The addition of image browsing at the Washington State Digital Archives has really opened up the photographic collections. So I thought I would begin a new feature of highlighting some of the great photographs of Washington's past that are available on the site. (Reminder: Though I work for the Washington State Digital Archives this blog is not a publication of that agency and I represent only myself in these posts.)
For the first post, I wanted to share this map of Spokane that I have seen nowhere else:
(Click here to go straight to a larger version of the image at the Washington State Digital Archives site.)
The map is captioned "Spokane Falls, W. T., 1884." Maps such as these, called "Bird's Eye" or panoramic maps, were popular in the late 19th century. Apparently a company that made them traveled through eastern Washington in 1884, as there are bird's eye maps of Cheney and Walla Walla from that year as well. The Library of Congress has a great web exhibit of its panoramic maps, along with a valuable set of essays for understanding the maps. It is important to remember that panoramic maps were created to promote development and investment and "not only showed the existing city but sometimes also depicted areas planned for development," according to an essay by John R. Hébert and Patrick E. Dempsey. So there are varying degrees of fiction and wishful thinking in these maps, and historians have to be careful using them.
The map pictured here is interesting because it pictures Spokane Falls at an early period. The city had only been incorporated three years before. And in 1889 the great fire would burn down most of the buildings rendered on the 1884 map. The city is a few blocks of brick and wood buildings, with a few more blocks of residences in each direction. The mighty Spokane River is drawn in full flood, crossed by spindly-looking bridges at Post and Howard Streets. It is a stark contrast to the better-known 1890 panoramic map of Spokane Falls, pictured below:
Or the 1905 panoramic map of Spokane:
...both of which show a more developed, commercial town well past the frontier city in the 1884 map.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Digital Archives Featured Image #1: Rare 1884 View of Spokane
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Duke Digital Collections iPhone App
I am not sure if this is an oddity or a glimpse of the future, but Duke Digital Collections has developed what I believe is the first iPhone app for a digital archive. The app is really nicely designed and takes advantage of many of the iPhone's capabilities. Here is the demo they put up on YouTube:
And yet--I can't see using my iPhone to do historical research. What do you think, dear readers? Is this a very impressive novelty or something more?
[Hat tip to the frequently valuable Duke Digital Collections Blog--a nice example of an institutional blog.]
Online Instruction Better than Traditional Classes?
The Evidence on Online Education - Inside Higher Ed: "Online learning has definite advantages over face-to-face instruction when it comes to teaching and learning, according to a new meta-analysis released Friday by the U.S. Department of 
Education. The study found that students who took all or part of their instruction online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through face-to-face instruction. Further, those who took 'blended' courses -- those that combine elements of online learning and face-to-face instruction -- appeared to do best of all. That finding could be significant as many colleges report that blended instruction is among the fastest-growing types of enrollment."
(Here is the DOE Press release and here is the full report.)
I will have to read through the full report to see how they measure things, but the results sound right to me. My online students have typically done much better than my classroom students, scoring on average a full point higher on identical finals. (Or as I usually spin it, I have statistical proof that contact with me makes students dumber.)
Photo of AKAT-1, "a 1960s vintage Polish-designed analog computer"via Wikipedia.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Rethinking H-NET
H-NET is in decline. What should be done about it?
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article up right now. Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once Vibrant, Fight for Relevance: "Once they were hosts to lively discussions about academic style and substance, but the time of scholarly e-mail lists has passed, meaningful posts slowing to a trickle as professors migrate to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social networks like Facebook."
H-NET in in financial trouble as well. In an "open letter to our readers" the H-NET leadership cites declining revenue, aging servers, and other factors to encourage donations from H-NET users. I gave and so should you. At the same time I completely agree with Frank E. Reed's point that the last thing H-NET should be doing is replacing old servers to host their clunky legacy software. And finances are not the only problem at H-NET. As the Chronicle article points out H-NET suffers as well from declining relevance. The email lists have less and less traffic and have gone from being places of scholarly discussion to electronic bulletin boards--a worthwhile function, but a lesser one.
My career has tracked the rise of H-NET pretty closely, and H-NET has been a tremendous boon to me. Right out of grad school I took a 4/4 teaching job at an open-admissions state college in the rural Midwest. 
With few campus or travel resources, a heavy teaching load, no network of scholars in my field, and no expectation to publish, it was your classic black hole of a job--a place you go and no one ever hears of you again.
