You can learn how to preserve historic places in your community using our guides, lessons, and tutorials from Local Preservation School resource directory. Our open educational resources are created by our project team or adapted from publications donated to the project by our partner organizations.

If you’d like to donate educational resources that you created to the Local Preservation School, please get in touch! Subscribe for updates as we continue to expand the Local Preservation School.


Explore our featured resources

Firehouse in New York City

Place Matters Toolkit

Your guide to learn how to identify, promote, and protect places that you care about.

Read More

Map of Germantown, Philadelphia with pins

Historic Neighborhoods 101

Learn to look at your neighborhood like a preservation advocate.

Read More

Seven Foot Knoll Light, Baltimore, Maryland

Explore Baltimore Heritage 101

Learn how to research, write, create visuals, and do outreach around historic places in Baltimore.

Read More

What are open educational resources?

All the resources we publish are open. There are many different definitions for open educational resources (often abbreviated as OERs). All of our resources:

  • are available at no cost to educators and learners
  • can be modified by educators and learners
  • can be redistributed by educators who have made changes to the original work

Learn more about OERs from An Introduction to Open Education Resources or read our guide to creating open educational resources.

How can you use these resources?

If you are new to historic preservation, you can use our resources as self-guided courses to learn more about a range of topics including research and writing, organizing and advocacy, and neighborhood preservation planning.

If you are an experienced volunteer or a preservation professional, you can use our resources as a foundation to create your own workshops or trainings for board members, fellow volunteers, or other residents within your community.

How can you improve these resources?

We need your help to continue improving and expanding our collection of educational resources. This site and all of our resources are published using GitHub and GitHub Pages. These tools are used to make it easy for people to work together on open source software projects but can also be used to work together to build websites like our educational resources.

Please submit your questions, suggestions, and corrections as issues on our primary repository. You can also fork any of the repositories created by the Local Preservation School, make changes, and then submit a pull request. Learn more about issues and pull requests on GitHub.

For more information on contributing to the Local Preservation School, please read our contribution guidelines.

Discover more open educational resources

Explore our collection of educational resources on topics including American history, activism, digital tools, transportation design and policy.

The American Yawp

CC BY-SA 4.0

The American Yawp is a free and online, collaboratively built, open American history textbook designed for college-level history courses.

Learn More

Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Beautiful Trouble is a book, web toolbox and international network of artist-activist trainers whose mission is to make grassroots movements more creative and more effective.

Learn More

Community Tool Box

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

The Community Tool Box is a free, online resource for those working to build healthier communities and bring about social change.

Learn More

Culture in Transit Toolkit

CC0 1.0

The Culture in Transit Toolkit is a resource for libraries and small cultural heritage institutions interested in initiating mobile digitization services.

Learn More

Maptime: Lessons and Resources

A collection of tutorials and slides on making web maps presented by various Maptime chapters as well as external resources for learning.

Learn More

The Programming Historian

CC-BY-2.0

The Programming Historian offers novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate their research.

Learn More

School of Data: Online Courses

CC0 1.0

A collection of independent learning modules curated into a series of courses - with a focus on data basics as well as specific skills.

Learn More

Streetfilms

CC BY-NC-ND-3.0 US

Streetfilms produces short films showing how smart transportation design and policy can result in better places to live, work and play.

Learn More

Teachinghistory.org

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Teachinghistory.org is designed to help K–12 history teachers access resources and materials to improve U.S. history education in the classroom.

Learn More

Every Place Counts Leadership Academy: Transportation Toolkit

PD

This Toolkit is a plain language explanation of the transportation decision-making process for educational and informational purposes.

Learn More

How to Do Creative Placemaking: An Action-Oriented Guide to Arts in Community Development

PD

This book includes instructional and thought-provoking case studies and essays from today’s leading thinkers in creative placemaking. It describes the diverse ways that arts organizations and artists can play an essential role in the success of communities across America.

Learn More