[Regia-NA] Digital History

[Martin Field]

This general news item was posted on another forum - I thought it might be
of interest to the IT's out there .....

Digital History:  A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past
on the Web_ by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig will be published in
hardcover by the University of Pennsylvania Press in November for  $28.95
but is available free on the web at http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/  It
is a production of George Mason University's Center for History and New
Media (CHNM), which is led by the authors.

TOC:

Introduction

Exploring the History Web
    * Introduction
    * When the Web was Young
    * Mapping History on the Web
    * Archival Websites
    * Exhibits, Films, Scholarship, and Essays
    * Teaching and Learning
    * Discussion and Organizational Sites

Getting Started
    * Introduction
    * The Web, Websites, and Web Pages
    * Thinking About Your Website's Genre and Features
    * Text and Images
    * Multimedia
    * Databases and XML
    * Serving Your Website
    * Naming Your Site and Presenting It to the World
    * Funding

Becoming Digital
    * Introduction
    * Why Digitize the Past? Costs and Benefits
    * Digitizing Text: What Do You Want to Provide?
    * To Mark Up, Or Not To Mark Up
    * How to Make Text Digital: Scanning, OCR, and Typing
    * Digital Images
    * Audio and Moving Images
    * Who Does the Digitizing? Should You Do It Yourself?

Designing for the History Web
    * Introduction
    * General Principles of Design
    * Text
    * Images, Color, and Multimedia
    * Putting It All Together
    * Site Structure and Good URLs
    * Accessibility

Building an Audience
    * Introduction
    * Connecting with a Community
    * Mass Marketing, Online and Off
    * Encouraging Return Traffic
    * Tracking and Assessing Your Audience

Collecting History Online
    * Introduction
    * Why Collect History Online?
    * Good Candidates for Online Collecting-and Poor Ones
    * Tools for the Online Collector
    * Attracting Contributors to Your Site
    * Encouraging Contributions and Building Trust
    * Qualitative Concerns
    * Case Study: September 11, 2001

Owning the Past?
    * Introduction
    * A Brief History of Copyright
    * Copyright and the Online Historian: Is the Web Different?
    * Protecting Your Intellectual Property
    * Sharing the Property of Others: Copyright and the Public Domain
    * Fair Use
    * Images, Music, and Movies
    * Will You Get Sued?

Preserving Digital History
    * Introduction
    * The Fragility of Digital Materials
    * What to Preserve?
    * Documentation
    * Technical Considerations
    * Backing Up
    * The Long-Term Fate of Your Site
    * The Future of Our Digital Past

Final Thoughts

Appendix
    * Introduction
    * Databases
    * Scripting Languages
    * XML

Acknowledgments

Links

Cheers
Martin F