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In theory, new or digital media offers boundless possibilities to enhance history scholarship. However, in practice it does not always work out they way we want. I think we all can relate to David Bell’s first two examples. I absolutely love the ability to access newspaper and journal articles from AU’s library from home at 11 am or 11 pm, whichever fits my schedule. Or it’s so easy to simply log onto the Internet to track down an elusive quotation (or any random fact that I need!) instead of traveling to campus to visit the library. It’s also much easier to collaborate with colleagues across the country on research thanks to digital media. Yet, as my recent web review demonstrates with university archives and special collections web sites, not all digital tools are made or distributed equally. Whether it is the constraints posed by technology (dial-up modem, different standards for different browsers), cost (of accessing articles or even paying for a PC or ISP), or human beings (such as eye strain or the inability of the brain to adapt to non-linear formats), new media has made tremendous strides in the past decade, but it is still very much in development.

The Journal of the Association for History and Computing and the American Quarterly hypertext articles are great examples of digital media’s strengths and challenges. I thought the Journal was easy to navigate and loved how they listed reviews of web sites, online articles, and print/books side-by-side. However, some of the links to sites featured in older issues (such as those 1998 or 1999) are no longer active, making it frustrating for readers. The American Quarterly articles are chock full of information and visuals; a terrific way to blend the two media and allow readers to seamlessly access more information. Yet I found myself getting bogged down in hyperlinks, jumping from one topic to the next and then forgetting where I was in the “main” text. As I was simply browsing through the articles, this approach was acceptable. But I agree with David Bell’s comments that reading scholarship online can be very distracting, leaving readers questioning how much information they actually retained from the process. In addition, Roy Rosenzweig raises extremely valuable points when he notes that traditional academic reading skills (like pinpointing a thesis) may not apply with hypertext articles. Based on my experiences and these readings, I wondered if those of us in the humanities have a more difficult time using digital media based on our traditional reliance on print or text sources? Would a mathmatician have the same problem?

Roy Rosenzweig’s second article and Clifford Lynch’s overview of e-books complicate the situation further, raising issues that I hadn’t considered like ownership of e-books or the right for free access to online scholarship. It’s interesting that we expect to pay subscriptions for hard copy magazines, journals and newspapers that are delivered to our home or office, yet expect online versions of these media to be free?

In spite of these difficulties, it is clear that historians and other academics must work with new media even if the experience is not flawless or without challenges. As Bell wryly notes, it took early modern scholars centuries to fully exploit and understand the benefits of printing.

In addition, while academics may complain about the growing pains of digital media, we cannot forget the problems of print scholarship. This irony is demonstrated in the Benjamin Harrison article. Harrison turns my complaints about digital media - constrained by technology, cost, and human factors from ideally functioning - on their head and into complaints about print. He compellingly argues that print is expensive. Next, he shows the limits of print technology, maintaining that paper publishing is limited in scope and bandwidth from serving all potential readers simultaneously. Finally, the human factor involved in print, such as a slow peer review and revision process, bogs down the process.

During my eight+ years in the business world before grad school, I was one of the people that Edward Tufte writes about when he says: “Some corporations and government agencues require employees to use designated PPPhluff and presentation logo-wear.”  Therefore my comments are based upon business experience rather than academic (or a historian’s) experiences. 

 We were expected to use PowerPoint for major client meetings and especially new business presentations at my PR firm and the IT department provided standard templates for us to use.  In spite of Tufte’s comments that PowerPoint slides create suspicions of minimal analysis, lack of creativity, and little credibility, we were expected to draft compelling slides in order to demonstrate our creativity.  Quite honestly, if we did not provide a PowerPoint for a client to glance at and then ignore, we might not be meeting client expectations.  PowerPoint is so commonplace in the business (and probably the academic) world that it might be conspicuous by its absence.  So very ironic…

This is not to say that the business world does not realize the trouble with PowerPoint.  In fact, I attended a management training session at my company called “Death to PowerPoint.”  The instructors pointed out the over-use of the tool and how it limited creativity.  We were encouraged to use hand-outs or other visuals selectively during client meetings as well.  While we did use other materials and we all were sick of PowerPoint,  this did not change the company mindset.  Call it sheer laziness or resistance to change, PowerPoint reigned supreme.

