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American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 14.1 (2004) 143-150



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The Digital Archives

Cynthia Patterson

Digital dissertations found a place in the print and electronic news recently. At one institution, university officials argued that the digital dissertations saved valuable library shelf space for books, while students protested that forcing them to "publish" dissertations to the wider audience theoretically knocking on the university's electronic door, would undercut their attempts to turn such digital dissertations into book deals. We all know the dangers inherent in the free-for-all, self-publish, self-promotional environment of the World Wide Web, and yet the Web also allows much greater access to archives, scholarly research, teaching resources, and academic communities than ever before possible.

This review essay of digital work likely to interest scholars of American periodicals is designed to supplement the rich resource section of links already housed on the web site of the Research Society of American Periodicals (RSAP) developed and maintained by Ellen Garvey at http://home.earthlink.net/%7Eellengarvey/index1.html. I purposely skip any sites already referenced on the RSAP web site, and focus on collections that have come online since that site was last updated. The Library of Congress American Memory collections; the Cornell/UMichigan Making of America collection; HarpWeek; Godey's Online—I presume these archival materials to be well-known and easily accessible for most scholars of American periodicals. In this essay I will focus on "new finds"—sites identified in response to calls posted to online discussion groups for Women's History, RSAP, the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW), and American Studies; and URLs I've collected over the years as I explored my own interest in digital scholarship.

In the interest of space, I will not review here every site I have bookmarked. Rather I have designed this review essay as a "sampler" [End Page 143] of the kinds of digital materials available to scholars of American periodicals. In addition to the sites linked to the RSAP web site, I would encourage scholars to explore the two other "meta sites" that I have found very useful in my own work: The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) site at George Mason University <http://chnm.gmu. edu/index1.html> and the History Matters site <http://historymatters.gmu.edu/>. The CHNM site features, under the "Resources" link from the home page, "A Guide to History Web Sites" covering more than 5000 history sites worldwide. This web site database is searchable and indexed. The History Matters site features a link to a collection of Web review essays and an annotated list of over 500 web sites <http://historymatters.gmu.edu/browse/wwwhistory/>. Users can search the annotated list of history sites by topic, time period, key word or type. The list of forty-three "topics" includes ten time periods, and categories such as "Popular Culture, Leisure, Arts" and "Women" (two of my personal favorites). Users can choose from eight "primary source" categories, including "advertising," "letters and diaries," and "photography" and can stipulate one or more resource "types": "text," "image," "audio," or "video."

With the proliferation of information available on the Web, it is useful to distinguish between sites that serve primarily as archives of primary source materials, sites that feature electronic essays or teaching modules, gateway sites (link-rich sites low on content), online journals, organization sites, or online communities. For a helpful discussion of these distinctions, see the "Guidelines on Reviewing Web sites for the Journal of American History," available at http://chnm.gmu.edu/jah/. For a sample JAH web site review of interest to American periodicals' scholars, see Kelly Schrum's review of Ad*Access <http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4906/>.

Increasingly, as individual scholars seek to publish their work on the Web, the lines between these categories tend to blur. For instance, "research essays" frequently contain condensed archival materials—sometimes text, sometimes images, often both. Likewise, teaching materials—such as online syllabi and assignments—often also include a small archives or excerpts...

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