Too flashy?

There seems to be some interesting differences emerging between high profile online historical sources and other sources that are created and managed on a smaller scale. Take for example the new Digital Vaults website (http://www.digitalvaults.org) from the National Archives and Records Administration. This resource presents historical resources in a visual and dynamic environment that is both very attractive and simple to navigate. To investigate a resource you can search or browse through the collection. Once you have identified a particular resource, you can center the item on the screen and related resources will be displayed in an array according to associations between the resources. However, the resources available on the site are idiosyncratic and do not really support question-driven inquiry. The folks at NARA have developed a frame for using the resources with their pathways concept, but the pedagogy is a bit fragmented. For example, one of the sample pathways,” Men and Monuments,” offered as a beginner pathway includes a sequence of documents (mostly images) and clues that guide the user from one resource to the next. The first is an image of Lincoln with the clue “President Lincoln was our 16th president. Find the statue of Lincoln that’s missing it’s head.” By scrolling over the assorted images, you can find the correct image.


The array of images appears the same on each instance the pathway is loaded and the correct image is not displayed. In order to find the image, users much either narrow the focus by using the tags on the left or re-arrange the images with the sorted tool on the right. Both of these operations are essential to using the resources, put not essential to historical thinking or inquiry. Ultimately, success in the Pathway activity is mostly an exercise in manipulating the mostly idiosyncratic tools on the site.



In contrast to the Digital Vaults, a small but more tightly focused collection of historical documents at the Cold War Interantional History Project provides students with the resources and tools needs to address a range of historical inquiry questions. Tools available on the site are simple, mainly just a search function, a chronological arrangement of documents, and short annotations on a single page for each document.

The bottom line for me is function trumps form, and teachers should think pedagogical when considering how they might use online historical resources.