot of chairs. As you know, we've got some construction going on on the driveway here. They're expanding the road to make it two lanes in and out, which will be fantastic on community day. So they have been working on that from 7 to 3 each day this week. The Heritage Center will be closed this week while they do that construction, but we will be, we're obviously open now, and we'll be open tomorrow evening for that presentation. So I'll get here at 6.30. He's coming with a jump drive or a laptop, so we should be good to go. So thank you to Rich for coming in and setting up those chairs.

And I'll have a laptop as well, just in case with the backup and ACVC.

Okay.

Good. Very good. All right. And then moving on, because again, continuing on with that is on Saturday. So again, this is just Thursday we're having the talk. Then on Saturday, the tour of the Pennsylvania Trolleyboats. And there's no transportation there, correct? Is that meet there? Unfortunately, I cannot make that disappointment. But that sounds like a great thought.

So we have five spots left. If anybody We'll be there at 10 a.m. for a behind-the-scenes deluxe tour, they call it. And it should be a wonderful time.

I do love it's back-to-back, where you get the theory and then the practicality. Then the hands-on. See, how cool is that? I'm disappointed I will not be able to make that, so I'm wanting lots of stories back from that one. That sounds great. All right, then move it on. Not done yet. So a week after that, then we have on Saturday, the 27th, another one I'm really excited for, which is the appraisal fair in partnership with the Heinz Mystery Center, which I am very much looking forward to. I'm signed up for it. I have family members signed up for it. The website worked perfectly for me. We get it in there and get credit card info in. So I am looking forward to that on the 27th. Is there any help you need on that right now? Are we going to, as we get closer?

I talked to the librarian over at Chandler and they've done that program a couple of times before. So she needs to be here about how to set up the tables and how you arrange things to sort of get the queue going. Because each person from the Heinz History Center has sort of a different expertise so Bob who's coming is like the sports guy so not to say that you can't look at something else but if that person brings in something related to sports they're probably going to want to talk to Bob so I'll think about how the room should be set up I'm thinking we just sort of set up tables in the perimeter, have a table maybe for people to put their stuff down once they come in, maybe have a couple chairs to sit while you're waiting. But I'll work on that. And Anne said that she would be here that day, and she's helped at the Shaler one. And I'm willing to help out.

But frankly, I've been looking for it. I know we've been talking about doing it for a long, long time. Now actually doing it, this is pretty cool. This is super cool. Everybody's saying this would be a great location to do that. I agree. Let's see how it goes. So again, I tried out the website. Everything works fine. People want to sign up for me. I'm betting we will have some people show up, though, who did not sign up. So we'll have to figure out how to deal with that one night. Is there something on the home page now that takes you directly to that? I was trying to find the patient register too.

There should be. I think I had someone ask me that. They couldn't find it. I think I did that.

But I can show. The other thing is about people paying. The ones who haven't signed up, I imagine you're paying. Or are you paying online? Yeah, you probably are.

If you sign up online, you have to pay out.

Right.

But we can have some payments at the door. We can just take cash. Cash.

But I'm telling everybody who plans to come, obviously, this is our version one. And so we'll be figuring it out as we go along. Everybody's excited. Everybody's got something super cool to bring. And it's probably worth millions, of course. Of course, it's been in their garage for decades, but it's worth millions. Myself included, of course. So I'll be bringing some stuff with millions, I guarantee. I am really looking forward to that. If there's any other help you need, though, please let us know. And then I do have some bad news and good news for the speaker next. So we did have Steve Cicero scheduled for the history of Route 19. Unfortunately, Steve did have a family issue come up, but because Steve Cicero is Steve Cicero, he said, I got you somebody to replace me. And he said, person I think Steve is correct so I appreciate Steve doing this it's a person named Bill May who was a specialist on the Biddle Boys and the full story on that so I do have a story up there from Butler County so he's a historian in Butler County he's given speeches everywhere around this including the Heinz History Center and he seems like the absolute real deal so he has sent us his little abstract and it reads like a thriller like you can't believe it So I am looking forward to that in June. So we're continuing on that. I appreciate Abby adjusting on that and making the flyer and everything, because I know that was something we didn't expect. But I do want to say Steve Cicero is a real standard guy for adjusting. Because I did tell him, yeah, stuff comes up. We would figure out a plan B. He would figure that out. He figured it out for us, which I agree with. So that's on July 16th. And then on Saturday, July 25th, because, again, we just keep rolling here, the scanning app.

