Gary Rohrbach has an awesome idea for our Club! See how he and Valarie Deneen are spearheading a new digital project.
Part of the legacy which Emmaus Rotary Club has is a collection of Banners from various Rotary Clubs. The first time that I went to a Emmaus Rotary meeting was in 1982 and it was held at Pine Tree Tavern. One of the things which most impressed me was that in front of the room there were 8 or 10 Rotary Banner Boards. Each board had about 20 separate banners from various Rotary Clubs from around the world. Each banner was either given to the club from a visiting Rotarian or was from one of our members who had made up a meeting at another club or it was given as an exchange for one of our banners. Having these banners is one way in which Rotary connects the world.
For every meeting that was held at Pine Tree Tavern, at Marcels Restaurant, at the Mercantile Club and other sites where we had met over the years, the banner boards were displayed. When we started to have our meetings at Brookside Country Club there was no room to store the boards from one week to the next so we had to take them elsewhere to be stored. Fortunately for the club, Dale Dries offered to store them at his store. Recently the banner boards have been used only for special occasions like the visit of a Friendship team and last year's District Conference as Emmaus Rotary was the host club.
A new project which we hope to complete is to have an item on our website in which we display photos of the banners and possibly a sentence or 2 about each. For example, we have banners from Clubs who we have had Group Study Exchanges, Friendship Exchanges, Student Exchanges, etc.
Gary Rohrbach is forming a committee to set an agenda to accomplish this task and will Chair the committee. Valarie Deneen and her daughter Emily have volunteered to help the committee with organizing our digital efforts. For example, utilizing the Google Photos search function that uses artificial intelligence and text recognition to search for text or imagery within photos. A search for dogs, for instance, will bring up any drawings, photos, or text mentions of dogs in the album. This will make our work MUCH easier! We will later be able link our 90 banner images directly to the Club website for all to see.
If you are interested in joining the Digital Banner Committee please either send an email to glrohrbach@gmail.com or call his cell # 610-428-6766.