Although I agree with much of Tufte’s thought-provoking yet humorous article (who can top the Gettysburg Address!), he does not consider cost when he writes about options besides PowerPoint.  It would be wonderful to create glossy, four-color handouts for client meetings with detailed analysis and clear graphics, but often the budget does not exist for such items.  Instead, projecting a PowerPoint presentation is viewed as a cost-effective way to provide a colorful display.  And nearly everyone at the company for at least a few months is skilled enough with PowerPoint to design presentations on their own so no training is needed.

Here is a link to my practice web site.  It’s not very elaborate, but since it’s my first web page, I consider it a major accomplishment!  I tried to practice the steps that we learned last week and experimented with other features with varying success.  For some reason, I’m having trouble with the placement of tables and will likely ask someone to help me with that before class on Tuesday.

As I am professionally interested in archival management, I surveyed twenty college and university archives and special collections web sites to determine how they are structured and if they function successfully as digital tools for historians.  In order to capture the broadest survey possible, I viewed sites at a wide range of institutions across the United States, including members of the Ivy League, colleges affiliated with religious groups, and select liberal arts schools with national recognition.  As an archive’s digital capabilities may be limited by funding, I deliberately looked at both large and small and public and private institutions.  I used Google and Yahoo searches to kick off my research as I thought it would be intriguing to learn which schools have the most prominent results with search engines.  With a Google search for “university archives,” Harvard University is the first site listed followed by Indiana University.  With Yahoo, Indiana is the first school, followed by Northwestern, and the University at Buffalo.  A similar search for “college archives” on Google yields the following sites first: Oberlin, Smith, Amherst, and the College of St. Benedict.  With Yahoo, Oberlin is listed first and then Simmons.  To augment and round out my pool of sites (and ensure significant variety), I then added additional schools of my own choosing.

As background, all of the schools’ archives and special collections are affiliated with their respective university library, except for the University of Texas at Austin’s archive which is connected to the school’s Center for American History, and the web sites are linked accordingly.  As these archives are associated with special collections, archivists are responsible for managing materials related to the school’s history as well as donated materials and collections ranging from American history to rare art books.  Archival staff may include special collections or manuscript librarians.

The three schools with the most comprehensive archives and special collections web sites, Brigham Young University, Harvard University, and the University of Virginia, all provide historians with significant digital tools to conduct online research.  As historians may also need to travel to the schools to physically visit the archives, these web sites boast ample practical information (such as online finding aids or copyright policies) to efficiently and strategically plan a trip.  Each of these three sites also devote sub-sections to their digital collections that are not password protected, making it very easy for historians to understand which materials may be accessed online and jump right into research.  In short, these sites look and function like professional academic resources.  Of these three, however, Brigham Young’s site warrants special mention as it houses thousands of online materials. 

Conversely, other sites were distinctly unimpressive.  Most surprisingly, the storied Columbia University features the most unimpressive archives and special collections site, which simply acts as a very brief online brochure, with only a few online photos available to researchers.  Gonzaga University’s site is well designed and appears to link to online materials, but the links are not active.  While Indiana University’s site is robust, most of it is password protected, and it is not clear how a researcher might secure access which could be extremely frustrating to historians.  For small schools, the most noticeable challenge appears to be using student webmasters.  Oberlin College’s site, for example, looks amateurishly designed and several sections, such as one discussing news about archives and collections, are woefully out of date.  Perhaps the student volunteer graduated?