Oh, wow, we really have them.

Yeah, so is that still that? Again, another thing we've been discussing. I think we're actually doing it, correct? We're actually doing it.

And that's what, July?

July 25th, which is a Saturday.

Amy and I, this Friday, discussed the details she sent over the whole workup of... the way things should work. So, well, we can do that. We can do that.

We have phones up with the libraries about their last flatbed scanner. And the other one they have has to run on that computer that hasn't been on that network.

So we have at least two scanners, mobile scanner here. That could be enough.

It just depends on who needs it. Okay. What would it be now? Within Would you like to We're inviting people who have old photographs of the canvas to bring them in sign waiver. scan the pictures so they stay in custody of their pictures. But then we have scanned images that hopefully we can get added into the Historic Pittsburgh collection and we can use here, you know, for exhibits and things and post them on Facebook and all those wonderful things that they do now in history. But the beauty of it is we just need to scan the pictures and get as much information about the pictures, but they get to keep the pictures. We're not asking them to donate their pictures.

What time is that? I'm not sure. I don't think they set a time.

And I do have to give a shout-out. If you notice, the theme is stuff we've been talking about, we're doing. Like, I really give, like, lots of version 1.0 stuff.

I just give this boot tons of credit. I think to separate the information gathering from the actual scanning of things to flow a little bit better for us. So we'll have a worksheet to capture the situations as we came about the images and who's in them when they were paid.

Yeah, I have a blank form because they actually have to sign and say, I need to post these online.

I think I'm officially exhausted. So it's like that is a giant list of stuff. All right. I am going to move on then to just public comment on the agenda items. Is there any agenda item people want to talk about? We just finished talking about the scanning party. So what's the scanning party? A lot. But if there's anything else you want to talk about. But is there anything else anybody wants on the agenda that's not there? If not, as always, you can throw it in the room. As far as the approval of the previous meeting minutes, I did take a look at them. To me, that adequately represented what we discussed last time. I'm good with it. So I just wanted to move to see, is there anybody, are people okay? Do I get a motion to approve the minutes? Oh, wait, thanks. No, we need, go ahead.

Do you have a question? Yes. way at the bottom, in about the previous minutes, it says that we're way out of date.

Thank you.

Thank you. You do.

You win. Thank you. Motion to approve. Motion to approve. Pending that. Kevin, do I have a second? Jim, thank you so much. Thank you. All right. The gala still scheduled for Friday, November 6th at the Camelot. And there's going to be a subcommittee meeting right after this. All right. Then reports and updates from committee. All right. The marketing communications, the social media side. Again, it seems to be on fire. At least I love all the stuff that's there. I'm not sure if you want to go through any updated stats.

Yes, I do. Last month we had 236,400 views, which was up 31%. We had 139 new followers. And our content interactions, which is likes and comments, was at 2,300. That's up 29% from the beginning. I asked Liz, in looking at the analytics, they give you so much information, but I don't really understand what you mean. So there's reach, there's likes and reactions, there's shares, views, viewers, and then a whole bunch of other analytics that you can look at on the back end of Facebook. So I think that likes and reactions are the most, or engagement in general, is the most important metric to look at. So our post with the most likes and reactions was the post about the Zares Halloween shopping bag. And it had 186 likes and reactions and four shares, and it had a reach of 5,528. Number two was the throwback Thursday to NA Schools, which was, I believe, the cover of the annual calendar that they sent out in 1964. It had 128 likes and reactions and 10 shares with a reach of 13,595. Number three was the image of the flyer for the Trolling Museum presentation. with 120 likes and reactions, a reach of 12,035 and 14 shares. Number four was the then and now image from the 2001 history book, 114 likes and reactions, seven shares, 8,357 reach. And number five was an image of McKnight Row down in Ross Township showing the old Value City, which is where the old Joann's was. 97 links and reactions. This had a reach of 21,773 shirts. It's very fascinating what people like to engage with and also just the views that these things get. It's quite impressive. I mean, there are tens of thousands of people that are viewing our Facebook posts at any one time.

