Is HOL an example of online 'Kraevedenie' ?

I'm fond of collecting words from other languages that are hard to translate and express something that is absent or at least unnamed in English speaking cultures.

This week I came across a Russian word (a language I enjoy hearing, although I can't understand more than please and thank you) while reading my excellent library book on Russia (borrowed from Stroud Green and Harringay Library naturally) called Molotov's Magic Lantern by Rachel Polonsky.  As the author discussed Chekov in relation to his home city of Taganrog, I came upon a passage about a branch of scholarship that blossomed in Russia in the 1920s called kraevedenie which Polonsky defines as devotion to the knowledge of place in all its particularity - history, local lore and economy.

Gorky hailed kraevedenie  as the encouragement of the 'growth of our sense of human dignity' and a modern kraeved, as the practitioner of this type of scholarship is known, calls it a form of 'local love, of spiritual work'. 

The passage leapt out at me,  perhaps as a way of defining what an online site could represent for a place.  There is certainly history here, and lots of local lore. The local economy is constantly under the collective microscope. We promote a sense of place and with it we would hope to uphold the dignity of residents, especially in their relationship with authority. (As an aside, Stalin was not keen on the kraevedi and they were murderously purged in the 1930s by the authorities).

The Chekhovian sprit of his home town has a kraevedenie that is "at once modest and profound, grand in vision and attentive to the miniature, alert to the quirks of history and human personality, long-sighted and all-forgiving" according to Polonsky.

I'd certainly be happy to aim for that for Harringay and Harringay Online.