SITE REVIEW
There are many sites that contain historical information about cities and towns in the United States. It is difficult to find any single website that meets all the requirements for this project. However, a variety of existing websites demonstrate functionality that will be adapted for WFC HISTORY.
The Wisconsin Historical Society website is rich in content. The Wisconsin Historical Society is ‘a state agency and a private membership organization’. The Wisconsin site has many features that WFC HISTORY will adopt. The Wisconsin site includes information about a variety of historical or semi-historical topics of interest to academic and public historians, genealogists, teachers, students and history buffs. The Wisconsin site includes abundant photographs and images from library and historical society collections as well as from individuals. Like the Wisconsin site, WFC HISTORY will include newspaper articles, local sites on the Historic Register, records and photographs of old buildings, images from the painting collection at a local estate, Glen Burnie, as well as representative art images from local artists or art picturing the area. Like the Wisconsin site, HISTORY WFC will include news about the Historical Society, historic reenactments, events and festivals. For the benefit of those who trace ancestry to Winchester and Frederick County even as far back as the eighteenth century, there will be a searchable Name Index with information from local histories, directories, local historical material and eventually obituaries and articles from local magazines and newspapers. (links to this stuff) The Wisconsin site has a wallpaper page with images to enlarge to various sizes for use as desktop wallpaper that will be adapted for the WFC site.
The following details of the Wisconsin website will be adopted by the WFC site; a neat and consistent look and feel, links to the main menu items prominently placed on all pages, text links for the site on all pages, non-serif fonts for most text, no overuse of capitals, underlining of links with mouse over, an alphabetical site map and thumbnail images that can be enlarged by clicking to display information about the image.
A number of the characteristics of the Wisconsin site will not be adopted. The Wisconsin site has a commercial component and the Wisconsin Historical Society markets various items. The home page is overwhelming with about 60 links from the home page. The Wisconsin site has no clear statement to unify the elements or a topical organization of the site map.
Mr. James Ellis of the Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) discussed the site in a phone conversation on December 3, 2004. The site began in 1996 with 100 documents and grew to 3,000 documents in 4 years. With the expansion, the Historical Society decided to replace the system. They worked with a professional designer. Migration to the new site took 3 people 5 weeks. The OHS has 15 application databases including the image database and an on-line catalog that existed before the web site. Most databases use Oracle. The site uses XHTML. Dreamweaver is used for development. The site has 12 templates. Movable Type is used for some areas of the web site. Web Trends is used for statistics.
There have been no severe problems. However, budget and funding are always an issue and web perils have been encountered. Mr. Ellis described a hostile French takeover of a server that wiped out images and replaced them with a movie. The material was restored from a backup. The site expects 1.6 million visitors in 2004. 90 percent are from the United States and Mr. Ellis estimates that about half are from Wisconsin. Names, Archives and Historical Buildings are popular sections.
Plans include a homepage redesign, E-Commerce for purchases and the Wisconsin Encyclopedia. ( I made him aware of the Texas Handbook,) The Wisconsin Historical Society has much more material to be digitized. The Society is the state archive and receives material from individuals, newspapers and the like.
Mr. Ellis is the only full time web tdeveloper with 2 part time assistants. Mr. Ellis stated that some WHS staff in other organizations include the website in their future plans. He would like to see the entire organization consider the website as a resource for their projects.
WFC HISTORY will also use concepts from TSHA Online which is a joint project of the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas State Historical Association. The Association is affiliated with the University of Texas. The scholar, Walter Prescott Webb, served as both the director of the Association and the director of the University’s research center in Texas history. The Association also produces the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. This site contains the complete text of 6 volumes of the Handbook of Texas as well as an additional 400 articles about Texas History. The material is exhaustive and reflects the scholarly influence of the University. Each article, no matter how small, appears to be carefully and accurately written and includes a bibliographic reference as well as the name of the author. The site has some features that the WFC HISTORY project will adopt. There is a word search and one can also search by year. The site also has a Texas Day by Day feature. The user selects month, a list of articles referring to days of the month are presented. Each article briefly describes the event and links to other materials in the handbook . The Texas site has no images or a section specifically for students and teachers. Only the Table of Contents is available for the Southwestern Historical Quarterly.
A large number of community sites only skim the surface of the history of an area. Some of the sites were established by local historical societies and some by individuals interested in their region. What these sites lack in historical depth, they often make up in enthusiasm and insider knowledge or access to unique materials. The relatively small site for Brainerd Kansas was developed by Kevin Roe. This site contains images of the old town that Roe obtained from a local historian, Agnes Harder. The feature of this small but elegant site that will be adapted is the Guestbook Section where individuals can record memories of the community. Users will be informed that entries will be reviewed for quality and relevance (and at the same time censored) before they become available on the site and that space will not allow all entries to be made available.
Another site with material that is uniquely local is the Redding Connecticut site developed by Brent Colley. This site includes postcards and pictures from local collections, oral history recordings by local citizens, and text from local histories. The WFC project plans to include oral history and solicit material from the community for inclusion.
The Waterford Virginia site includes a section on the history of Waterford and Loudoun County. Waterford is a National Historic Landmark. This site was developed by Edward Lehmann. Mr. Lehmann was interviewed on November 21, 2004. Mr. Lehmann is a resident of Waterford and developed and maintains the site on his own initiative and at his own cost. He began development in 1996 and regularly monitors and modifies the site. He uses Dreamweaver with style sheets as a development tool. The site resides on a commercial provider, Futurequest that charges $95.00 a year to contain the site. The site now has about 100 web pages. Some documents on the site are provided gratis by 2 local writers, Joe Keating and Eugene Scheel. Mr. Lehmann did the photography with his digital camera and uses Photo Shop.
Mr. Lehmann is a member of the Waterford Citizen Association, a loose community group, which does not provide financial support or labor but otherwise supports the site. Mr. Lehmann volunteered advice from his experience. Think about the purpose of each page is, who the users of the page will be and how they will use it and design accordingly. Test your navigation with an inexperienced user. Be aware of how Google and other search engines go though a site so you can set up your links to take advantage of the recognized search strategies. Mr. Lehmann uses Statmachine.com which charges a small annual fee to get statistics on usage. He chooses to keep away from techniques like mouse-over that use Java to avoid unnecessary complexity.
The Deerfield Massachusetts site is an exceptional local site. It is well-designed and attractive with art that was prepared specifically for the site. One of the features of that site that WFC HISTORY will adopt is the technique used for the time line (http://www.1704.deerfield.history.museum/timeline/index.jsp ). The time line shows three rows of events. The top row displays local history events. The middle row displays events in the North, that is, the northeastern part of North America. The bottom row displays corresponding events in the World. Local history is viewed in conjunction with the region’s and World events.
The Ohio Memory site, has a scrapbook feature that allows a user to select favorite images from the numerous images on the Ohio web site and make a scrapbook with notations of a personal sub-collection of images. Images of the Ohio past range from a Temperance Songbook, to Indian artifacts and to small Ohio businesses of the past. This will be a feature that WFC HISTORY will adopt in a later phase.
The Long Island newspaper, Newsday, calls a section of its site, Long Island, Our Story. This section features articles, a timeline, a Family Stories section and a brief history of each town in Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island. The articles read like newspaper articles. The approach and tone is more journalistic than historical. The Family Stories Section is a good idea but the families are all interesting and probably not a representative sample. The stories are not written by family members. The Search appears to search the entire newspaper and is not helpful to one interested in history only. WFC HISTORY will adopt the approach of the Newsday site and contain articles on every town in Frederick County.