I mean, it's absolutely a huge force.

Gigantic. Yeah.

I mean, I know it takes work and effort to be able to post stuff, schedule it out. You did a great job. Absolutely great job. Thank you so much. Everybody is involved in being able to do that. And I assume Liz is assisting somewhat this, or is she still too early to be able to assist?

She's Yeah, I got you. To increase what, you know, the momentum that we already have.

Have you been picking the items to put on?

And actually most of them have been I don't know if I should admit this, but they've been copy and paste from like three years ago. So I mean, they're old. So it's not like it's people coming up next to each other on our feed. But they've got more engagement than they did three years ago. And it saves me a lot of time. Yeah.

No, very good. Any other questions on that one? Thank you so much. That's huge. I just think it's such a force multiplier. It's fantastic. All right. From a budget standpoint, I don't think there's anything new this month. So from a budget standpoint.

The only thing I bought was this clicker for 15.

I do. All right. From an outreach standpoint, not sure if there's anything else you want to mention with outreach. I don't know if you want to talk about the Vincentian stuff just yet from an outreach standpoint.

I went to the Vincentian Heritage Place for a visit and met with their activities director and told them about the programs that we do here at the Heritage Center at DeBell. you know, if they'd like to bring over a shuttle bus of folks for a tour sometime, or, you know, if we can do some sort of presentation over there. They seem to have a very active community, and they go on different little bus visits. They go out to dinner, things like that. So I think that that would be their community that would most benefit from, you know, coming over here.

I know that we have, when I was at Concepcion, that's still living, Because she came to our class reunion. But she lives at the Terrace Place. Oh, okay. Sister Rita. I guess she was the first year in her, when she went into convent. So I know she's available. I have her number. I'll have them. have to go to. She came to our area and she still drives and stuff. So she's, you know, great.

That's where she was from.

I hope we can get some people in because we have so much stuff.

Maybe also following that, as you can see, we have a display put up by the Sisters of Divine Providence in La Roche. So they came on June 1st and we set up this display for us. It's fantastic, and it'll be on display until the end of August. They plan on bringing over a number of their sisters and people from La Roche to take a look at this. If they have a group that's coming, I'll certainly let you know.

I think the display is absolutely fantastic. I absolutely love the display. Great job. Great job.

The number of people who look at everything, are you sending that to people if other volunteers get that information? The information of how many viewers we have on Facebook, things like that. The one of the things that you just read before. I just think they would be so interesting. Now, I don't know if they have to look up the minutes, if that's in the minutes.

It is in the minutes. And I do send the minutes and the meeting agenda to all the volunteers. Yeah. I think it's amazing.

It is. Yeah. I think it'll only get more going on. It's just been growing. All right, anything else on the arrow, Savannah?

So I was thinking in my head, when we shut down, like maybe if we would have an open house when we open back up again, and then we can talk about who we are, what we do here, how we do it, because maybe some people don't know how we do it, what kind of things we're looking for, and why we do it. Just sort of like kick off this momentum that we have from all these programs. And if you have the Thursday night programs done, you know,

i'm talking like for next march yeah whenever we open up again yeah yeah that's a great idea i like that that's a great idea you could talk about the improvements to everything like no not next week i'm like hopefully you know just to yeah i do yeah send it out all to the community great idea that is great you could actually use the presentation that you did for the

Or to the volunteers. Some of that stuff. That's what I mean.

