calderwood

William J. Turkel’s blog, “Teaching Young Historians to Search, Spider and Scrape,” introduced several research/data collecting techniques to me for the first time.  I’ve seen SIPs listed on Amazon, but I did not fully realize how SIPs could make book searches more effective.  The other techniques are totally new to me, and I’m interested to learn more about them.

Until I had read Chapter 6 of Digital History, “Collecting History Online,” I had a picture in my mind of a web site that would basically serve as an alternative presentation of my master’s thesis.  Now, of course, I realize that such a web site would not be making full use of the interactive nature of the internet.  If I were to design a web site to accompany my master’s thesis, I would no longer think of it as a relatively static presentation of research.  Instead, the research could serve as a magnet to attract personal accounts, which in turn would fuel further research and contribute to a deeper and broader understanding of the topic.

After looking at several online archives, I have to say that Business Plan Archive was my least favorite.  I don’t think it really encourages curious visitors like me, since you have to register (and state your reason for interest) to see anything.  Because the site seems so off-puting to visitors, I have no idea how they manage to attract contributors.

In terms of design, The Video Store Project was probably my favorite site.  Right at the home page, it gave clear indications of where to go, depending on whether you are a visitor or contributor.  Even further, it set up clear distinctions for the types of potential contributors (video store owner/employee/customer).  As a visitor, I liked that I could arrange the different contributions by date or by state.  (I immediately began to look at the contributions from the cities in California closest to my hometown, including Berkeley, Hayward, and Oakland.)  The amount of questions contributors had to answer surprised me, but I didn’t consider the amount too cumbersome, especially since most of the questions were so simple.

One thing I liked about the Echo site was, when you click on the link to one archive, you get a list of related archives along the left side of the page.  For example, when I looked at the Remembering Hiroshima archive, Echo led me to the Atomic Veterans History Project, which I found even more interesting than Remembering Hiroshima.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2006 at 1:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.