Description: This color lettermark was created for Digital Frontiers.

Description: This presentation discusses digital archives and looks at the history community's presence in digital archives. The purpose of digitizing cultural heritage collections is often presented in terms of preservation or distribution. Concerns center around how to best ensure the sustainability of materials or how to enable user interactivity. However, especially within the field of history, there is a push to think in terms of how to create community through the narratives the authors produce. The authors orientation is shifting from author-centered to reader-centered, and how the authors construct knowledge is becoming increasingly social and democratic. This can be explained as part of a greater cultural shift where, "until recently, public memory was constructed and disseminated for the people but not by the people." This presentation explores such issues through the examination of three digital archives: 1) The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War site (http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/). 2) The Virtual Vietnam Archive (http://911digitalarchive.org). After a brief description of each project, a critique is provided covering the four aspects of: motives, preservation, interactivity and barriers. While all three digital archives place a focus on personal narratives and deal with the complexities of conflict intimately, none of the projects ...

Description: This presentation discusses the Handbook of Texas. A program of the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), the 'Handbook of Texas Online' is a multidisciplinary digital encyclopedia of Texas history, geography, and culture. It comprises more than 27,000 articles on people, places, events, historical themes, institutions, and a host of other topic categories. It began with TSHA Director Eugene C. Barker, who had proposed a biographical dictionary project in 1932. Historian Walter Prescott Webb became director in 1936 and enhanced Barker's idea to encompass "a combination dictionary, biography and encyclopedia." The first edition of the 'Handbook of Texas' appeared in 1952. A third volume supplement was published in 1977. Not long after the publication of the supplement, the board and staff undertook an even more ambitious idea, a new completely revised edition. In the July 1996 the 'New Handbook of Texas' was published in six volumes. Less than three years later, the Association officially released 'The Handbook of Texas Online' on February 15, 1999, offering it free to the public. Today 3 million individuals come to the TSHA website for a total of around 4 million visits and 10 million page views in the course of the year. The central challenge ...

Description: This presentation discusses the impact of digitizing resources. The Portal to Texas History℠ is a gateway to humanities collections within the digital library of the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries. The Portal provides access to more than 190,000 digital objects, comprising over 2.6 million image files. The range of primary source materials includes maps, books, manuscripts, newspapers, diaries, photographs, and letters from the unique collections of Texas libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, genealogical societies, and private families. The Portal was launched in 2003 with collections from five content partners and currently includes materials from more than 190 partners. While increasing numbers of partners and assets are signs that making digitized resources Web-acessible is a desirable thing, digital libraries are increasingly expected to identify the impacts that have resulted from digitizing assets. In 2012, UNT Libraries began to investigate the impact of digitizing assets on two of the Portal's key stakeholder groups: content partner and users. An environmental scan identified seven possible impact categories: cultural, economic, educational, environmental, operational, political, and social. These categories served as the framework for data collection activities, which included five key informant interviews with content providers and surveys of both content partners (N = 58) ...

Description: This response paper is for Dr. Jennifer Way's graduate art history seminar on 20th-21st century art. Students in Way's seminar attended 'Social Media and Digital Communities: A Roundtable Discussion,' a session featured at the Digital Frontiers 2012 conference. Way charged her students with writing a short paper to explore connections between the roundtable and their seminar studies. What follows is a short paper by graduate student, Ann Howington.