Helping Historical Societies Navigate Digital Transformation

Ed Kapuscinski has been building websites since high school in the 90s. One of the few things he's been doing longer than "web stuff" is "train stuff". While he likes to tell the story of how he rearranged the track on his family's "Christmas Layout" to be more like Strasburg when he was two, it's possible to trace his hobby back involvement back even further to the time his parents participated in an NTRAK show while his mom was still pregnant.

In the time since then, Ed has built a career building websites and then building teams that build websites. His professional experience includes building sites for national brands like Kleenex and Huggies, Fortune 500 clients like CH Robinson, and cultural institutions like the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Ed is a six time Sitecore "Most Valuable Professional and has run international web development practices with teams around the world.

Ed's involvement with Historical Societies began with his work building the site that became The Conrail Photo Archive for the CRHS. That work lead to a stint on the CRHS's Board of Directors and then many more years of working on various digital projects for the organization after his retirement.

Ed's path to building sites beyond the CRHS lead through his involvement with the Nickel Plate Historical Society. He was asked to join the Board of Directors to help the organization modernize its web offerings. While its main site had just been wonderfully rebuilt by Ed's friends at the Garbely Publishing Co, who provide a range of services to historical societies, the NKPHTS leaderhip had a vision that needed some more specialized technical knowledge to achieve.

While Ed's agency work has been focused on building websites "on the Microsoft Stack" he also kept his Open Source skills sharp with his involvement with the CRHS. Years of large scale content management experience helped him create the Nickel Plate Archive using the open source CMS Drupal and many of the skills he had developed through his professional experience like content tranformation and importing.

Ed's time on the NKPHTS Board also involved being part of their strategic planning committee. This committee was charged with envisioning what the society would look like over the next decade. While working through this excercise he identitied the challenges that historical societies face today that result from their long established business models. An important part of the committee's work was identifying plans for how to address these challenges. While working to identify plans to address these challenges, Ed realized that the future struggles of the NKPHTS were not unique to the organization, but were shared with all other similar organizations.

This spurred Ed's publication of his findings on the future of hobby publishing.

This whitepaper served as the guide for the creation of the new Delaware & Hudson Railway Historical Society, an organization created from the ground up as a Digital First Historical Society. Ed, of course, built the archive site that's at the heart of the organization's digital content offerings.

A break from his day job has now given Ed the ability to help other organizations move to the future he outlined in his white paper.