coeller

The Conservative Mennonites are a relatively small group of people, some 10,000 members spread across the United States. They are relatively unknown and unheard of. Their monthly publication, the Brotherhood Beacon, has been published since 1971. However, most of these issues are stored in only a few libraries in the country and are not easily accessible. The Conservative Mennonite Conference is beginning to build a presence on the web through their homepage, but could greatly increase people’s potential to learn about their history through opening access to the Brotherhood Beacon through their website as well.

My project intends to do just that. I am planning on digitizing the earliest five years of the Brotherhood Beacon and placing it on their website. Hopefully this digital archive will expand to include the entire 35 year span of the publication and allow for the conference’s webmaster to easily upload new issues into that database as well.

My primary audience is most likely members of the conference catching up on issues of the publication that they missed or searching for articles that pertain to some historical interest. Another audience that I think will benefit from the project is researchers. I know that there is an historian doing research currently to write the centennial history of the conference and I expect that this will be a useful source for him. This will also be a useful source for me as I hope to include the Conservative Mennonites in my research at some point. My latest idea is to include how they perceive and interact with Latin America and U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America. This digitized archive will allow me to research this subject in an efficient way. A third potential audience might be people who simply stumble upon the website and peruse articles to learn more about the Conservative Mennonites.

Considering my various audiences, I will be using streetprint software to create an online database that is both searchable and browsable, segmented into individual articles. The search function would allow people to search within articles as well as within title and author subfields. The process that each article has to go through in order to complete the archive is this: To begin with each page of every issue must be scanned in and cleaned and made uniform. Then each page must be sorted into articles, scanned by OCR software, and uploaded through streetprint to the website. The attached text file created by the OCR software will allow users to search through the text and then bring up the image of the page to read the article. To complicate matters, each issue will be scanned at the Mennonite Historical Library in Goshen, Indiana and then burned to cd and mailed to me for the completion of the process.

The general layout of the site will be manipulated through streetprint, but I expect a fairly simple, clean layout where users have a simple search function that brings up thumbnails of the pages one which their search terms were found and then they can access those articles through the thumbnail links.  I would also think that in terms of style they will match the Conservative Mennonite Conference website’s layout possibly by importing their style sheet, or maybe more simply just matching colors, etc.

The argument of my project is not too exciting and fairly simple–that increased access to Conservative Mennonite documents is essential for researching and understanding the history of Conservative Mennonites.  This history is important both for Conservative Mennonites and for those researching them to see how they fit into larger historical themes.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Final Project. 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.