The American Memory Collection at the Library of Congress is a great archival collection. The Library of Congress was one of the pioneers for presenting archives digitally over the web, and they have probably been one of the best funded digital archives as well. They present many collections over the web from presidential papers to slave narratives. Overall the site is well organized. However, there are many areas where a surfer reaches a dead end, and has to hit back to get to another page, particularly when one looks at a picture in detail. Within the slave narrative collection pages and other collections as well, it is not always clear how to get back to the home page of a particular collection without going back to the main page of the American Memory Collection. Most of the sites have a search function as well as subject browse capability. A few collections have OCRed textual information to make an even more detailed search possible. Overall, the site is well-put together and organized well. If money was no object, then having everything OCRed would be ideal, so that the archive is completely searchable, but that would probably prove to be too cost prohibitive.
This is a great archive of different resources organized into varying collections. Most of the resources are primary documents, which any historian would be ecstatic to be able to view at the click of a mouse. In particular, the slave narrative collection is impressive, presenting both digitized audio of the narratives so a researcher can get a true representation of voice intonation, accent, etc., which may be of interest to linguists. Also the narratives have been transcribed for researchers who would rather do their research that way. Many of the narratives are difficult to hear because of both poor quality of the original recording, degradation of the original recording, and intonation and accent of the speakers. Having transcribed narratives at the click of a button would save a researcher countless hours traveling to the Library of Congress, sifting through the collection, and playing these recordings in the library.
Archaeologists have not made much use of these slave narratives to date, perhaps because it has been a difficult undertaking in the past. An archaeologist, who would be looking for discussions about material culture, could search through the transcribed narratives more easily than having to listen to hours of audio searching for small references to material culture. What archaeologists would be listening for are references to material culture of slave life, from eating utensils, crafts, musical instruments, etc. Archaeolgists would also be looking for discussions of what these items meant to the African Americans using them. While it would not be impossible for an archaeologist to listen to the audio for these tidbits, the Library of Congress has made this task much easier.
In some cases the Library of Congress collections had made the impossible possible, however. The collection of Thomas Jefferson has made available over the web a variety of papers that because of their extremely fragile nature were usually not available to researchers. Now that information is available at the click of a mouse.