But I managed to stay in the game, and it was in part because of the H-NET listservs. I used the H-NET lists in my subfields to find people for conference panel proposals, test research ideas, make professional contacts for grants and such, and to keep my own name out there. I didn't become famous (and it isn't looking likely!) but to me H-NET was an absolute lifeline.
That said, H-NET never fulfilled its early (and perhaps unrealistic?) promise. A lot of us hoped that the H-NET lists would be places for scholarly 
conversations, the sort of exchange of ideas that happens across the lunch banquet table at the best academic conferences. This did sometimes occur, especially in the early days of H-NET. But by five years ago the lists had quieted down to become less discussion oriented and more like campus bulletin boards carrying academic announcements and the occasional bibliographic inquiry. Many lists seem to have faded away entirely as the traffic has moved to blogs, twitter, and other social networking sites with greater functionality.
Part of this might be a natural process, but at least part is due to the klunkiness of the H-NET software, which is a very 1980s legacy system with some patches. When you subscribe to a H-NET list you get a flurry of emails--1) a "Summary of resource utilization" ("CPU time: 0.004 sec Device I/O: 8," etc.), 2) a nine-item "Subscription Request Form" that you need to fill out and which includes such fields as "PLEASE WRITE A BRIEF PARAGRAPH ABOUT YOURSELF BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION: (Describing your research, teaching interests, or what you expect from the list, etc.)." and 3) a list of listserv commands ("2.) To unsubscribe, logon to the computer account from which you subscribed to the list, and send this message to listserv@h-net.msu.edu: SIGNOFF H-[listname]"). Though to be fair you can also go to the H-NET web portal to manage your subscriptions. It can make you crazy. (All I wanted was a Pepsi!)
As bad as the user interface is, the administrative interface for the list moderators is light years worse. I once trained to a moderator (then I irresponsibly flaked out on actually doing it--sorry, H-NET!) and was flabbergasted by the byzantine procedures of lopping off people's signature lines, knowing the right listserv commands, etc.
So what is to be done? My proposal is to take one H-NET list and its members and try to bring them into the 21st century. Begin by dumping the proprietary software and transferring the list to Google Groups (or something similar). Eliminate moderator's approval to post, which impedes the flow of ideas, but allow moderators to discipline and ban spammers and trolls.
At the same time, create a weblog for the list where every single subscriber has the ability to create a post. Such a multi-authored blog is quite unusual in academia but I have no idea why. Sites such as Metafilter, a "community weblog" with something like 80,000 members who can create posts, show that this model can create a vibrant online community.
And why stop there? Give the new H-NET list a Facebook page and a Twitter feed and a Delicious account.
This is a very different model for H-NET, and like most Web 2.0-ey innovations it relies on giving up control over what H-NET is. But is there really a choice here? To return to the Chronicle headline, the choice is to innovate or die. And H-NET is too important to let die.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
What Happens at THATCamp...
...gets Tweeted all over the world. (So watch yourself.)
I have just finished up at THATCamp, "a user-generated 'unconference' on digital humanities organized and hosted by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University." It was a heady two days of presentations, debates, discussions and twittering about digital history with some of the most interesting people in the field. There was so much content and so many ideas it is hard to know what to blog. So rather than explore any one thing from the conference, I thought I would explain the "unconference" format of THATCamp and how it worked.
[And by the way, I hope THATCampers who read this will use the comments to correct me or make additions. I want this post to be a resource for next year's ThatCampers.]
Attendance at THATCamp is by application--you write a few paragraphs about what you will bring to share at THATCamp in terms of skills, experience, projects, or whatever, and also what you hope to learn. If you are accepted you receive an email with details about conference lodging and so on and also a user account to the THATCamp blog.
The blog is where the "user generated" part begins. People are encouraged to post their ideas on the blog and to use it to organize sessions. Many of us were not clear on this (and by "many of us" I mean myself) and participation on the blog was perhaps not what it should have been, but we did kick around some initial ideas. Here is my post.
On Saturday we came together at George Mason for breakfast. Along with coffee and baked goods there were three tables covered by large sheets of paper and handfuls of sharpies. The paper was divided into three large columns: Session Topic, Leaders, Attendees. The organizers had grouped the blog ideas into sessions and put down the names of the most voluble posters as the session leaders. We were encouraged to add ourselves as attendees or leaders or even to add new sessions.
