This week we examined ideas from various sources on what makes a good online presentation of archival material for a general audience. This is a topic that is inevitably influenced by the who your target audience is. Depending on the information being presented the audience can be a very specific group such as a museum designed for children or it can be the American public in general which is more the case when we are talking about government records as a whole.
In the “Final Thoughts” chapter of Cohen and Rozenweig's Digital History, they summed up the hope of what digital technology will bring to the field of history. The authors state their wish that “all historians can use the web to make the past more richly documented, more accessible, more diverse, more responsive to future researchers, and above all more democratic.” (Thank you Dr. Cebula for waving citation requirements) http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/finalthoughts/
We also covered the authors appendix where they give some final technical advice on how to best present historical information. Unlike the rest of this week's reading this was purely technical advice relating to scripting languages. It is miscellaneous although I do agree that for the best professional look basic HTML should probably be avoided. http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/appendix/2.php
The “Does Your Museum Need Its own Social Network” article is a perfect example of material being presented to a very specific audience, in this case children. The idea of using a social network to attract and encourage an audience to come back to a museum is an interesting one. In the case of this museum privacy is paramount as we are talking about children. Outside social networks cannot be trusted even if they have good security (facebook) and you certainly wouldn't use a network with bad security (myspace). http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2008/01/does-your-museum-need-its-own-social.html
Instead this article suggests the creation of a on site social network within the museums database that better guarantees the privacy of its users while allowing them to interact with other fans of the museum. This network also allows parents to fully monitor their child’s activities and of course the parents have the final say so in whether or not their kid can join this network. Admittedly many elements of this proposed network including its name “Tree of Promise” seem a little corny, but it is important to remember who the target audience is. http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2008/01/does-your-museum-need-its-own-social.html
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| Tenement Museum Blog Header |
From the more specific audience of a Children's Museum we turn to State Archives whose audience is simply defined as the general public, although I think it is fair to say most of the audience is going to be adults or at least teenagers. A key question that carries over from paper archives is centralization. Some states have a fairly centralized system where the state government holds all of the records; meanwhile other states are decentralized and individual counties and cities hold most of their own records. This question translates into the digital world over whether there should be a single online database with many different types of government records available for public view or whither each local government should create their own online access. http://www.ctg.albany.edu/publications/issuebriefs/preservation?brief=3
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| Penitentiary Convicts 1877-1888 (Washington Digital Archives) |
Of course when we are talking about the creation of a digital archive it is hard not to talk about the Digital Archives facility we have here in Cheney, the first building custom built for that purpose. The pdf about the creation of the Washington's Digital Archives as well as the cost/benefit analysis shows that having government records online in one database is often the best way of presenting them to the public. http://www.ctg.albany.edu/publications/reports/proi_case_washington/proi_case_washington.pdf
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