To dovetail on Suzanne's thoughts, excuse me, I had suggested to Abby maybe once a month, we have a one-hour volunteer meeting, like probably on Wednesdays. Because there are so many people here. And that would be a really good opportunity to include these kinds of statistics.

I love those names. I wouldn't think that it would give it the 100,000 or something. Yeah, it's huge. Right.

On the programming side of stuff, I know we're thinking, to me, I think it's one of the biggest successes for having such good programming was you getting out the calendar way in advance. and adding as you go along, and doing associate, and doing all of that. So I know we say for next year, you're thinking, let's try and get that done by end of summer or fall, at least get some stuff together. So I don't think right now, but looking to finalize.

About speakers that you've seen.

So I have a list. I'll get that to you of just potentials. I'm not saying do it, but just here's the potentials.

And I have a list for you for pretend. I spoke to Paul White from the Richland group, and they apparently get tons of people to come to their events. And there's a couple that's no, that was that's another. But no, that was the one, that was a couple. But anyway, he does presentations, but on the Underground Railroad, there's a lot more homes over there in the Underground Railroad. We have one on Englemore Road, but I didn't know that we had a whole bunch of them here. Yeah, that's fascinating.

Suzanne and I also met with the gentleman who lives in the home on Ingmar Road and we talked about doing a presentation a Saturday afternoon presentation within probably in October or November I can't I think it was October October so this afternoon yeah so we'll put together some more information but it should be October Saturday afternoon thank you great try see how they're doing all that much

That house up there was so...

There's a home on Ingmar Road that was a part of... Well, the Kuhn, owned by the... Owned by the Kuhn family.

Yeah.

And it was built using bricks that they fired across the street on Ingmar Road, so...

There was no Ingmar Road.

That's where the brick was built. Okay. This is the home, if you're going towards Ingmar, on the right-hand side, the brick house with the blue door.

It has a blue door. Oh, okay. Well, there's quite a few of them. I don't want to see them. But he has lived there for 20 years. Yeah.

He was a professor at CCAC and Pitt.

Was it Pitt? Yes. Montanax is Pitt.

Okay.

Very good. All right. Anything else? If not, I'll move on to volunteers next. So just from a volunteer standpoint, I'm not sure any other, any updates you want to give Suzanne or anybody else from a volunteer perspective who continue to do an absolute bang on job. Like, I mean, outstanding, absolutely outstanding.

We've done a lot of straightening up, listed all that back to old stuff that we didn't when they, when they came in here and We have a new volunteer who foolishly offered to go through all the newspapers, and that's Jim Vinsky.

This Jim.

Well, if nothing else.

The AI is just amazing. That's what I find. Not just the price, but what the styles are. And it's not, that's the best part.

No, we've done it. That would be wonderful. We could be open Sunday then. When do you want to start? Okay.

Thank you. Anything else from a volunteer perspective? Alright, so we've got the operations next then the mechanics 175 committee, so I know that's Kevin and a big race for me.

And so far, so that's what we've been working on awesome good.

And then I'm going to move on next to discussion about potential software. I know, Meg, you were taking a look at this, potentially software to catalog and track some of the permanent collection objects. I don't know if you have an update or not to this.

Should do. First of all, provided to Abby and her intern a list of 102 organizations that seemed to be in some way similar to us. In other words, they had a collection and they had people who come and see it. That was kind of the criteria. So they're working on reaching out to those organizations and finding out if they use software, what is it, etc. On a different tangent, I was able to take a look at the quote-unquote old laptop, and it has software on it called Musarch, M-U-S-A-R-C-H. It was written by an individual. And he has since, I'll use the word retired, he no longer supports it, updates it, anything like that.

So there's no opportunity to, you know, go back and then get a newer version.

