This week I asked my students to write reviews of three historically-themed websites and chose one that they admired, one that they thought could be saved, and another that they think should be totally revamped.
For my three websites, I’ve chosen to focus on websites that host primary source documents. Collections of primary source documents are becoming more and more popular as the work of hosting a website becomes more and more automated. Yet, not all of these document collections are conceptualized at the same level of functionality, nor in terms of design. Some might say that one of my examples was among the first, and thus should be exempt from such criticism, yet I’m including it (the Internet Modern History Sourcebook) as a lesson in the problems of spending the time and money (possibly the result of a grant) and then not devoting any time or resources to it down the road and thus the site quickly becomes dated and sometime unusable.
THE GOOD
Before looking into the “ugly” in more detail, I’d like to highlight one of the better document collections out there. Hosted at George Mason’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM), the History of Children and Youth collection is a wonderful example of best practices for hosting a collection of primary sources. The website is divided into four categories – website reviews, primary source documents, case studies, and teaching modules. The inclusion of categories beyond just hosting the documents in question allows the website to cater to a variety of audiences at the same time – to students looking for primary documents, to teachers looking for classroom material, and to the general history buff, who wants to read a bit about a topic and then explore other resources as well.
Since I wanted to focus on the primary sources, I’ll limit my further comments to that area. The scope of documents included in this collection is amazing – covering all of the major areas of the world. Digging into each of the categories allows the user to explore the lives of women and children in these different societies through a variety of media. There are paintings, sculptures, texts, photographs, toys, folktales and many other items that help illustrate different how children and youth live around the world. Each item is tagged with additional information to aid in searching and also allows the user to quickly locate related material. The search function is also highly adaptive, allowing both simple and advanced searches. In order to help students understand the source that they are looking at, each source has an annotation that places the object or source within its historical context. My only real reservation here is that the primary sources are not accessible as pre-formatted PDF files (which allow students to cite page numbers within a document, not just a website).
THE BAD (SORT OF BAD, BUT ALSO GOOD)
Another very good (and ambitious) collection of documents that I have found very useful in my teaching is hosted by the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. The German History Documents collection is divided into ten chapters or periods of German history. Each chapter contains dozens (possibly hundreds) of annotated primary sources, maps, and images. Every document (here’s where things are ambitious) are available in both the German original and in English. Each has a pre-formatted PDF for uniform printing and citing, which is very useful for those of us who integrate such sources into their curriculum. The vast about of information here is remarkable and is going to greatly help develop better teaching resources for undergraduate education in English-speaking countries. At the undergraduate level, it has been very difficult to find English language documents for use in teaching. So, this collection is highly valuable to many of us in the field.
However, there are many problems with the usability of this website. The structure of the website is rather basic and analogue – it doesn’t take advantage of any of the newer programming or design techniques that would allow a much more rich end-user experience. The structure of the site resembles the analogue book format of a multi-volume document collection that just happens to be on the internet, rather than in a printed book. Although there is a rudimentary search function, which does work OK, it does not have the sophisticated advanced search features offered in the CHNM designed website. One of the differences here is the basic technology that each of these two sites are based upon – CHNM uses Omeka, while the GHI website is running Cold Fusion scripting and static web pages. I don’t have anything against ColdFusion per se, but I don’t think its implementation here has helped users navigate the website. The website also needs a desperate dose of design overhaul. At a minimum, each source title should have a three-line excerpt for easy browsing. Another issue is that many of the PDF links contain spaces, which is a definite no-no, since web browsers cannot use spaces. The server inserts % signs as a holder, but this makes for very odd-looking slugs. Were they running Omeka, this would be taken care of automatically and items would be renamed as they entered the MySQL database.
All of these reservations aside, it still is a fabulous and much needed collection of primary documents!
THE UGLY (AND DATED)
On to the ugly! For the ugly category I decided to go with one of the oldest primary source collections on the Internet – the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. This sourcebook is probably one of the most used collections of documents on the web. I can’t think of a colleague or friend who teaches modern European history who does not use documents from this collection. However, it is a remnant of early 1990s website design. Some might say – “Hey, it works!” and they would be right, sort of. It works if you know what you are looking for. It works if you find your way to a document by searching Google and just happens to land on one of these documents. It works if a professor links directly to a document from the syllabus or course website. It doesn’t work if you are trying to find information on your own in an orderly fashion.
The collection has many of the most classic texts of western society and as such is a rich resource, no matter its format. However, there is a great deal of potential for improvement. The first thing that is needed here are better annotations and better searchability. The layout of the documents is roughly based on chronology with a long list of key words listed along the left sidebar. This organization works, but it isn’t as efficient as integrating tags or any other form of hyperlinked navigation. Integrating “related documents” to each document would greatly help students who are using the website for research papers. The ability to search within the website for specific terms or concepts would also help a great deal.
The larger issue here, however, is that the success of the website (as I mentioned earlier) actually makes is almost impossible to revamp this website. Since there are so many external links pointing to these documents, revamping them and migrating to a more modern server technology (like Omeka) would break hundreds (if not thousands) of links. This raises the larger issue of what one does with older websites that are not maintained. What is the expectation within the humanities for maintaining such resources over the years? Most digital history projects are financed through one-time grants that do not include money for maintenance. Some document collections (and this might be the case here) weren’t even funded – they were built over the years by a lone professor who developed a resource for his own use, but then became a popular go-to place for others teaching similar topics. As far as I can tell, the site has not been updated since 1999.
The lesson here is: design and usability is just as important as the content. The documents need to be easily accessed and should include annotations so that the documents don’t exist out there in the interwebs as stand-alone documents that lack any sort of contextual information. All three are good collections, but they could all be improved as well.