Do we need a new ZooChat forum dedicated to zoo history? Not to memorabilia, which are the products, but a place where we can chat about the lives of the animals, the issues swirling around zoos in the past, and how the zoos evolved? I write a blog, Chimp Trainer's Daughter, and it gets readership from around the world -- which tells me there's an interest, and lessons, in talking about the past. What do you think?
I think it would be a good idea. There are often threads and discussions relating to historic events/ species kept etc in zoos in the past but scattered about over the Forums. It would be a way of centralising them. Unfortunately Sim, who owns and designed the site seems unvailable and only he can 'build on' a new Forum (AFAIK) like that.
I think so too. Mind you though that interest in zoo history is not a problem but to build up and maintain the forum as it requires IT skills that I for one do not possess. We both know those behind the Bartlett Society website; they possess the IT skills needed but their contribution to the cause is already substancial and I don't think they should be asked to do more volunteering. But possibly could someone else.
I didn’t mean that there should be anything on ZooChat to rival the Bartlett Society website, but just a forum where all posts appertaining to zoo history could be collected together instead of being distributed, as they are now, across a number of different forums.
What is the Bartlett Society website? I don't want to remake the wheel, I just thought we could have one forum on ZooChat, but if there's a place already on the web...
I've been thinking about how we could do something like this for quite a while. I'd love to be able to capture information about zoo layouts, developments, and other information, including photos and video, and be able to display it in a time-line for each zoo so that people could see the development of the zoo over time. Not sure about the best way to capture or present this information yet, but please make suggestions and I will look into it. I'm currently searching for some staff to help take on some of the support and development workload I've now got, and once I get that sorted I have a lot of things to catch up on for ZooChat - and a lot of new ideas I'd like to implement.
Sim, I wonder if we should organize it by "era" rather than by zoo. When I think of zoo history, I like to see what zoos were doing during the Great Depression, or post-WWII, or during the "let's do more for conservation era" of the 1970s. The similarities and dissimilarities and the debate in the entire zoo community, as they evolved en masse, is most interesting to me. I'm not at all sure that the zoos would be happy about this, however. As I write my Chimp Trainer's Daughter blog, referring back to the Detroit Zoo of the 1940s and 50s, I get the distinct impression that officials with the zoo would prefer to see the chimp show history just disappear into forgetfulness.
