A few years ago I did an internship at the Maine Historical Society working on the Maine Memory Network. If you're not familiar with this site, you should definitely check it out. It features many items from the collection of the MHS and over 150 organizations from around Maine. These organizations include libraries, camps, museums, towns, parks, local historical societies, and various other groups.
There is also a fantastic search feature in which you can put keywords to bring up any number of interesting things. Put in the word murder and you get nine items. Put in death, you get 123 items. How about haunted? That gets you 25 items. How fun is that? Granted, the number of items will only be as relevent as whatever keywords they used to catalog the item, but it is still great fun.
One of my tasks during my internship was to pick a topic I was interested in and make an exhibit for the web site. This let me dig through their collection and view many interesting items, which helped me decide upon my choice of Cape Elizabeth Shipwrecks. I highly suggest you read it, not only because I wrote it, but because there are some incredible photos of wrecked vessels and even a rescue in progress in which men are rescued from a wreck during a storm. The pictures are really quite dramatic.
Please view the entire list of exhibits as there are articles on everything from the Civil War to Suffrage to the Kotzschmar Organ. Even though I am not interested in all the exhibits subject matter, the pictures and documents themselves can be interesting.
--Chris Wallace
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