We did this for half an hour and went to a sort of welcoming discussion. Twenty minutes later the staff had worked up a schedule for the weekend. We all bookmarked it on our iPhones and netbooks and filtered out to our sessions. (I thought about suggesting a printed copy but something told me that this just isn't done.)
The sessions were great. You know how at a regular conference you sit through the overly-long papers, checking your email and hoping that people stick to the time limit so you can get to the discussion? We skipped the papers. The sessions were extended discussions on digital history topics with people who are on the front lines of the digital revolution (and me).
Technology suffused the conference. The rooms were wired and included wireless signal. Usually someone would plug in a laptop to the digital projector and people would jump up to display a website or digital tool as it came up in the conversation. And there were power strips to plug in! More strips than there are snakes in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Another thing that made the conference different was the use of Twitter, which was encouraged by the organizers. At THATCamp Twitter serves as a social organizer, a platform for exchanging 
information, and most of all a back channel of communication during the sessions. Nearly everyone had a computer or cell phone at hand and as we talked about digital history a second conversation was happening online. By using the hash tag #thatcamp in our tweets we could customize a Twitter feed (if you have a Twitter account you can see the conversation here, or visit an archive of all the 2500+ THATCamp tweets here). Many followed the conversation online using the free application Tweetdeck. It might sound odd to anyone unaccustomed to the technology but Twitter really was an effective and natural tool for enhancing the conversations. Occasionally someone would say "Now Susan just made a good point in her tweet [paraphrases Susan] what do we think of that?"Another interesting effect of Twitter is that quite a few digital humanists not at the conference took part in the Twitter conversations.
One additional innovation was the series of three minute presentations during lunch, which were lovingly titled "Dork Shorts." People signed up to 
give three-minute presentation of their digital projects. It was enough time to give a taste of the project but short enough that everyone who wanted to could show off their work.
The one other thing worth mentioning about the conference format was the variety of attendees. We had people from museums and libraries as well as academics, and undergraduates and graduate students mixed with university faculty and staff. It was very democratic and welcoming.
The "unconference" format of THATCamp gave me a lot of food for thought. The format was not perfect. Some of the conversations wandered too much, a few of the session organizers spoke a bit longer than necessary, and it took half a day for everyone to get in the groove of the unconference. But it was so much better than any other conference I have attended lately. I walked away from THATCamp not only with a lot of new knowledge and ideas but with a sense of having made meaningful connections with a bunch of digital history people. One of my goals is to bring the Pacific Northwest History conference to Spokane one year (oh God, did I just say that?) and I like the idea of adapting some of the unconference techniques to a regional history conference.
THATCampers--what did you think of the format? What did I miss?
[The picture of the Dork Shorts board is from CHNM director Dan Cohen's blog, Found History, which has his end-of-conference impressions of the event.]
Thursday, June 25, 2009
"Lick This": LOC, Flickr, and the Limits of Crowd Sourcing
[Update: This post has provoked quite the discussion over at the Flickr Commons board.]
In January of 2008 the Library of Congress and the photo-sharing web service Flickr announced a unique partnership. The Library of Congress Flickr Pilot Project put 3000 historic LOC photographs on the website Flickr and invited the public to view, annotate, tag, and generally mess with them. This was perhaps the LOC's first foray into the world of Web 2.0 and generated a tremendous buzz. "In the first 24 hours after launch, Flickr reported 1.1 million total views on our account, with 3.6 million views a week later," according to this LOC report on the project. The project--"a match made in photo heaven" according to the LOC blog--has been praised everywhere from the New York Times to the popular community weblog Metafilter.
The goals of the project are to "increase awareness of the Library and its collections; spark creative interaction with collections; provide LC staff with experience with social tagging and Web 2.0 community input; and provides leadership opportunities to cultural heritage and government communities." Especially talked about was the second goal--sparking interaction with the collections. The idea was that visitors to Flickr could add useful metadata LOC images, such things as the names of people in the photographs, locations, models of cars or other machinery, etc.
The project may well be a success overall, but as a way to add useful metadata to historical documents, the Library of Congress Flickr Pilot Project is a disappointment. Let me explain...
