Each of the partners in ACS offers courses on the Civil War, and each has a regional legacy, including local resources (photographs, documents, maps, data) in their collections. While these resources could be digitized and made available for local use in teaching, their value would be greatly enhanced by linkage into a growing mosaic of materials on the southern United States, shared via the Internet. We propose to build a general entry point for online study of the liminal decades between 1850 and 1880, intended as an adjunct to courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The unique features of this project are (1) an interface enabling users to contribute faculty research, course projects, student papers, and other media to the growing digital archive,(2) the possibility to locate their material in the spatial and temporal matrix, and (3) facilities for users to search the collection via a map interface. Most of the events, artifacts, processes and actors of the decades in question can be located with some degree of precision in the spatio-temporal framework (battles were fought on certain days in particular locations, railroads were built in specifiable sequences, people rose to prominence in particular years and places, tons of iron were produced in certain months, etc.). Chronological organization allows a user to follow processes over time, and to ask what was happening simultaneously in different locations.
An ArcIMS interface will permit a user to zoom in to specific areas, choose map layers to display, define rectangles within which to query an active map layer, and click on a map symbol to retrieve hyperlinked material (an alpha prototype is available at mapa.wlu.edu/civilwar). Search utilities for browsing and textual interrogation of the digital library databases will also be developed.
Among the materials to be included are texts, images, statistical datasets, maps, video resources, and timelines. Each of these resources has obvious utility in courses, but the possibility of linking them and making them accessible on the Web via spatial and temporal interfaces adds greatly to their value.
This year's effort will link maps with multiple data types, to enable users to interact with digital library contents in novel ways, and to facilitate geographical retrieval from a wealth of material. While the specific content in this project is centered on the Civil War and Reconstruction years and on materials from W&L's collections, the structure we build will be easily adaptable to other materials on the American South, and to eventual augmentation by remote contributors. We will develop (1) an Access database with spatial and temporal dimensions, (2) Web-based user interfaces for upload and query, incorporating geographic characteristics and identifiers, (3) procedures for selection and metadata creation for a broad range of media, and (4) a substantial online collection of material drawn from W&L collections.
The prototype developed during the summer will be tested at W&L during the academic year 2003-2004, and the results of use will inform the development of an ACS-wide implementation in the subsequent year. The project draws upon faculty, library and computing expertise (Holt Merchant as content expert and alpha tester, Vaughan Stanley and Lisa McCown as content experts, Hugh Blackmer as project designer and GIS coordinator, Skip Williams as database expert, and Peter Jetton as consultant on Web design and implementation).
Student participants will learn practical uses of software packages and have a unique opportunity to participate in a cross-disciplinary project which pioneers the integration of GIS (ESRI's ArcGIS and ArcIMS) and database tools (Microsoft's .Net suite) and builds a unique resource.
Ben Hicks is an advanced student in History, and will work under the supervision of Holt Merchant and Vaughan Stanley to adapt materials from course syllabi, select illustrative content from W&L collections, digitize resources and enter material into the database, and choose and link remote resources. The project is an oportunity for him to engage with a broad range of library resources and digital technologies.Jitendra Shrestha's background in Computer Science equips him to learn the .Net software environment and adapt existing Pirarucu digital library structures, integrate the database with ArcIMS functionality, and build the containers and the conduits to allow users to manage the Digital South database. This experience will broaden his practical skills in software development and project management.
Schedule: in the first week, Hicks will work with Merchant and Stanley to identify a broad range of materials to be included in the digital library; in weeks 2-5 (during Stanley's absence on vacation) Hicks will digitize materials and create basic metadata for all items; in weeks 6-8 Hicks will complete documentation and assist in the testing of the user interfaces for submission and query. In the first three weeks, Shrestha will work with Williams and Blackmer to adapt the Pirarucu database and construct the user interface for input into the database; in weeks 4-6 Shrestha will work with ArcGIS and ArcIMS to build the geographic user interface; weeks 7-8 will be devoted to debugging and documentation.
ACS has provided generous support to the Digital South project (see home.wlu.edu/~blackmerh/acsgis/digisouth.html for a current summary); an application to NSF under the Digital Libraries program is currently in the developmental stages, and Blackmer is exploring NITLE support as well.