The Montana History Portal is both incredible and intimidating. Incredible because there are so many digitized resources available on the site. And intimidating for the same reason: the sheer quantity of resources can make it difficult to find things.
Here are a few hacks for making the site more manageable as well as cool things you might have missed if you've given up on the site.
1. Adventure Lab
The Montana History Portal teamed up with Geochaching Adventure Lab to create walking tours/scavenger hunts of historic Montana places. Adventure Lab is a free-to-use mobile app that allows users to roam locations using GPS coordinates to make their way to specific locations. Can't make it to a particular site? The tours (including some present-day street views) are also posted on the Portal in the Places exhibits Page. The Adventure Lab entries all have "A Walking Tour" as the subtitle, but there are exhibits of other places too (for example, check out this exhibit of the construction of Hungry Horse Dam).
2. Exhibits
These online exhibits are basically small, curated sets focused on particular people, places, and events. I've already mentioned the Places exhibits above. The People exhibits include exhibits on topics as varied as eastern Montana photographer L. A. Huffman and the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps. These African American soldiers were tasked with testing if bicycles could serve the military as a substitute for horses. (Spoiler alert: They could not.)
Events exhibits include Montana floods and the 1972 Montana constitutional convention.
Possibly the most useful exhibits are included under Research Guides and Teacher Resources. These exhibits include not only text and images, but also guiding questions. Check out this one on logging!
3. Find What You Want by Narrowing Your Search
Many people hit the Montana History Portal home page, type a search term where it says "Search Our Database," and then throw up their hands when the Portal comes back with a huge list of (often unrelated) items. Don't let this be you.
Instead, narrow by item type (e.g., image, for photographs) and (if relevant) by date range and additional keywords. Here's an example:
I'm interested in finding pictures of women homesteaders. Typing in the word "Homestead" gets me 3,657 results, including many pages of Evelyn Cameron's diaries, in which she used the word. Narrowing it by “Image” gets me 391 results. Narrowing it by “Date” (I chose January 1, 1909, to January 1, 1919--the height of the homesteading boom) results in 184 images. That's still too many for me, so I'm going to click on "Refine Search Terms" and add a keyword: "women" and "Update Search". Sixteen results found. Now that's manageable.
Note: Starting with the phrase "women homesteader" and narrowing it by image only got me two pictures. That's why I always start with one word in the main search box and then use the "Refine Search Terms" button to add keywords.
One last note: Don't be afraid to play around with search terms. I would have gotten different (maybe better) results if I had used the word "homesteader" or "farm" instead of "homestead" or "woman" instead of "women."
4. Browse (or Search) Specific Collections
Want your students to find a photo to use as a prompt for a story, to create a meme, or create an exhibit? Interested in having them explore a particular topic or the work of a particular artist or photographer? Consider having them browse specific collections.
This just got easier. The Montana Historical Society has posted over 11,000 images and counting on the Portal. Until recently, all of these photos were maintained in a single large collection on the Portal. Now many are broken out into smaller collections of significance to make it easier for you to find the images you are looking for. The five new collections are:
- Bud Lake and Randy Brewer Crow Indian Photograph Collection (over a thousand images, mostly documenting people, places, work, and regalia of the Apsáalooke [Crow] Nation.)
- Evelyn J. Cameron Photograph Collection (660 photos by Evelyn Cameron, who moved to Terry, Montana in 1893 and helped support herself and her naturalist husband with a photography business.)
- Haynes Foundation Photograph Collection (a massive, and still growing collection of photographs by F. Jay Haynes, the official photographer of the Northern Pacific Railroad, who also established the first photo concession in Yellowstone National Park, and his son Jack, who inherited the Yellowstone photo business.)
- Henry B. Syverud Scrapbooks Photograph Collection (over 1,500 images taken by Henry Syverud of his friends and neighbors in northeastern Montana between 1909 and 1965).
- L. A. Huffman Photograph Collection (740 images of eastern Montana, especially the Miles City area, taken between 1879 and 1931.)
Want to search within these collections? Type the collection name in the main search engine, select the "Search For" button, and choose "Exact Phrase." Then, after your initial search, chose the "Refine Search Terms" button to add or restrict keywords.
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