North Country Public Radio/North Country at Work

North Country Public Radio serves about 250 small communities across a geography the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. How to touch and tell the stories of people in so many places? We decided on a digital first project: North Country at Work. The project explores the history of work through the photographic history stored in libraries, historical associations, museums and residents’ attics and albums. We believe work is the beating heart of every community, the reason for creating community and the barometer by which we measure change and well-being in a community. We travel community to community scanning photographs that tell the story of work life, from the earliest days of permanent settlement in this region to the present time. We record stories about the work and workplaces in the photographs. We create content for all platforms, digital and broadcast. We are building a new open source platform which will go live this summer. The platform is a first for archival materials: highly searchable, interactive, and a space that encourages exploration and discovery. We plan to share the platform sometime within the next year with other stations to use for their own multi-media projects. For now, we are storing and making content available at a “holding site”