Above is a screen shot of this photograph, from the very popular 1930s-40s in Color photograph set. This iconic photograph is also used as the cover image on the LOC's Final Report Summary for the project. This one photograph, and the user-generated metadata attached to it, demonstrate the problems with inviting the general public to contribute to a historical collection.
One of the most innovative features of Flickr is the ability of visitors to add notes to the pictures. You can create a rectangular box over some portion of an image and add a text note. This is especially useful for identifying individuals in group photos or pointing out specific details.
So what sort of metadata have users added to supplement the sparse LOC identification ("Bransby, David,, photographer. Woman aircraft worker, Vega Aircraft Corporation, Burbank, Calif. Shown checking electrical assemblies, 1942 June ") of the photo?
There are 20-30 notes on the photograph and not one contains useful historical information to give context or help us understand the photograph. Most are throw-away jokes or comments, "I love this fabric!" by Flickr user Mrelia and "Lick this" by user HeatherrFalk (referring to the woman's forehead!). Most of the rest of the notes refer to the woman's appearance or the composition of the picture. Almost useful is a little nested debate about the authenticity of the photograph--how staged was it?--but the discussion is hard to follow, requiring hovering the mouse over each box to see the comment.
Flickr users may also add comments and tags to images, and organize them together into sets. But here again the crowdsourced noise overwhelms the signal of useful historical information. There are over 100 comments attached to this one photograph, all but a few devoted to the picture's composition (well it is a photography website after all) or how pretty the woman is or posting just to post something. Within the chaff there are a few grains of wheat--as when user BeadMobile adds some pencil drawings made by his grandmother when she worked in a factory during World War Two. But you really have to dig.
What about tagging? User tagging is often presented as a simple and powerful way to crowdsource metadata in online archives. There are 71 user-generated tags for this image. Some are obvious and useful--"1942" and "rosie the riveter." Many others however are odd ("everyone did their part") or cryptic ("sfv" "LF").
And the sets? How have Flickr users organized this image with others? Well the woman in the picture should be proud that she is in the "Nation Of Domination. (We Rule The Universe)" photo pool and the "cable porn" pool.
The above might seem like a lot of text to bash on one image and its metadata, but the problems extend to all of the other images in the project. The notes are mostly smart-ass remarks, the comments are empty, the tags are idiosyncratic. The frustrating thing is that there really is some crowd sourced gold withing the flood of junk, such as the transcriptions of hand-lettered signs in the windows of the Brockton Enterprise newspaper office in this photo.
The most useful comment I found in this project? User Catskills Grrl's comment: "Gee, I wish the stupid, smart-ass notes would be deleted off these photos."
I will pick up the topic of crowd sourcing again in a future post, pointing towards some archives that I believe are doing it correctly.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
"What is Black and White and Red All Over?"
From the Daily Show, this cruel and funny visit to the New York Times seemed to continue the line of thought in my earlier post, The Death of Scholarly Publishing? [Disclaimer: I am a subscriber to the NY Times.]
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| End Times | ||||
| ||||
[Hat-tip to Facebook friend Katrina Gulliver.]
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Road Trip #1: Moore-Turner Heritage Gardens
Yesterday I visited the historic Moore-Turner Heritage Gardens on the lower South Hill of Spokane. The gardens were established by the wealthy Senator George Turner and his wife Bertha. Over the years they terraced and landscaped and planted the steep basalt hillside behind their mansion into the most beautiful and elaborate gardens in the inland northwest. But George Turner died in 1932, the bank foreclosed, the house was eventually demolished and gardens overgrown and forgotten. The city acquired the tract at some point but the land was left vacant--even serving as a dumping site for debris carried away from Havermale Island as it was readied for Expo '74.
Below are the pictures I took--click here to see the full images with captions.
Then things got interesting.
In 1998 an ice storm damaged many of the trees on the site. When the lot was being cleared of downed brush the workers noticed the long-forgotten terraces and stairs. Spokane Parks employees and others researched the history of the site and soon an effort was underway to restore the historic gardens. (The effort was documented in a documentary by local public television station KSPS, "Hidden Garden," briefly mentioned here and partly available on YouTube.)
Today the gardens are magnificently restored to resemble as closely as possible the gardens of a century ago. Working with with the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture and other experts, the restoration team did painstaking research to find period photographs, plant lists, and newspaper information about the gardens and how they were used. It will take a few years for the site to reach its full potential--the rose bushes and climbing vines need time to grow--but the site is already a delightful addition to the city parks. And it may be the only historic garden of its type still in existence in the area. The garden opened to the public in 2007.
