This week marks the arrival of Preservation Ohio's newest staff member - our new Assistant, Kendra Scott Carty. Like the rest of our organization's staff, Kendra is a long-time Buckeye, born and raised in small-town Ohio. We're absolutely thrilled that she is with us, and happy to share a bit with you about her with our members and friends. Kendra's new e-mail is: kencar@preservationohio.org.

Kendra was born in London, Ohio and has lived most of her life here in Ohio. Her youth was spent in Caledonia, Ohio, a small farming community in Marion County. It was there she developed her love for nostalgia, a curiosity about the past. Much of her time was spent in the one-room library or on a neighbor’s porch listening to her elders share stories.

During her high school years, she moved to Galion, Ohio. Her parents were both born and raised in Crawford County, and many of her family members still reside there. Kendra, while researching her genealogy, is finding that much of her more recent family history lies in Crawford County.

After graduating from Galion High School, Kendra lived and worked in Columbus for a few years and then moved to Chicago, Illinois. It was there she earned her Bachelor’s Degree in English at Loyola University and her Masters in Library and Information Science from Rosary College (now known as Dominican University). Upon graduation, Kendra worked downtown in the library of the Chicago Community Trust, a foundation that allocates funds to communities and social service groups in the city. This experience provided her an even broader scope of knowledge about the “Windy City’s” neighborhoods and history.

After several years, she and her family moved back to Columbus, Ohio. Kendra is a self-proclaimed “Ohioan at heart” and wanted her daughter to be closer to her extended families. Kendra wishes to instill in her daughter the sense of family and community her parents both shared here in Ohio.

After working for National City Corp in their systems department, Kendra is happy to have the opportunity to work for Preservation Ohio and to become more fully acquainted with Ohio’s communities and history.

Today marks the third anniversary of MyHometownOhio, the country’s first self-authored blog on statewide preservation and revitalization. When we launched on July 21, 2006, we were very much alone - even the blog of the National Trust for Historic Preservation would not appear until a year and a half later. Today, many statewide and local preservation organizations have their own blogs, and “PreservationNation” has been around for some time. We ourselves have joined MyHometownOhio with sites on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace and Flickr - as well as our own online social medium, The Ohio Preservation Network.

In the last three years, this site has covered both the "happy" and "sad" in preservation - the enactment of the Ohio Historic Preservation Tax Credit, the beginning of demolition discussions for the Seneca County Courthouse, several devastating fires in Ohio downtowns, and much more. All in all, we have published some 387 stories in those three years.

As Preservation Ohio looks at some exciting new programming, we suspect that there will be a good deal to report in the year to come; we’re certainly hoping that a 4-year anniversary is in the offing for July of 2010. In the meantime, continued thanks go to our readers, as well as to the thousands of Ohioans involved in promoting the past as a means to generate economic development and an outstanding quality of life in this state we all love.

2009 has seen an amazing explosion in the area of social media. The phenomenon that is Twitter, for instance, has recently had an impact in everything from national politics to international relations. Far from a static tool, social media is constantly evolving, changing and adapting to meet new opportunities and new technologies - particularly in the area of the mobile web (cell phones, etc.).

In many ways, America’s non-profit organizations are leading the charge into the creative use of social media. Here is a recent conference presentation on the use of social media in the non-profit world. Note, however, that as these statistics are already 7 months old, that today’s numbers have risen exponentially.


Preservation and revitalization are, perhaps not surprisingly, lagging behind this trend. Pacesetting organizations such as the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training are attempting to identify and promote the use of social media by preservation organizations through their excellent Voices from the Past website and Preservation Today web casts, however many local, statewide and even national preservation and revitalization organizations seem to be stuck in Web 2.0 - if they have any online presence at all.

Preservation Ohio has been at the forefront of this change since MyHometownOhio, the country’s first self-authored blog on statewide preservation, was launched in July of 2006. We currently have the most followed organizational page on Twitter of any statewide or national preservation organization, and have companion sites on Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube. This Summer we launched the country’s first self-contained social networking site for statewide preservation, The Ohio Preservation Network, and have forayed into the realm of live blogging for the recent announcement of the 2009 List of Ohio’s Most Endangered Historic Sites.

One thing about social media - the scene can change in just a few months. That’s why we are always looking a year down the road - to identify the social networking and media opportunities of the future that will better enable us to perform our mission.