behind AotW

I’m having too much fun pulling the string on one of my guys: Moses Luce of the 4th Michigan. I mentioned him in an earlier post about his alma mater, Hillsdale College. I got a great email from Hillsdale’s archivist, Linda Moore, with some quotes, a new photo, and a pointer to the college newspaper.

Hillsdale has digitized and posted online the Hillsdale Herald for the years 1878 to 1896. These are searchable, but displayed as page images (photos of the printed papers) – a digital historian’s dream. I’ve felt like a kid in a candy store.

As a prominent alumnus, Luce is referenced and discussed dozens of times in those years. Social gossip, event records, family history, and biographical information are all here. Tidbits from the paper have also suggested other avenues of reseach for confirmation or clarification. Great stuff.

I’ll be using this material to update our capsule biography soon.

Meanwhile, I have a mystery – take a look and see what you think …

I am pleased to see Laurie’s “This Week in the Blogs” survey on CWi. Thanks to Drew for putting the word out. It’s great to see how an outside reader sees what we do. It’ll probably help new readers find us, too.

In the inaugural edition Laurie notes that, in commenting on the JFK Library digitizing records, I used

some geek-talk , as in “…proprietary software platforms or storage formats, but trust that core data will be available to the end users in standard web-friendly formats like .txt, .xml, .pdf, .jpg.”

Such things are important even for those of us who are not as geeky as we ought to be.

I apologize for the jargon. I’ll watch out for that in future.

To translate the snippet quoted above:

I am worried that the JFK Library will create digital records that can be read only by people using EMC products, but expect they would also make the information available to the public in standard formats all of our browsers can read.

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While I’m at it … the CWi blog listing on Link Central says of behind AotW that we

get into some very interesting, albeit scholarly, issues.

“Scholarly” usually means stiff, pedantic, even dry and uninteresting. It also suggests a subject of interest only to academics. I am a life-long student, and I try to be careful with History, but don’t want to come across as scholarly. Nor would I want to portray doing History on the web in those terms.

I’ll work on that, too.

Big news for practitioners and proponents of Digital History: the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum yesterday announced a massive project to digitize and make available online all of the millions of documents, images, and audio and video recordings in their collection. See more in the Press Release.

Being one of the twelve such Presidential Libraries under the direction of the National Archives (NARA), hints that they might all eventually get this treatment. If they can do it, who else might follow? Keep those cards and letters coming …

JFKL&M is getting help from EMC who are donating hardware and software assistance, estimated to be worth 1 Million $US. Good press and credibility for EMC – more power to them. Featured is the EMC Documentum product – a suite of management and “transformation” tools to support digitizing, data management, and web delivery. I worry a little that this suggests some proprietary software platforms or storage formats, but trust that core data will be available to the end users in standard web-friendly formats like .txt, .xml, .pdf, .jpg.

“The project to digitize the collection is expected to take more than 10 years and will begin with the official papers of President Kennedy”, says the press release.

Keep your eyes on this one as it goes forward. The potential here – for all of us – is enormous.