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I attended a library workshop yesterday called “Googling for Scholars.”  The session was very informative and helpful in various ways.  The main tool that we focused on was Google Scholar.  I’ve heard of Google Scholar in the past, but after having tried it out once or twice, wasn’t really too impressed with what it could do in comparison to other online databases available through American University’s library website.  Fortunately, through this workshop I was able to learn how to use Google Scholar more effectively, especially now that it has been linked with American University’s library in some important ways.  Here I will try to compare the potential strengths of Google Scholar with other databases available through the library’s site.

We mainly talked about how Google Scholar could be used for historiographical purposes or to learn more about individual authors and how connected their scholarship is to other contemporary scholarship.  Google Scholar has a feature where you can search for an author, see what they’ve written, and then see how often that article/book has been cited by other authors.  This is an essential tool for both building source lists and seeing what the most important work is in the field.  Before, this was the primary use of Google Scholar, but now if you access it through the library’s Aladin website (Library’s main site, click on Research/Aladin and then Aladin homepage) you can actually access full text articles online if they are available through American University’s subscriptions.  This increased usability makes Google Scholar a far more useful tool.  You can also search for books in the American University library directly from Google Scholar since it is now linked with the library, just make sure to go through the library’s site to get to Google Scholar to use all these additional features.

So, how does this compare to what’s already out there in terms of historiographical tools?  Currently, I tend to use a combination of resources for finding book reviews and historiographical essays.  J-STOR is an excellent tool for finding these sources in full-text if the articles are at least 5 years old, but for newer reviews things get slightly more confusing.  EbscoHost and Proquest search (both available through the American University Library) cover this time period, but are a bit more sporadic in bringing up reviews and giving you access to full-text versions of those reviews.  Nonetheless, they often do the job.  I’ve also used the History Cooperative (through the library’s site) to search for reviews/historiography on more recent books and it will often bring up reviews that were hard to find other places, but it is not exactly comprehensive.  Two other online sources that I need to experiment with further, which were mentioned at yesterday’s workshop, are Project Muse and America: History and Life.  I used America: History and Life in writing my thesis and it is useful for finding anything that has been written on a subject as it searches dissertations and unpublished works, but does not always provide easy access to these materials.  I need to experiment further with Project Muse to see what it’s strengths and weaknesses are.

The library workshop on Google Scholar was great in that it showed me some great ways to use that resource and provided the vital information (which grants Google Scholar true usability) that it had been linked with the American University Library.  The discussion about what sources to use at different points in searching was also quite helpful for future bibliography building as well as finding reviews and constructing historiographies.

So, maybe you’ve noticed or maybe you haven’t, but I feel it’s probably appropriate to give credit where credit is due this week as we talk about intellectual property and copyright.  In the title for each of my weekly writings I use a quote and those quotes all come from the mouth of George W. Bush.  It’s amazing how well his words often lend themselves to the topic at hand (example of when this did not work out - this week, as Hanukkah and bin Laden don’t have a lot to do with copyright, but it was just too funny to not use it, and for that I apologize).

George W. Bush has said, “I can only speak to myself.”  Unfortunately, this is not true, so as long as we all have to listen we may as well enjoy it.

Copyright discussions make me tired. Thinking about setting up a website with lots of images, quotes, and other paraphernalia might be fun, but add the copyright issues and you get nothing but a headache. Unfortunately, this issue is something I’ll have to think about more in my digitization project.

Originally, I didn’t think that copyright would be much of an issue as I was hoping to publish/digitize the publication of the Conservative Mennonite Conference on their own website. The Conservative Mennonites don’t seem too concerned with copyright and that combined with publishing it on their website made me think I could avoid it. While I’m still hoping this proves true eventually, things have gotten more confusing in the short term. Unfortunately, I am having to build the website at a different location and then transfer the archive to the Conference’s website. Currently, I’m using a little space through the Center for History and New Media, but was also thinking I should check with the Conservative Mennonite bible college, Rosedale Bible College, to see if they could host at least during the construction phase and maybe for a longer period of time. Unfortunately, the librarian there has brought up copyright questions. I haven’t actually talked with him about it yet, but I’m already worried about how this conversation will go. I simply don’t like the problems of copyright.

This week’s reading did help me to see how I can identify with both sides of the debate, but I think it would be fair to say that I still generally fall on the side that says that copyright should be less restrictive. I know that original artists should be paid there dues, but in the academic setting we’re far more focused on protecting/claiming our ideas rather than making money off of them. It’s easier to use other people’s ideas in this way, you simply have to give them credit by citing them. This is fairly simple, but add in money/profit and things get confusing.

One interesting debate on this subject (which I’m hoping Peter Jaszi will mention when he comes to speak to our class) is the demise of the fantastic documentary - Eyes on the Prize. This is probably one of the best overarching documentaries on the Civil Rights Movement. However, they have recently run into copyright issues and haven’t been able to make a DVD version of the video series or continue producing the series. Thus, it now sells on ebay for sometimes close to $1,000 for the complete series on VHS. I (like many others) think this is a ridiculous tragedy. We are losing one of the best documentaries on the Civil Rights Movement, because the producers can’t afford to renew copyright usage agreements. This story was reported on quite a lot about a year ago (Washington Post, Wired News, etc) but I’m not sure where it stands right now. At one point, a Civil Rights Movement activist even encouraged people to violate the copyright and burn digital copies of the series to preserve it. Many of the articles also quoted people from the Center for Social Media at American University who were very interested in this topic as well. I’m a huge fan of this series and would hate to see it disintegrate on old VHS tapes before somebody creates a digital version, but that is what copyright costs are doing.

