Madison Story Project

The Madison Story Project was a 2015 collaboration between the Madison Public Library system and the Madison Children’s Museum. Both institutions had noticed a dearth of historical firsthand accounts of childhood created while the children were still young. Most documents on the subject were written by adults reminiscing about their childhoods, rather than children who were still experiencing their childhoods. This gap created difficulties for both institutions, as it made it harder for both collections and exhibitions to give a clear picture of what it was like to be a child in past eras. To prevent this problem from plaguing future librarians, they decided to work together to elicit stories from the children in their community, facilitating the creation of new documents describing contemporary childhood in Madison from the child’s perspective. They then shared these stories with the community and archived them for the future.

The project was initiated by the Madison Children’s Museum in 2014, but when the Madison Public Library got involved in early 2015, it really took off. All documentation of the project on the web dates from after the Library got involved. The Museum had collected hundreds of stories from local children in 2014, but none of these stories were uploaded to the internet in a form that persists today. It seems that the Library was much more effective at making the results of the project accessible online and keeping them online. Brenda Baker, director of exhibits at the Museum, put it this way: "The library has a lot of expertise in digital media, we have a lot of expertise in younger kids and local culture. We felt like we had a lot of synergy with the library."

Partnering with the Library allowed the Museum to reach deeper into the community, into spaces that the Museum did not have easy access to. The library hosted events at its many branches, in local elementary and middle schools, and at community centers. At these events, they solicited stories from the youngest residents of Madison. These stories could take any number of forms: text, captioned photos, drawings, video, audio, or any other creative medium. Not only did the Project accept any kind of story, they also taught kids how to tell their stories. They held workshops where they showed kids how to create videos and visual art about their lives. 

The Library also helped the project reach new demographics. The Museum had not originally sought stories from teenagers, but the Library was able to reach out to that demographic more easily. In 2013 the Madison Public Library launched the Bubbler, a major arts program that launched several initiatives throughout the library’s branches. Its Teen Bubbler programs were very successful, and the Library was able to incorporate the Madison Story Project into them. First, they offered a two-day workshop on telling a personal narrative using stop-motion animation. Teens told stories about their current and past experiences, and created simple animations depicting them. The videos they created are pretty remarkable windows into their lives, and surprisingly stylish. The success of this workshop led the Library to host a follow-up 3-day project where teenage patrons created stop-motion animated trailers for books they’d been reading.

The Madison Story Project’s website is very well put-together. It provides a concise description of the project, along with a toolkit containing ideas and tutorials to help children get started with storytelling. The site also provides a means of sharing these stories: it links to a set of social media accounts set up for the project, along with the hashtag #madisonstoryproject. 

Unfortunately, their language regarding sharing the stories is rather confusing. At the bottom of the Toolkit page it says “Ready to go? Submit your story here” and links to the Share page. The Share page, however, does not describe a submission process or use the word “submit” at all. Instead it instructs the viewer to put their story up on “your favorite social media site” using their hashtag. They claim that “we’ll approve it for upload as soon as we’ve had a chance to view it.” There’s no explanation of what they mean by “upload,” and I can only assume they mean they’ll add it to their archive of stories. They should make this clearer, especially since they’re working with material that is made by children and may contain private, identifying information about those children. Additionally, the act of posting a story on social media with their hashtag does not at all guarantee that the Project members will actually see it. Not every social media service uses hashtags, and not all of the ones that do allow one to easily see all posts associated with a hashtag. Even some of the social media sites they specifically name do not operate this way. YouTube barely uses hashtags, and any story posted on a Facebook account with regular privacy settings would not be visible to the Project organizers. They should have put a lot more thought into their instructions here, and they probably missed out on a lot of stories because of this.

In May 2015, the Madison Story Project hosted a major event called “A Day in a Kid’s Life”. This event generated a huge amount of social media posts and online content. However, even days after that event, all social media activity relating to the Madison Story Project completely ceased. There are no uses of its hashtag on Twitter since May 22, 2015 and the Facebook page for the project hasn’t been updated since a November 6, 2015 post announcing an exhibit about the project at the Madison Children’s Museum. It seems that the majority of the Project’s stories were generated and collected at in-person events, rather than online. This lack of internet submissions is likely linked to the failure of the website to properly explain the submission process. The scarcity of official updates from project organizers can probably be attributed to a lack of time for such matters when librarians in both institutions have so many other duties to carry out day-to-day.

It seems to me that the Madison Story Project absolutely benefited from institutional collaboration. Without the Museum the project would have never began and would have a less stable venue for preservation and display. Without the Library, the project would have received far fewer stories and reached far fewer children and likely no teens at all. The Library was also essential in getting the website running, even if it had issues with submissions. For me, the main takeaway here is that the Library’s deep ties to the community and far reach allowed the Museum to carry out a larger scale community-based project outside of its own walls. Though the project had its issues, I would call it a success.