Engaging a City's History through Consortial Search

The city of Chicago has over a hundred collecting and archival institutions; most of which include serving the community of Chicago within their mission statements. The Chicago Collections Consortium is a non-profit organization that serves as a collaboration among organizations throughout the city of Chicago. This session will focus on how the Consortium (CCC) created a diverse and collaborative environment for cultural heritage workers across the city; creating shared authority and opportunities for connection and leadership through an active committee structure. This includes discussions on how CCC ideates, creates, and iterates content across physical and digital channels, for audiences from tourists to genealogists, students to families, and beyond. Using the Consortium's work around the EXPLORE portal, this lightning talk will include a discussion of how to maximize efforts to bring collections into conversation with each other, provide a seamless user experience, and create a process that accommodates the voluntary nature of a consortial model. The purpose of this talk is to inspire cities around the country to adopt similar Consortium methods, bringing distinct ethnographies out of individual archives and together forming a multifaceted telling of history and culture.