To Get There: The Moore-Turner Heritage Gardens are directly adjacent to the Corbin Arts Center at 507 West Seventh Ave (Google map directions). According to the city the gardens "are open to the public weekends in May beginning Saturday, May 16, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. During the summer, June through August, the Gardens will be open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. (closed Monday & Tuesday). For additional information please call the Corbin Art Center at (509) 625-6677."
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
"I never intended to kill him": Exploring the Plateau Peoples' Web Portal
Plateau Peoples' Web Portal: "This portal is a gateway to the cultural materials of Plateau peoples that are held in Washington State University's Libraries, Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections (MASC), the Museum of Anthropology and by national donors. The collections represented here here have been chosen and curated by tribal consultants working in cooperation with University and Museum staff."
This is an exciting new site that already has a lot of content. The idea--to create a single portal for multiple institutions with materials about Plateau Indians--is a good one. And the execution is superb. The site is nicely designed and easily navigable.
The best thing about the project is the way that it seems to have been designed with the full input, cooperation, and most importantly control by the native peoples. According the the website: "The materials in the portal have been chosen and curated by the tribes. Tribal administrators, working with their tribal governments, have provided information and their own additional materials to the portal as a means of expanding and extending the archival record." Tribal administrators can add content, flag items that are culturally sensitive and should not be displayed, and add tags and other metadata to create "a rich and complex foundation for the exploration of Plateau peoples' histories."
Currently the Umatilla, Yakama, and Couer D'Alene tribes are part of the project, Each is represented by a tribal "path" that brings together all the information for that tribe under a set of nine categories (such as "Land," "Language," etc.). It is pretty clear from the architecture of the site that the plan is to bring in other native groups as well.
So let's go exploring in the site!
The title of my post comes from this letter from 1858, written by George Wright at a "Camp near Sacred Heart Mission." Wright writes: "I have determined to release the old chief Polatkin." He explains that "I never intended to kill him, or hurt him in any way. I only wanted to bring him to the mission in order that he might see how I treated the Indians here." Though Wright does admit that he hanged an unnamed Indian, one of Polatkin's friends or allies, along the way. "I hung the man taken with the chief because he had murdered two miners April last, and besides that man was at Ft Walla Walla with Father Ravelli and professed great friendship for us, and then came up here and joined the hostile Indians."
If you look at the item page for this dramatic letter you can see some of the sophisticated interactive features at this site. Registered users may flag an item as culturally sensitive, transcribe an item, or add comments either as text, audio, or video.
The Plateau Peoples' Web Portal is a model digital history project. It combines an appreciation of the sensitivity of its materials, cooperation with diverse groups, and some state-of-the-art Web 2.0 features. All of us working in digital history and archives should take note of the site.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Kalispel Encampment to Commemorate David Thompson
As part of an ongoing commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the initial encounter between explorer David Thompson and the native peoples of the northwest, there will be a Kalispel 
Encampment [PDF] June 24th through the 27th near the site of the original Kullyspel House in northern Idaho.
The four-day event will feature a teacher's workshop, educational activities, demonstrations of traditional skills, and a scholarly symposium titled “Tribes and Traders.”
For more details read the press release for the event or go to www.DavidThompson200.org to sign up.
Image: Detail from "Kalispel encampment with tepees among scattered trees" from the UW Digital Collections.]
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Call for Papers: 2010 National Council on Public History in Portland
The National Council on Public History is having its annual meeting in Portland next year. The conference is March 10-14, and is being held simultaneously with the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Environmental History.The Call for Papers is here.
This is a great conference and I hope we can get a good representation from northwest public historians and history institutions. Drop me a line if you would like to put something together! The deadline for proposals is just a moth away--June 30, 2009.
"Earliest Portland photo ca 1850" via the Jay County Historical Society.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
New Perspectives Issue Focused on Digital History
The May issue of Perspectives, the monthly magazine of the American Historical Association, is titled Intersections: History and New Media. It is a nice, accessible round-up of brief articles on topics such as blogs, teaching with digital objects, narrative challenges of online exhibits, etc. Many of the articles are of the "hey look at what I am doing" genre, but still very useful.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
The Death of Scholarly Publishing?
