History Harvest is a collaborative public history project in which students engage with members of the public to collect and digitize documents and artifacts of historical interest for scholarly and community research.  History Harvests engage with individuals, communities and institutions to digitize important historical documents and facilitate deeper scholarly and community research into topics that sometimes only these materials can illuminate. At harvest events, students digitize materials brought by the public, record oral histories about about the significance of those materials, and collect information to serve as metadata for a digital collection. Then, students edit and upload their materials to a site like this one and prepare exhibits based on further public collaboration, research, and connections between materials.

We have held two History Harvest courses:  Fall 2019 on the topic of “Spatial Change in Champaign Urbana" and Spring 2021 devoted to LGBTQIA+ and Independent Media histories. Each set of collections and exhibits is available in the drop down menu for the navigation button for that topic/year. These buttons also take you to the main pages for each course and collection project, which will tell you more about them.

The navigation button labeled "How to use this site" will give you tips on how to browse collections and exhibits or look for specific materials. This is a work in progress, so please return!