Reflections & News About Working With the Past
The Carroll County Public Library has digitized its collection of the Carroll County Times. This online, text searchable resource spans the years 1933 to 1999. The old, original microfilm was professionally scanned and software was used to allow for easy text-based searching of the collections. This valuable addition of records for researchers joins a growing body of material around Maryland.
The April issue of Maryland Life has a piece I wrote called “Bicentennial of a Blindsiding: When the Brits Stormed Havre de Grace.” It’s about the devastating attack that took place there during the War of 1812, and the City’s plans for the 200th anniversary observance. The attractively situated community at the top of the Chesapeake has been working on this celebration for a couple of years now and they are anticipating 20,000 visitors on the first weekend in May.
I have had an interesting experience working on a digital humanities initiative, a crowdsourcing project with the University of Delaware Museum Studies Program and History Media Center. It involves a Civil War chaplain’s diary that has been gathering dust for 150-years and was periodically brought out for some research.
The University digitized the diary and students, faculty and staff are pouring over fading pages from another age, scrutinizing those aging entries line by line. With students working from many remote locations since the scans are on the Net they review the hand written words and transcribe the entries. The emerging scholars then submit their contributions which are reviewed and put up on line. Eventually, the entire diary will be available for anyone to access and read and that will broaden engagement, investigation, and research with this valuable source.
It’s a collaboration with the University of Delaware that I hope to strengthen because it makes largely unused cultural heritage resources available to a wider audience. The University’s focus is in the area of the digital humanities, which allows us to take largely un-accessed collections and get the material out to a broader audience for study. It is also a preservation method in that it reduces the handling and makes interpretation much easier.
It has been fascinating to watch this new media project unfold.
On the day the Digital Public Library of America opened its virtual doors to the public, I was in Havre de Grace to do a talk with author Heidi Glatfelter on “Researching and Writing about the War of 1812.” We took a team approach to the program as I focused on new methods of doing digital research, while Heidi discussed how she accumulated information to produce her just released title, “Havre de Grace in the War of 1812: Fire on the Chesapeake.” We both drew on our experience in working as consultants on the 1812 Bicentennial celebration that is taking place this spring in the beautiful community at the top of the Chesapeake. Heidi was the grant administrator and I served as a consulting public historian.
Online research has made a broader universe of information easily available to anyone studying the past. So for this community-oriented audience I talked about some of the basic virtual repositories such as the Internet Archive, the American Memory and Chronicling America collections at the Library of Congress, and Project Gutenberg. As old maps are of interest, we took some time to examine some of the portals for cartography such as Old Maps Online. Of course, in the age when we all Google our information, we took a little deeper look at some of the tools in that massive index, such as Google scholar and newspaper archive. These were free resources, but we also talked about the commercial content providers.
Once Heidi finished talking about how she accumulated her body of data and developed the narrative for the enjoyable and informative work, we turned to the audience for questions. They were interested in discussing how to use the online tools and other topics such as derivative digital copyrights.
Here is a link to online research resources you may find helpful.