The University of Michigan Press has announced that they will be "redefining scholarly publications in the digital age"--by which they mean they will no longer print books. Rather they will shift their resources to "digital monographs." You to have give them props for the positive spin in the press release. 
"Freeing the press, in large part, from the constraints imposed by the print-based business model will permit us to more fully explore and exploit ever-expanding digital resources and opportunities," Phil Pochoda, director of U-M Press, quotes himself as saying. Pochada also refers to his team and himself as "visionaries."
There is much fussiness in the academic community about this move, but it is not like we did not see it coming. Scholarly publishing of monographs has been on its death bed for years, with press runs of many books dropping below 1000, then below 500, then into the low hundreds even as prices have soared and subventions have become almost respected.
But as the guys over at Digital Campus pointed out in a recent podcast, the vital element of scholarly publishing is the peer review, not the physical form of the end product. Though no one seems to be noticing, academic articles have already made the leap. I am willing to bet the average article in the Journal of American History gets far more digital readers via the commercial databases such as the History Cooperative and JSTOR than through actual subscribers who crack open a physical copy.
And the digital versions of the articles are far superior to the printed ones. First of all you can actually find relevant articles via search engines. Then you can do keyword searches to take you to a relevant passage. You can store the articles you are working on in your laptop and mark them up with various tools. Within five years most of all of our history journals will cease publication in the dead-tree format.
But even I have to admit that the book poses special challenges.
First of all, we have no good delivery format for digital books. The Kindle solves many of the readability problems of digital publications, but it also locks away your content into a closed proprietary system. You don't actually own your books on a Kindle, you just pay Amazon for permission to read them. The Sony Reader does not seem to be catching on, and there is no open source reader that I know of. (Update: Not so fast...)
Second, will anyone buy digital scholarly monographs? Grad students are too broke and their professors too deep in their print fetish to buy digital books. And books have a somewhat different revenue model than scholarly journals, depending more on individual and less on institutional purchases. Journal subscription costs are largely borne by institutions, but books still generate some of their revenue via sales to individuals.
Third, authors who have a choice will go to publishers who print physical books until the last one closes shop. After all, what kind of gift to grandma is a digital book? The answer here is print-on-demand (POD) services to turn digital books into hard copies. One can imagine a bookstore that has exactly one hard copy of each title on its shelves. When you make a selection you bring the book to the clerk who punches a few buttons and a machine in the back spits out a lovely bound copy. In fact you have to imagine such a store, because none currently exist, despite developments such as the Espresso Book Machine. There are quite a few online POD vendors, and I was pleased with my experiment with one of them, but I don't think they represent any significant fraction of the book market.
So the transition to digital is apt to be trickier for books than it has been for journals. As university presses pull back and are closed down in the current economic crises (is LSU press next?) the search for a new model of scholarly publishing grows more urgent.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Wyoming Newspapers Project
Friend Pecay (of BibliOdyssey fame) tipped me off to a great resource: Wyoming Newspaper Project. "Available through this website are all the newspapers printed in Wyoming between 1849 and 1922, in an easily searchable format." All Wyoming newspapers through 1922! I mean, we know that Wyoming is sparsely populated but that is still an amazing feat. Half of the 900,000 images are online right now with the rest to follow over a few months.
This digital archive has a plain but useful user interface with strong search and browse features. You can search or browse, including browsing by city (and it is fun to see what little hamlets once had newspapers). In my experience the site is still a bit shaky, so if your search fails just come back later and try again.
All the newspapers for an entire state! What a resource this is for historians of Wyoming and the American West.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
No Stimulus for You!
As the official numbers on the 2010 Obama budget request are released it is clear that history largely missed out on the stimulus. For most of the programs that benefit history, funding is flat or only slightly increased over previous years. The exceptions are the NEH and the National Park Service, but even there the increases are far short of the billions and billions of stimulus infrastructure being doled out around the country. Some examples from the National Coalition for History:
The National Archives & Records Administration will get a 1.5% increase from $460 million to $466.9 million.- Funding for the wonderful Teaching American History grant program will stay at the 2009 figure of $119 million.
- The National Endowment for the Humanities budget will increase 10% from $155 million to $171 million.
- National Historical Publications and Records Commission grants will increase from $9.25 million to $10 million.
- The National Park Service's Historic Preservation Fund will increase from $69 million to $77 million.
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