CHNM Website Rated Tops by ISTE

The Center for History and New Media is happy to announce that its website has been chosen as one of the best for secondary school teachers by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Written by James Lerman and published by ISTE 101 Best Web Sites for Secondary Teachers lists CHNM alongside such projects as the National Geographic Education Guide, the Newsweek Education Program, and the United Nations Cyberschoolbus as one of only fourteen Social Studies websites to be included in the new guide. ISTE is a nonprofit professional organization with a worldwide membership of ISTE is a an educational technology professionals.

History Matters Recognized by New York Public Library

The New York Public Library selected History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web to be included in its Best of Reference 2005. The Best of Reference, created each year by a committee of librarians from The New York Library, is a list of 25 reference books and websites acknowledging useful resources for local branch reference work. In 2004 the American Libary Association named History Matters one of the "Best Free Reference Web Sites."

The September 11 Digital Archive was included in the Best of Reference 2004.

CHNM-affiliated project profiled in Chronicle

The Business Plan Archive, a project directed by David Kirsch at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business and hosted at CHNM, is featured this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Business Plan Archive is a cousin to CHNM's own Echo: Exploring and Collecting History Online project, and CHNM has collaborated with Kirsch on several projects to collect, preserve, and present digital materials in the history of science, technology, and industry. Both Echo and the Business Plan Archive are funded by major grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Click here to download the article.

Cohen, Syllabus Finder featured in Inside Higher Ed

Reviewed this week in Inside Higher Ed is an article by CHNM Director of Research Projects, Dan Cohen. The subject of the article, which appears in the most recent issue of the Journal of American History is CHNM's innovative software tool, Syllabus Finder and the sophisticated analysis of the place of textbooks in U.S. survey courses that Cohen performed using this tool.

Syllabus Finder was created by Cohen as an experiment in the fledgling world of web services, where computers talk directly to each other to try to solve complicated problems or complete tasks that would be difficult to do otherwise. In this case, the computers that talk to each other are the Center for History and New Media's web server and Google's web server. The Syllabus Finder sends an optimized, specially packaged version of your query to Google, which sends back information and possible matches. The Syllabus Finder then processes this information and combines it with simultaneous searches on in-house databases (e.g., a database of educational institutions, so it can tell you which university or college a syllabus comes from). It also has algorithms that try to extract additional information from matching syllabi, such as assigned books. When this complex process is finished, the Syllabus Finder displays all of the information it has found.