While COVID has kept some teachers scrambling to keep students’ attention, Penny Cliff has had the opposite issue. As the education specialist at the Georgia Archives, Cliff coordinates free lunch-and-learn lectures that have captured a wider audience, expanding from about 1,100 in-person attendees each year to more than 5,000 virtual viewers last year when the sessions went online.
“We found that virtual worked even better than in-person,” said Cliff, a former history professor at Gordon State College in Barnesville. “We then put our videos on our YouTube channel for people who couldn’t get to the virtual presentation, and that has done remarkably well. People can now view the presentations at their leisure.”
Established in 1918, the state’s archives moved to Morrow in 2003, and Cliff estimates that the monthly lectures have been ongoing since at least 2007. In 2013, the archives became a unit of the University System of Georgia, a link that means Cliff can tap into a wealth of professors, researchers and instructors from universities and colleges across the state to share their expertise on a range of topics.
“We do the very best we can to cover a wide variety of genealogy and history related topics,” said Cliff. “We’ve had presentations on World War I and II, the state’s historic theaters, the history of Underground, even Atlanta’s heath care history. As Georgia Day is Feb. 12, we feature a speaker whose area of expertise is colonial history. The goal is to have topics aimed at many different groups.”
The staff also conducts professional development workshops for historians, librarians and curators who want to learn more about managing records and artifacts, with beginner and intermediate sessions offered for a fee. And they work with students, professors and members of the public working on a range of research.
“We have 51 collections, and they’ve been scanned so people can click and do a search,” said Cliff. “We get a lot of genealogists from all over the United States because our virtual vault has early state records and deed books than have genealogical value. We also work public schools, home schoolers, lawyers and groups like the DAR. It’s free, open access that’s great especially for people who aren’t comfortable getting out in person.”
While the current uptick in COVID cases may mean fewer folks in the face-to-face sessions, Cliff said the program will continue in cyberspace.
“We hope in future to have a hybrid of in-person while also keeping the virtual and YouTube options,” she said.
Lunch and Learn programs are held the second Friday of each month from noon until 1 p.m. The Jan. 14 presenter is Doug Young of Atlanta’s planning department whose topic is “Future Places Project: Redefining Historic Preservation in Atlanta.”
For information, visit georgiaarchives.org.
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