For 24 years the Indiana State Senate's historical database has remained untouched and unnoticed.
That was until Ball State University's Bowen Center for public affairs decided it was time for an update.
The Bowen Center, part of the Department of Political Science, will work with the Department of History and Telecommunications to update the database and add audio and visual elements to better tell its history, Philip Sachtleben, associate vice president for government relations, said.
The project is split into three stages: updating and expanding the database to include civic and political leaders since 1984, creating an interactive Web site for civic government classes and a database for their local leaders, and gathering a collection of oral history to add to the data base, he said.
"We hope to update this great resource so that scholars come and use the material to look at Indiana legislator history," Sally Jo Vasico, co-director of the Bowen Center, said.
Sachtleben said the three-year project was in its first stage, with the second stage and the creation of the Web site starting in six to eight months. The 2011 deadline is loose, he said, and will depend on how long it takes to update the data.
"We'll have to see how long it takes," Sachtleben said.
Ball State hired Mary Mendel to head the project. Mendel was Principal Secretary of the Indiana Senate for 28 years and Vasicko said her experience will be helpful as the project continues.
"[Mendel has] been around legislators, she knows legislators and she has good contacts with the legislators that are still alive that we want to interview," Vasicko said.
Satchleben said Ball State's Middletown history project, which was created to study Muncie as a hub of national trends throughout its history, inspired the project. Similar to Middletown, the State Senate project started as a paper database that became digitized and easier to access, he said.
"It is made to bring a large amount of data pieces from different projects together without making a lot of searches," Sachtleban said. "We're trying to get people interested in doing oral history and data collecting."
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