Most schools, however, fall in between these extreme examples.  This group of middle-of-the-roaders includes state schools and private colleges, both large and small.  At a minimum, the sites for nearly all schools in the survey feature an overview of their collection (both materials online and offline), a selection of online finding aids, and, at least, a small image gallery.  Some however, boast online exhibits or other unique features.  Although Oberlin’s site is not the most impressive overall, it includes an intriguing section on teaching resources designed to help professors at Oberlin use archival materials in their classes.  However, there only is one topic currently listed in this section.  Generally, while visiting these sites, historians will get a sense of what is housed in the collection and practical information about the archives, such as hours, staff, but not much more.   

Overall, therefore, only a very small percentage of university archival and special collections web sites serve as dynamic digital research tools. Based upon my survey, only Brigham Young, Harvard, and the University of Virginia’s sites function as versatile online resources for historians. When comparing these three to the other schools’ sites, I thought carefully about audiences and specific messages the sites convey.  These three premier sites are clearly designed to appeal to scholars around the world by offering credible, professional online resources.  While other sites, such as Stanford or Northwestern, also are designed to look good, by offering limited research tools they instead appeal primarily to faculty, staff, and students of the institution who can easily follow-up their visit to the web site with one to the physical archives.

Following is an annotated survey of the twenty web sites that I researched.  They are divided into four groups – impressive sites for researchers, challenging sites, middle-of-the-road sites, and noteworthy sites.

Impressive sites for researchers to visit:

Brigham Young University 

Wow!  This is an amazing site with the most online collections of all the sites reviewed for this survey.  Digitized collections are clearly marked for researchers and a large number of collections are available and searchable.  For example, the online collection “Trails of Hope: Overland Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869” features fifty nine diary volumes, eighty two photographs and works of art, forty three contemporary maps (including select interactive maps), and seven trail guides.  There also are electronic theses and dissertations and a whopping 8,900 images from the BYU Museum of Art collection plus much, much more available to researchers online.  The site also provides an overview of the non-digitized materials in archives and special collections.

Harvard University 

Harvard’s site is extremely comprehensive, providing online access tools for researchers, such as an online finding aid search and the online visual resources catalogue.  The site devotes a sub-section to materials that are available online, such as annual reports, documents relating to the school’s founding, and narrative histories   It also features several online exhibits.  In short, a researcher could visit this site and gather necessary information or plan their research in advance of visiting Harvard all without calling an archivist for assistance.  Overall, it features a very professional appearance and is nicely designed without appearing commercially slick.  As the archival and special collections staff has over ten people, this site should be well done.

University of Virginia

Connected to the school’s library web site, this is an incredibly robust site.  Researchers can search finding aids online through UVA’s connection to the Virginia Heritage database which is an online repository for twenty-one institutions in the state.  A large portion of the site is devoted to digital collections such as the Dolley Madison project, featuring her correspondence, drawings, and maps.  While some of the collections are password protected to access the actual materials, scholars may read top line information about the collection.  Overall, it is extremely impressive.

Challenging sites for researchers to visit:

Columbia University

Columbia’s site comprises two main research components: the University Archives and the Columbiana Collection.  The University Archives is just a page with overview information about the collection.  Columbiana has the same overview page, but also boasts select electronic materials online.  However, one of the links was not active, and the others are twenty photos of the campus and one digital article from an 1855 library reference about the university’s history.  Surprisingly, there is no link to the Columbia library web site.  Overall, this is an extremely basic site that functions as a brochure rather than a digital tool. 

Gonzaga

Overall, this is a well designed online brochure.  While the site seems to be fully up and running, it is filled with disclaimers that finding aids are in the process of being compiled and are not yet available.  This was true for all of the university archives collections and special collections, such as the Bing Crosby Collection.  In addition, sections of the site appear to be hyperlinks to online materials, such as minutes to university senate meetings, but the links are no longer active.  This site is clearly under construction and not a helpful tool for researchers.

Indiana University

This appears to be a very robust site, but much of it is password protected which could be very frustrating for historians.  The password protected material includes general information such as “archival resources,” and what appear to be collections, such as “North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and oral Histories.”  It also is not clear how a researcher may access these parts of the site – by contacting the archivist?  By simply being a student?

