Online historical resources: A study in differences in presentation

The rapidly expanding body of historical information online has quickly stripped our ability to describe this mass of information in quantitative terms. While in the early days of the Web some talked about the numbers of documents available on the Web or in particular collections (e.g. the 9 million document images available at the Library of Congress’ American Memory), today we might be better served to describe historical information in terms of how it is represented online and to describe the shape (scope, breadth, intent, and interpretation) of specific resources and collections. Such a shift in focus might also enable us to describe how resources are represented using different technologies and how those technological forms might impact the use of these resources. Ultimately, a clear understanding of how historical materials are organized is needed to develop the historical literacies needed to use the resources.



One example of these differing technological forms emerged this week as I guided two graduate students in a study of America Civil War diaries kept by southern women. In our work, we located three diaries. One of these diaries is from Julie Johnson Fisher (above) and is presented online at the University of North Carolina’s Documenting the American South - http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/fisherjulia/fisher.html. Fisher, who lived in Camden County Georgia, kept the diary in 1864 for eight months beginning January 1 of that year. The online presentation from Documenting the American South aims to balance the simple availability of the diary using html/xml text-based coding with archival conventions that provide librarians and other scholars clearly formatted information. The diary is available on a single webpage with information at the top of the page that describes the scanning protocol, copyright information, notations on the presentation, and Library of Congress cataloging information. The text of the diary is presented in italics with clear headings for each diary entry date and pagination that corresponds to the typeset version of the diary from which the transcription was taken. The original version of Johnson diary is lost or its location is unknown to the UNC library. The presentation of Johnson diary is utilitarian, but widely accessible. A web search on “Julia Johnson Fisher” should place the Documenting the American South online version among the top hits. A version of the diary that I created with students at Georgia State University is listed as well. This version is online at http://www.dhpp.org/julia_johnson_fisher/. We created still yet another version at http://julia.rediary.org/. You'll find portions of her diary at http://georgiainfo.galileo.usg.edu/CivilWar/jan164.htm and http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-civilwar/4643



In contrast, another diary that was kept in 1864 by a woman who lived in Newnan, Georgia is available through Google Books. This diary was published in 1918 in a book titled “A Women’s War Time Journal” by Dolly Sumner Lunt with an introduction from Julian Street. The book was published by the Century Company in New York. The version scanned on Google Books is from Princeton University Library. Google scans books using optical character recognition (OCR) technology which creates machine-readable text. The online presentation uses full page scans, but the OCR text is searchable. These page scans appear in a Google page viewer that loads in a web browser, the book is available for download as a PDF and as an EPUB file, which is an electronic publication format presented as an e-book standard, by the International Digital Publishing Forum. EPUB files are viewable on a number of software and hardware devices. The Google Books presentation also includes a linked word cloud that features words that frequently appear in the book as well as links the various locations of these words in the text. Additional information about the book is located at the bottom of the page including information on the publisher and Google Books categories. In contrast to the Documenting the American South version of Julia Johnson Fisher’s diary, which included meta-data at the top of the page, the Google Books version of Lunt’s diary presents a link to the text of the book prominently at the top of the page. On the first page of the actual book, the Google Books page viewer is prominently fixed in at the top and middle of the webpage.



A third diary from Louisiana Burge, the young step-daughter of Dolly Sumner Lunt, is featured on a subscription web service from Alexanderstreet.com called “North American Women's Letters and Diaries.” The diary is available in transcribed form from a 1952 publication in the Georgia Historical Quarterly. This diary is part of a collection of 150,000 pages from 1325 women authors. Burge’s diary is presented on 16 separate pages. The organization of pages on the website is confusing. This is no single index page, nor is there necessarily any metadata although there is a table of contents page for Burge as an author. In order to view the pages in the diary, the reader has to click the link on the words "Louisiana Burge: The Diary of a Confederate College Girl" as they appear on a search or browse page. The next page includes links to the 16 pages of the publication. The list of these pages has no discernable ordering. Within the description of each page is a short reference to page ordering scheme (e.g. S889-D001 – the “S” references the publication and the “D” references the page in the publication). The pages are actually ordered 4, 5, 6, 2, 8, 7, etc. At the bottom of this index page is a link to an "Introduction.” After clicking this introduction, successive pages can be accessed by using a "next source document" link that appears at the top and bottom of all pages. The text is presented in html and includes pagination from the 1952 journal publication.


Each of these three presentation privilege different forms of information and make use of different presentational forms. The Documenting the American South version of Julia Johnson Fisher’s diary privileges scholarly and archival information and offers the text in a mostly straightforward single page html format. This presentation enables printing, scrolling, skimming/scanning reading techniques, browser-based searching, and easy copy/paste functionality. The Alexander Street version of Louisiana Burge’s diary also enables copy/paste activities, but the multi-page presentation makes browser searching more difficult. The organizational structure of the Burge diary is disorganized and hard to follow, and the browse and search functionality, while manageable in the first stages is much more difficult after the initial links to the diary have been located. The Google Books version of Dolly Sumner Lunt’s diary is the most portable with its PDF and EPUB versions. The presentation also provides quick access to the document and clever search and browse functions. Reading the Lunt diary is less comfortable than the html of the other two diaries. The Google Books page turner attempts to recreate the feel of a book, but slows down skimming and scanning.

The implications of these presentational approaches for students are enormous. Each presentation is idiosyncratic and requires different skills. The literacies needed to locate, access and then ultimately use the diaries are complex and made nuanced. Even though we approached these three documents on the same day with a single, high focused research interest, we had to confront three web resources that had their own standards, interfaces and ways for interacting with the texts. The standardization of print book publishing and text-based archives provides researchers with predictable and generalizable interfaces. An orientation or two to the world of print archives and brick and motor libraries was usually enough for students to be able to use most libraries and archives. Today, we must provide students with on-going experiences to handle the various and seemingly every shifting approaches to presenting online historical going resources.