Built by Dr. David Trowbridge, a Marshall University associate professor of history, and free for everyone, Clio allows universities, libraries, local historical societies, tourism organizations, preservation groups, museums and local historians to create individual entries as well as complete walking tours. With contributors throughout the nation adding hundreds of entries and dozens of walking tours each month, Clio has grown to over 25,000 individual entries and 160 walking tours, Trowbridge said.
Currently, users can choose from walking tours in cities such as New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Philadelphia.
“Perhaps more importantly, organizations in smaller cities throughout the United States are taking advantage of the free platform to connect residents and visitors to history,” Trowbridge said. “There are also thematic heritage trails that cover larger areas for vehicle tours, such as a bourbon history tour and several heritage trails that focus on women’s history and African American history.”
Clio also allows individual users to create an itinerary that is tailored to their interests and save it for personal use.
Trowbridge explained the value of personalization after using Clio this winter. “I was using Clio in Denver, and it was 5 degrees,” Trowbridge explained. I wasn’t walking miles to see all the sites in my area, so I picked four sites that were important to me and close to the hotel, and created a private tour.” Trowbridge said his favorite walking tour is a combination of two historical trails in Boston, Massachusetts. “I created a public walking tour to integrate the Boston Freedom Trail and the Black Heritage Trail together, as it probably should be,” he said. “I included key sites along both trails and included a historical pub in the middle.”
The mobile app’s new discovery mode updates location tracking automatically as one walks or drives. Now, in addition to users selecting a current list of nearby sites, they can switch over to a map that shows their present location and the sites that are nearest to them.
“We experimented with push notifications that would alert users to nearby history,” Trowbridge said, “but we found the integration of the list and map made it much easier to determine whether a historical site was of interest and on your route.”
About 2,800 registered users and 400 institutions, including historical societies and universities, have populated the service Trowbridge imagined just five years ago. To date, users and instructions have created the more than 25,000 historical entries that are in the system today and include photos, soundbites and more.
“The key is to keep improving Clio as funding and technology become available,” Trowbridge said. “I hope Clio allows communities to interpret their history in a way that reaches people where they live and whenever they travel.”
For more information about Clio, visit www.theclio.com or download the Clio app on mobile devices via the App Store or Google Play. Trowbridge can be reached by e-mail at david.trowbridge@marshall.edu.