The Wisconsin Historical Society website is rich in content. The Wisconsin Historical Society is ‘a state agency and a private membership organization’. The website includes information about a variety of historical or semi-historical topics of interest to academic and public historians, genealogists, teachers, students and history buffs. The Historical Society has a project to digitize images from a collection of more than 2 million items and there are abundant photographs from Wisconsin’s past. Examples of the content include newspaper clippings, sites on the Historic Register, records of 120,000 old buildings, a painting collection, and news about the Historical Society, historic reenactments, events and festivals. A searchable Wisconsin Name Index contains information from local histories, directories, biographical encyclopedias, and more than 60 scrapbooks containing 30,000 obituaries and articles from Wisconsin magazines and newspapers. There is no story of Wisconsin on the site. There is a commercial aspect to this site as the Historical Society markets various items.
Some of the material is surprising. An on-line back issue of the Wisconsin Journal of History contains an article about Blenheim. Blenheim is the house in Fairfax Virginia with graffiti from Civil War soldiers in the 26th Wisconsin regiment. Tractors and farm implements predominate in old posters from the McCormick International Harvester Collection. Although it is illegal to present Wisconsin vital record images online, there are clear instructions for obtaining vital records. Image collections are searchable. Selected images are organized into exhibits. The current exhibit involves airplanes. Searching old newspapers resulted in several articles about small town events including a charming 1915 article about a social gathering of Old Settlers (apparently a local organization). A search on the word ‘Lincoln’ resulted in images of 1860’s articles including text of various proclamations although there was not as much material as might be expected about such an important individual. The site has photographs of a children’s clothing collection. A section with photographs of historic districts such as the West Lawn Heights Historic District includes very ordinary homes built between 1906 and 1946. (Compared to Virginia, Wisconsin has a short history.) A wallpaper page has images to enlarge to various sizes for use as desktop wallpaper.
The Wisconsin website is well designed. There is a neat and consistent look and feel. Most pages have a photograph at the top. (Apparently a set of photographs are used and images vary from one retrieval to the next.) Buttons for the main menu items appear across the top of all pages. Text links for the site are at the bottom. The color scheme is pleasant. Non-serif fonts are used for almost all text. There is no overuse of capitals. Underlining of links occurs only with mouse over. There is an alphabetical site map. There are an extraordinary number of photographs and other visuals. In all cases, a thumbnail image can be enlarged by clicking and information about the image is displayed.
This site is almost too rich and complex. There are about 60 links on the home page. There is no clear statement to unify the elements. A topical organization of the site map would be useful.
The Ireland Story web site was developed by an Irishman, Patrick Abbot, between 1998 and 2001. There is no information about this individual elsewhere on the Internet. It is unknown whether the information on this site can be trusted but the written material reads well and some sources of information are identified. The site is history with a personal perspective. Nevertheless, the content of this site is interesting and reasonably well-written. The content is divided into a ‘Complete History’, Geography and Maps and ‘Ireland Today’. The history section contains narratives about various stages of Irish history. There is a long section about the potato famine. There is a section on peat bogs. The site discusses recent difficulties in Northern Ireland and the section on ‘Ireland Today emphasizes 2001 politics. There is information on the various governmental, military, police, political, religious, terrorist and pressure groups. The author‘s home town is Omagh and a long section about the Omagh bomb that killed 29 people in August 1998 includes photographs and interviews. The author is interested in user response and asked the question ‘How would you rate the political bias of this site’? Not surprisingly the published results show users detected no significant bias. The site contains a variety of colorful maps. There are maps of cities, poverty in 1841, the famine in 1847, population decline, and recent republican and loyalist violence and army activity.
The home page is a mess. The background of the website is distracting since it is blue sky and white clouds which immediately sets a non-serious tone. The first page uses capitols for some headings. The link to the IrelandStory bookshop does not work. Fonts for links with serifs are hard to read with underlining. Colors are bright and garish. This works for the maps but adds to the amateur look and feel. Most of the site has with the same URL and bookmarking individual pages is difficult. Maps open in a sub window and it is difficult to determine how to get back to the previous page. The search engine did not show up on my computer although the screen indicated searching was available. On a better connection, the search engine was there but did not search the site rather it appeared to search elsewhere. The home page contains a weird link to itself. The site is small and the organization is fairly easy to comprehend.
http://www.irelandstory.com/