“It was so fun to be at Maihaugen this Sunday and hear the sound of Polish voices around me …” This was the reaction from one of the museum’s frequent visitors who attended the opening of an exhibit on Polish immigration to Norway. Such comments showed us that the project to document immigration has helped draw new visitors to the Maihaugen Museum. 

To reach out as broadly as possible to others, those of us connected to the project have invited ourselves to meetings, given talks, and participated in various arenas where immigration was the focus.

We’ve organized many events under the auspices of Maihaugen’s regular Sunday program. For this, handwork exhibits have been shown to be successful in attracting visitors. Among other issues, we’ve presented the special tambour embroidery of Danish Else Johnsrud, the mandala design embroidery of Dutch Hetty den Hertog, and the Polish folk costumes of Polish Maria Lund. We also presented a Sunday program with a speech about the immigration documentation project and our work to collect artifacts of people’s memories and experience.

The history association in the village of Fåberg co-operated with the college in Lillehammer to arrange a speaker series on local history; we were asked to make a presentation about our project. In addition, we’ve been invited to give talks to local organizations (for example, to the Lillehammer Rotary and Soroptomist clubs).
We’ve also spoken in connection with United Nations Day activities held around Oppland County.

Likewise we’ve kept our related authorities informed through an Outreach conference under the auspices of Oppland County Administration and the Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority conferences. The program, “The more cooks, the better the food,” was offered under the Norwegian museums’ extensive network.

An important part of the contact work has been to attend multi-cultural events, for example the Woman’s Day March 8th celebration in the town of Gjøvik, the international festival in Lillehammer, the women’s coffee klatch in Brandbu, events at the Adult Education Center, the local volunteer center and more. Many good contacts have been made at informal gatherings where people have left carrying a brochure about the project.

Articles have been published in various places, including one titled, “The Cat in the Sack,” in Maihaugen’s 2009 Year Book.  The project has also been presented at the Archives annual Research Day.  The Oppland County Administration’s booklet, “Policies for a Multi-cultural Oppland,” is illustrated with many photographs from our project.

The documentation project has gotten good press coverage in newspapers and on television.  Among other places has our work been presented in NRK 2’s Museum program (NRK being Norway’s public television network with multiple channels). And elements of the documentation project have been featured on Østnytte (News from Eastern Norway) and elsewhere on NRK.

We have also been active using websites to send out information, news, statistics, articles and other project materials.