National Archives Experience: Digital Vaults

Kennedy family at Hyannis, summer 1963.

The National Archives maintains over ten billion records which help document the American experience. The Archives has selected and digitized over 1,200 of those documents, photographs, maps, and other items and made them available through their online ”Digital Vault.” The result is an exciting, interactive site that covers all periods of U.S. history up to the 21st Century. Although I find the flash graphics that play while items are loading a little distracting, this site is a great resource for teachers and students alike. (There is an html version, as well.)  In addition to an ever changing  collection of “vaults” which can introduce users to topics ranging the Age of Discovery to American women in combat roles the site provides users with educational games and assistance in finding more information on a given topic. In addition, one can collect and download images and use them to produce posters, slide shows, or their own games. Images include brief descriptions as well as subject tags so that users can move from an object to a series of related items. Their are instructions, but it’s a lot more fun to click and explore.

Hurricane Digital Memory Bank

This weekend will mark the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall east of New Orleans; it was the catalyst for immediate and long-term suffering on the part of Gulf Coast residents. To add insult to injury, Hurricane Rita struck southwestern Louisiana a few weeks later.

The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (HDMB) is the largest online archive of Katrina and Rita materials. Over time its collections have grown to include over 25,000 items, ranging from documents and reminiscences to artwork, photographs, and video. The HDMB is the product of a partneership between the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, the University of New Orleans,  and other national and Gulf Coast area partners.

In 2007, HDMB received the Award of Merit for Leadership in History Award at the American Association of State and Local History’s annual conference in Atlanta.

History 2.0: Google Timelines

Over the years, Google has introduced many useful applications, but just recently I found one that I consider really awesome. I was reading a blog the other day that introduced me to Google timelines. In the past when performing some searches, I had noticed timelines within the results, but I don’t think I ever paid much attention to them. That has changed.

Google timelines uses a chronological graph to provide a gateway to search and explore historical archives of digital content. For example, if you search under ”New Hampshire” using Google, you can scroll down the bar graph. This represents the number of online sources about “New Hampshire” for a specified period.  The height of the graph is directly proportional to the number searchable stories available for that time period. 

There are a couple of ways to bore down for more information. You can click on a specific year or month to uncover results. Once you click on the timeline, you can also refine searches. For example, you can go beyond “New Hampshire” to create a historical timeline for “Dover, New Hampshire.”

To generate your own timelines, you can go directly to the Google News Archives search: http://news.google.com/archivesearch. For example, by typing “Liberia” into the search box you can create a timeline to cumulate related  digital content. And your searches are not limited to geographic regions. For example, if you are research modern Poland, you can generate a timeline on the life of former Polish President Lech Walesa. Or, if looking for digital content about the Great Depression…well, you guessed it.

Some might flinch at links to Wikipedia, but you’ll also find pdfs of articles from the New York Times or Christian Science Monitor, as well as appropriate excerpts from digitized monographs. The timelines feature is a tool, not a panacea, but it certainly represents a good way to begin your research.

Product Trials for Black History Month

The UNH Library is pleased to announce the following product trials for the month of February. Please share this information with your students and colleagues, use them, and let us know what you think. Such input is important to us as we weigh future expenditures in a time of shrinking budgets.

Proquest Historical Newspapers. Black Newspapers Collection. http://libproxy.unh.edu/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com/login  This digital archive-offers full-text and full-image articles for significant newspapers dating back to the 18th Century.  The Black Newspapers Collection provides access to nine titles including the Chicago Defender and Baltimore Afro-American.

Black Studies Center  http://libproxy.unh.edu/login?url=http://bsc.chadwyck.com   Black Studies Center is a fully cross-searchable gateway to Black Studies including scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles, and much more.

 Ethnic NewsWatch http://libproxy.unh.edu/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com/login Ethnic NewsWatch™ (ENW) features newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic and minority press, providing researchers access to essential, often overlooked perspectives. With titles dating from 1990, ENW presents a comprehensive, full-text collection of nearly 1.6 million articles from more than 300 publications offering both national and regional coverage. While the content may mirror mainstream media coverage, the viewpoints are decidedly unique.

 

Viewing the Inauguration

The UNH Library has arranged for the Multimedia Classroom (Dimond 235) to be available all day (9am-4:30pm) on January 20, 2009 for watching the Presidential Inauguration and related events. If you have any questions, please call Alan Chase at 862-1756.

Colonial State Papers

The UNH Library would like to announce a trial for the Colonial State Papers, which provides access to primary materials related to the English colonization  of North America. The trial is scheduled to run through February 12, 2009. The link for the resource is: http://www.library.unh.edu/scripts/redirect.pl?dbase=367

This resource contains primary source material dating from the late 16th Century through the mid 18th Century.  It includes materials about England’s earliest colonization efforts, early encounters with Native Americans, Atlantic trade, maritime affairs and piracy, as well as ongoing conflicts with other colonial powers, particularly France and Spain.

Please give it a try and let us know what you think. We base our future purchases on the feedback we receive from such trials.

Library Funds Boston Museum of Fine Arts Membership for UNH

The UNH Library has taken on the Boston Museum of Fine Arts membership for UNH. This means UNH students can once again get in free by showing their UNH IDs at the door.

Passes for benefits-eligible faculty and staff will also be available. The passes have not yet been received, but should be here before the end of December. We will let the University community know when they are available.

Both programs apply only to general admission when an advance ticket is not required and do not apply for special exhibits.

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

Emory University, in collaboration with a diverse backing that includes the National Endowment for the Humanities and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, has developed a database that includes information about some 35,000 slave voyages. It includes information about the forced migrationof over 10 million Africans from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

It includes information on specific voyages, including the ability to create listings, tables, charts, and maps using information from the database. The database also include the means for estimating numbers for the 20% of slaving voyages that were not documented. And finally, the database  identifies over 67,000 Africans aboard slave ships, using name, age, gender, origin, and place of embarkation.

Literature Criticism Online and Refworks

The UNH Library added a couple of databases this summer that may be of interest

Literature Criticism Online contains a range of modern and historical views on authors and their works across regions, eras and genres. It includes centuries of analysis, both scholarly and popular, from broadsheets, pamphlets, encyclopedias, books and periodicals. It is delivered in an format that is both accessible matches the exact look and feel of the print originals. 

Refworks, is an online research management, writing and collaboration tool, is designed to help researchers easily gather, manage, store and share all types of information, as well as generate citations and bibliographies.

If you have any questions about or need assistance for any of the Library’s databases, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Welcome Back!

Well, after a hiatus that was much longer than I had intended, I’m back blogging about the intersection of history, research, the Library, and online resources at the University of New Hampshire. And oh, what a busy summer it has been!

You may have noticed a new look to both the Library’s homepage and online catalog. Rob Wolff has designed  a new library homepage which features both a new look and expanded functionality. It combines the familiar library site header with some new content, including search boxes for the new library catalog, course reserves, digital collections, and the library website.

The library catalog has a new, Google-like interface. It searches the same information but presents it differently. The result list is sorted by relevance; you can also sort by date or title. Flanking the results are ways to refine your search and find newest material. If you want to search with the familiar, old interface, there is a link to it on the new catalog page.