What he did create is a very nice package. It had a lot of features in it that I could see would be useful in our situation. It also had... I'll call them lookup tables of information that we will have to think about when we do require a package, decide what values we want our lookup tables to include. So for example, there's a table called categories. Categories means simply, is it an audio acquisition? Is it art? So those are probably pretty typical and we'd go with maybe what they are. had in the past or whatever the current, the new software might suggest. But things like location, we're talking about doing barcoding. So we'll have to be very customized in our locations. We could go to really high level and say upstairs, downstairs, on low. But that wouldn't be helpful, I don't think. So we'll have to be a little more discreet when we decide what the locations are. And when we're talking about downstairs, we'll have shelving units and then maybe individual shelves on individual shelving units. So that's a lot of thinking that we have to do about how we're going to handle our collections and how we're going to store them.

Are we going to use that computer? Was it from 2016? It's very old. I think it's Windows 7.

It's not... Yeah, something like that. Definitely not supported. No, as a matter of fact, four things. I'm not sure about that. I would say to get the database and extract it into an Excel spreadsheet. So, Suzanne, we can go through it and look at the individual items. There's a little over 1,000. And I also put it into a CSV file. So we can migrate. So we're in a good spot. All we have to do is decide on how much we will have to have new hardware and the new laptop or desktop, whatever we decide. Plus we'll need the barcoding equipment, both the printer, so we can stick our things, and then the readers like you see in the retail settings and we can read the markets.

So that's where we are. I can also send a webinar. I found it the other day about organizations who are going to go to this kind of digital asset management and what to think about just to give you some facts. Great.

Is that what you sent me earlier today?

No, it's that organization, but they do have, oh, it might be in there. Okay. But I'll send it again to anybody. they're very that organization that's that doesn't they're this is what they do moving Actually, there's a whole bunch of webinars that the volunteers watch that maybe on a Wednesday to lunch and have a webinar. I think that's a great idea.

I really appreciate you doing this. I think this is going to become more important to get everything digitized as we move forward to using more artificial intelligence stuff that people can query. I mean, you can't do that unless you have it digitized. It doesn't work because there's nothing to query. We're lucky that athletes have access to it. So it's going to become only more important. So thank you for the budget. I mean, it would be in place to support anything that they're doing.

Not this year, but we can come up with a full proposal of here's how much it's going to cost. Here's what we're going to do. Here's how we're going to use it. Here's what's going to benefit us. And put that in the proposed budget program.

Maybe. You never know. If we know what we're doing.

I mean, it's like, why we're here is really funny. There we go. And any visitors, like the one day there were seven people here?

Explain your fears about at least part of the cost. This type of software tends to be relatively inexpensive. For the packages, I've seen them by $700.

They're not terribly expensive. Is it a one? It's a subscription. It ends up being a subscription. I don't think so.

Yeah, and it depends on how much support you want. The more support you want, the more you're hired. Okay.

I do think that will inform even more projects then if we have everything digitized or a good chunk of it. I mean, you've got lots of projects to do that with that, to query that.

Well, yeah.

Correct.

Yes. Yes. We have to start with just this. Right.

We have to see how we can build up. Right. Okay, you want to take some items with you. Those items are in charge, you know, because of the lady pharmacist. That would definitely follow. Very good. All right, I'm going to move on to number nine, just public comment and any non-agenda items, anything else, basically anything else everybody wants to talk about today. Again, we've been on a tear on a bunch of activities, so I know everybody's exhausted by going through everything, but anything else that anybody wants to talk about today? Better bullpen pictures. Yeah. And even Vince Berriotti can't help us out on that. Right. Yeah. Okay. I just want to say again, thanks. We have had an absolutely bang up year here. I mean, absolutely fantastic. And we're only a midway through. So we've got really great stuff coming up this next month and next month. So again, thanks all volunteers. Thanks for taking your time. Do I have a move to adjourn? Okay, motion to adjourn. Do I have a second? Suzanne? Second. All right. Thank you, folks. We are adjourned. There will be a subcommittee meeting.