Questions to guide your initial fact-finding and choice of a focus:

In your community:

• Are there cultural specialists in your community with knowledge that could be valuable to others, but is not widely shared or available?
• Are there historical commemorations coming up in a few years that would benefit from new perspectives?
  

• What would you want to know about your school, neighborhood, or community in the past? Are there people experienced with issues that are resurfacing? Are there achievements that deserve to be more widely remembered as inspiration to others?
• Are there languages spoken at your school that you could document a rudimentary vocabulary to share, or cultural observances that your school community should know more about?
• Has there been a major change in the local environment that has had an impact on the community?

• can share observations and information with others who you may not know, may be in the future, and may have a reason to be interested that you don’t anticipate. For these reasons, details are recorded that are perfectly obvious to you at the time, but couldn’t be guessed by someone else in the future, and might turn out to be important. The recording is done in a way that can be understood by others, as much as possible.
• often aims to be accurate, complete, and depending on the purpose, perhaps objective. While these qualities are ideals that can never be entirely achieved, the effort is necessary for the documentation to be valuable.
• is done from direct experience. You can document someone’s description of an event at which you were not present, but you can’t document the event itself from their description alone. The recording is done during the event, or in some cases, immediately afterwards, before memory distorts the record.
• often involves planning for depositing the original record in a place where it can be cared for, referred back to when necessary, and made accessible to others.