We welcome contributions from local historians, educators, students, scholars and others about how we can continue to improve this course as a resource.

Introduction

Here are a few reasons why you may want to contribute to this project:

• Improve your own research and writing skills. There is no better way to improve your own research and writing skills knowledge than teaching an idea. Whether you are a student, an educator, or a working professional, you can share your experience learning
• Support your own volunteers and colleagues. If you work for a local museums or heritage organizations, you likely work with volunteers on research and writing projects. Our lessons are a shared resource that you can use for teaching new volunteers or even new employees.
• Connect with our contributor community. Contributing to this course can be fun and social. We credit all contributors, celebrate and discuss new lessons on our Bmore Historic Facebook group and encourage you to show off your work to friends and colleagues.

Issues: Where do we need your help?

You may already have an idea of some changes you want to make to this course or you may be looking for an idea. We use GitHub to keep track of issues with the course including many places where we need your help. We use the ‘Help Wanted’ label for tasks where we need help and the ‘Beginner Friendly’ label to note tasks that are suitable for beginners. Learn more about how issues work with the GitHub guide to Mastering Issues.

In general, there are three ways volunteer contributors can help improve Explore Baltimore Heritage 101:

1. Corrections
2. Fix errors in grammar or spelling
3. Correct inaccurate or out-dated information
4. Revisions
5. Clarify confusing lessons or exercises
6. Expand any lessons that are too short
7. Illustrate lessons or exercises with photographs
8. Additions
9. Create a new lesson
10. Create an exercise
11. Create a resource (map, timeline, or dataset)

Prequisites: What to do before you get started?

1. Join GitHub: Setting up a GitHub account only takes a minute and is required contribute to Explore Baltimore Heritage 101. Join GitHub and select the option to sign up for a free account. If you want to create private repositories, you need a paid account (ranging from $7 to $50) but a free account works fine for us.
2. Learn Markdown: Markdown is a great way to write content for the web with plain text. Follow the GitHub guide to Mastering Markdown (available as a PDF)or try this quick interactive tutorial to learn how to write and format text with Markdown. You can also try to pick it up as you go!
3. Learn how we teach: Explore Baltimore Heritage 101 is intended to be inviting and easy-to-use for everyone from beginners to experienced historians. We encourage you to read the introduction, our comments on teaching writing and research, and take a look at a few lessons.

Editing lessons

1. Find a lesson you want to edit or add to
2. Find and select the “Edit this page” button on the left sidebar menu (below the link to the next module)
3. Find and select

Editing data

Tables

Maps

Timelines

Collaborating with GitHub

Issues

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