Middle-of-the-road sites:

Northwestern

This is a good overall site with online exhibits and finding aids.  Nothing about the site truly stands out, although researchers get a sense of what is available in the collection.  No materials are available online except images in the online exhibits.

University at Buffalo

This site is currently touting its new online biographical database which is a helpful tool.  Scholars can browse information about the collection and visit online exhibits.

Amherst 

Amherst’s well designed site offers a limited number of materials online, but it features several online exhibits, including a photo gallery of school presidents.  With a staff of seven people, the site could be a better resource for historians, however, it appears that an alum is volunteering as webmaster.

Smith College

This site has a small image gallery online, select online research guides, and mainly brochure type information about the archives.  But there is a staff of one so the web site is clearly not a priority or designed to be a standalone research tool. 

Simmons

This site is very similar to others in this group.  It features an overview of the collection, but limited materials online.

University of Texas at Austin

The official web site for the University of Texas archives is just a page of text providing an overview of the institution’s holdings related solely to materials about the university.  There is nothing to search and no images to access.  However, this page is connected to the university’s Center for American History web site which boasts a robust research and collections site housing western Americana materials, southern history materials, among others.  As some of the materials in the university’s archives are part of the Center for American History’s collections, why not better integrate them online as well? 

University of Hawaii

This site is devoted to archives and manuscripts and it houses comprehensive information about the collection.  There are finding aids available online for much of the collection, including the Japanese American Veterans Collection. 

Florida State University 

FSU’s site features online exhibits and a small number of digital finding aids also are available.  In general, however, the site serves as a big online brochure with links to sub-pages providing more brochure type information for each collection.

University of Nevada Las Vegas

UNLV’s site features an online photo collection which is adding the capability to search by subject.  There also are online exhibits and overviews of the collections held by the university.  The gaming collection is the most digitized of all the collections, boasting links to other web-based resources, links to images, online subject guides, and an online art gallery complete with paintings of dogs playing poker!

Sites with noteworthy features:

Oberlin College

The site is designed to be comprehensive, but the overall look is slightly amateurish as it was designed by a student volunteer and is outdated or weak in some areas.  For instance, news section’s most recent entry is from 2002.  The site has one unusual feature — a section for teaching resources designed to help professors at Oberlin.  Currently, however, there is only one topic featured on a local cemetery. 

College of St. Benedict

This is a basic, but nicely laid out site for this Catholic liberal arts college in central Minnesota.  The site has one noteworthy feature.  All student newspapers are digitized with all back issues available online with full-text searching capability.  (The school opened in 1965). 

Georgetown University

This well laid out site has potential to be even stronger than it currently is.  There is a sub-section of the web site devoted to online collections although there are only four collections digitized at this time.  The site features a large number of online photographs too. 

Stanford University 

Stanford’s site makes it easy to find information.  There is not a great deal of material available to scholars online, but a small collection of historic maps may be accessed through the site. 

As this week’s reading was generally a primer on web site design, I found myself soaking it all in as I read. I’ve never worked with HTML or even used a software package to design a site. The closest I’ve come is drafting copy for the web that gets handed off to a designer who uploads it to the site! However, for my semester project, I’m planning a web and digital audio component so this lesson was important to me. While I’ve encountered terms like flash or RealMedia before, they seemed to take on new meaning when I consider them as potential tools.

Given my limited “hands-on” background in web site technology, if I can handle this, any historian can. However, as I noted in my response to Priya’s blog, the funding discussion in the chapter was very realistic, illustrating potential limitations of digital history. Unfortunately, the ability to fund a project may determine how elaborate a historic web site can be rather than the design experience of the historian! But since historians already seek grants regularly to fund more traditional research efforts, this is very familiar territory to navigate.

As I’m interested in digitizing audio for my semester project, I carefully checked out the Sonic Memorial Site http://www.sonicmemorial.org/sonic/public/index.html refeerenced in the reading and it was amazing. The collections portion of the site was very straightforward and it appeared relatively easy to upload an audio file. The audio clips also were clear and downloaded quickly. Although the topic of 9/11 is already an emotional one, listening to the audio files, especially ones recorded on 9/11 itself, really made an impact upon me. It may sound cliche but sites like this demonstrate how powerful a tool audio ican be when handled well.

