SAN DIEGO, CA (KGTV) — San Diego has a rich history, especially in the grassroots communities. San Diego State is working on a pilot project to help preserve and document that history, and they are doing it with a cellphone.
"We need a sense of place, we need to know where we belong, and we need to feel at home in our community," says San Diego State Associate Professor Isaac Ullah.
Ullah says it's history that helps us achieve these three things.
"The problem with local history is there is not a lot of resources to research it. Secondly, it's tough to curate it, and present it to the public. Lastly, it's hard to preserve and protect it."
The process of doing all that can be very expensive if done by a large company. So to cut the cost, Isaac is a part of a SDSU project called Community Heritage Empowerment Toolkit. Volunteers are brought on to preserve and document local history with their cellphone.
"They have cameras, and they have microphones. You can even 3D scan buildings with just your phone these days. We will show you how to use your phone to very quickly scan things into pdf formats, or images that can be put on a website. Eventually people can research their old house or their neighborhood."
This is a great project that SDSU is a part of, documenting and preserving history with a cellphone. SDSU has also partnered with La Mesa History Center to be a part of Community Heritage Empowerment Toolkit.
"This is a real good opportunity for us to be able to share our collection and the wonderful information," says La Mesa History Center President Jim Newland. "It also helps us in that people are much more open to donating their photographs for copying, instead of giving them to us."
"Our project is aimed to create guidelines best practices and examples so that places like the La Mesa History Center can do this."
The hope is this project will one day help local communities all over the country to help preserve their history.