I’m going to go out on a limb and choose the black sheep among all things academic - wikipedia. I know it’s written by people who might not know what they’re talking about and there might be some incorrect information, but I really think that it’s one of the best places on the web to learn what you want to know about a subject in a short amount of time. So what makes wikipedia so good?

I actually like their frontpage where they have news stories, a featured article, and an “on this day” section. The featured article and “on this day” sections make for great, interesting time-wasting material, but more importantly I think that following the links in their news articles gives potential to explore as much of the background to any news story that you want to learn more about. Say you’re reading about the Canadian prime minister and then want to find out who the prime minister was before him. Easy to do in wikipedia, not so easy on cnn.com. Or you may want to learn more about how the Canadian government is set up in order to understand the prime minister’s actions in that context. Wikipedia can do that for you.

I simply find that wikipedia gives you the information you need and links to more if you want it.

In terms of design I think they put interesting material out on the front page in a very clean, efficient, and easy-to-read manner, but the search function is obviously the most used function and it works well too. I like that they have links to other related articles at the bottom of the page and links throughout if you want to supplement the information on the subject you’re reading about with whatever information they link to. The perfect example of how well wikipedia does things is the Japan article. You’re not inundated with images that clog your browser, but you can link anywhere in the outline of the article and get the essential infromation very quickly.
Not only that but wiki is coming out with lots of other types of information as well, so if you don’t like them now, you better start liking them soon.

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 week’s reading contained many excellent considerations in designing websites. The more open nature of website design and ownership allows users to create a vast array of styles, but many tend towards terrible, difficult to navigate, ugly to look at sites, but following these guidelines allows users to reap the benefits of good design without having to research every style for themselves.

I was interested by Cohen and Rosenzweig’s dispute of the idea of that web surfers have short attention spans that should be catered to. At some points they obviously argue that you need to make your website fit the audience, but on this point they adamantly claim that this dumbing down is unnecessary as we underestimate surfers. I fully agree. I think this harkens back to our discussion of PowerPoint in various ways. Both have the tendency to dumb down information to an extent that readers/users are no longer gaining significant benefit from the website. Reading is a good skill and it should be maintained on websites. People can read, and will, if the writing is good.

I think Cohen and Rosenzweig make some great points, but at some level they’re basically saying don’t make a crappy website. We all know a crappy website when we see one, but somehow we still create crappy websites and think they’re cool. Part of this surely comes from simply having too many options - when you can choose from 53 bajillion colors why in the heck would you choose black for your text color? Because it’s better that way. Basically, I think we just need to visit our own website as if we’ve never seen it before and think about how it comes across. It’s very similar to how some people suggest reading your papers outloud when proofreading them. In our minds we skim over a lot of mistakes, etc, but when we slow down and let the text or website speak for itself we can start to see it’s shortcomings more clearly.

In terms of how to navigate sites, fortunately streetprint will solve some of these problems for me on my site. However, it’s good for me to think about how people want to navigate the site and what would be most helpful for users. This requires running through a variety of user types/scenarios and seeing how different people might navigate the site differently. This of course will inform the types of search categories that are available, how articles/issues/pages are divided up for most simple browsing, and a variety of other navigation information.

Reading through Roy Rosenzweig’s essay on hypertext and history, I think he does present several innovative options for historians that coul shape the way that history is done in the future.

To start with, the first essay that he examines that uses anchored links to take readers directly to the point of the citation within the source allows readers to analyze the context from which the author/historian took their information. I think this allows for closer debate of how we use historical sources. I also wonder if it would shape the way that historians write from sources if they knew that readers could analyze so immediately how the author interpreted the source and utilized it in their work. (By the way, I really need to learn how to create anchored links).

I also wonder if such an immediate connection to, or reliance upon, sources changes the way that historians argue in these articles. Does it simply turn into show and tell, rather than focus on the complexity of the argument? This seems that it could be both a strength and a weakness, as readers can see the evidence very clearly, but might also be distracted from the narrative of the argument at the same time. This also connects with Rosenzweig’s question, “Can you say to a hypertext author that his or her argument is not clearly laid out?” What is a good argumentative structure within hypertext? Does it really change, or is there still a basic level of argument that the article must contain?

Turning to Benjamin Hermalin’s article, I was struck by how scholarly article databases online could be a very helpful thing. I already depend primarily on electronic articles for most of my journal/review reading. His note that from these pages people could link to further discussion surrounding the review/article, made me realize that scholarly databases online have not fully utilized their web structure. I’m sure there are many other helpful connections that could be made to more fully utilize the web in disseminating information in more helpful and interesting ways. I would love it if I could look up a book and it would have a webpage with links to reviews, short summaries, discussion surrounding the book, and/or links to historiographies that mention it. Surely this would be a massive project, but it seems that google or somebody could come up with this in some way that I don’t understand fairly easily.