One of the items that really surprised me in the reading was the fact that digital files show no signs of erasure or revision. While I know that I can edit my blog after it’s posted and visitors to the site will not know, I thought there would be a back-end digital trail recording changes…

As a student interested in archival management, this week’s reading was quite enlightening. However, as Hedstrom’s article noted, there needs to be an open dialogue between scholars, scientists, and preservationists. They cannot create archival solutions in a silo. Therefore, while reading the materials I tried to view preservation from different perspectives – the archivist’s, the historian’s, and the tech guru’s.

For archivists, it is clear that digitization is not preservation and similar standards for selecting hard copy objects for preservation should also apply for the online world, even if storage options are greater. By preserving a letter or a photograph, the archivist is setting it apart from other objects of its period; the object is special enough to preserve.

For historians, I was not certain if greater capacity for digital archival storage is a good thing. As we’ve read, unless searching technology becomes more cost effective and efficient, it may be challenging for researchers to wade through an infinite number of online documents to find the one he or she needs. Even in the offline world, historians encounter difficulty tracking down archival materials, blaming poor or incomplete finding aids or the sheer volume of material. However, greater storage capacity allows for historians to have access to untold numbers of primary materials, a treasure trove for research.

When I thought about techies and preservation, I wondered if the very idea of preservation is contrary to the entrepreneurial spirit of technology innovation. For instance, tech innovators are always trying to develop smarter, faster, more efficient and cutting-edge technology. It’s about inventing the “next big thing” before the next person. Conversely, preservation is about literally freezing an object in time so it can be enjoyed for generations in as close to its original form as possible.

Thinking about these different audiences really complicates the digital preservation picture.

My JPG image is from the 1958 American University yearbook and relates to a project that I am considering for my research seminar next spring. For a class on Visual and Material Culture last semester I explored student culture at American University in 1958, 1968, and 1978 by reviewing the campus life sections of the school yearbooks. As some of the findings about American University student culture were noticeably out-of-step with broader U.S. college cultural trends, I’d like to expand the research to determine if other DC area colleges, such as Georgetown, Howard or Catholic, had similar experiences.

This black and white image from the 1958 yearbook was scanned in at 300 dpi, and was tweaked in Photoshop. The contrast and brightness were adjusted and the image was cropped.

On a separate note, for my class project for Digital History, I am hoping to digitize audio tracks, but it was not possible to secure the primary source materials and the audio technology yet.

One caveat regarding my image - I manipulated it on a Mac and uploaded it from the Mac lab at AU as I had trouble uploading it from a PC. The image was distorted. Therefore, I’m not sure how it will look on a PC but viewing my blog from a Mac, it looks great!

The reading on digitization for this week raised a number of interesting points and I thought it was the most eye-opening chapter in the book thus far. I’ve generally thought of the benefits of digitizing historical documents or books/articles, rather than the pitfalls, but some of the downsides are worth practical consideration. For instance, I never considered the significant amount of intellectual capital necessary to select and prepare a historical document for high quality digitization. However, it is good to know that select historians may be engaged in the process rather than having libraries or universities simply outsource all the work to third parties or relegate it to a purely technical team.

Digitize everything http://www.digiwik.org/digitize-everything/
neatly captures the dilemmas of whether to digitize or not to digitize and, if yes, how much and by whom. It’s really a thought-provoking blog entry. In particular, the question about marketing a digital collection raises a number of subsequent questions. In addition to noting that a collection is digital does it need to carry a “warning label” to users that the digital version of a document or oral history interview may not include all the original notes? We may cover this with copyright issues, but are reproduction or usage rights different for digital materials versus originals or analog copies? Should libraries and similar institutions focus marketing efforts on promoting digital downloads of materials versus encouraging customers to visit in person? What does that mean for training of library or archival staff (and historians)?