In a city full of history - and historians - Donna Seger’s Streets of Salem blog has risen to the top as an accessible online resource for a range and depth of information about Salem’s history, filtered through an intelligent, well-researched world-view.    Posts range from passionate, persuasive essays to joyful celebrations of ephemera – and are written not as a lofty professor, but as if she can’t help but share her excitement, anger or delight about information she has discovered.  Her educational efforts provide an important basis for preservation’s power – it is the stories and our individual and collective love of place that precede any preservation work. 

A side note – Donna restarted the Preservation Award program about 15 years ago after it had gone dormant for a time – so this award is a particularly meaningful one.