The University of Southern Mississippi's Civil Rights Archive and the University of North Carolina's Documenting the South Archive are two examples of electronic archives of primary sources, ranging from first-person narratives, to oral histories, photographs and audio sources.  The integration of these various sources has been made a fair bit simpler by the medium of hypertext, which the internet uses to transfer data.  It is hypertext that allows any integration to be made online in a relatively simple manner, and this is not possible using traditional paper sources.  However, since the possibilities of hypertext are so great, the Archive sites, due to their very nature, have not yet fully grasped the possibilities of extending the Archive and linking with other Archives of similar purpose and subject.  Part of the reason may have something to do with the fact that in these two examples, each academic institution does not affiliate itself with any others.

Although electronic archives have much to offer given the almost unlimited capacity they offer, as a form of presenting historical information, hypertext is not being exploited as well as it could be.  Part of it is to do with its relative newness but also because practical hypertext lends itself to certain limiting factors, factors that have been ignored in a theoretical treatment of hypertext.

Overall, the two sites have attempted to use hypertext in a way that is novel, but the treatment of material is only a small advancement on what paper texts have traditionally done, with a slightly smoother linkage between different kinds of primary sources being the only major improvement.
 
 

Introduction - An overview of what is to be done in this analysis
Part 1 - An analysis of the University of Southern Mississippi Civil Rights Archive
Part 2 - An analysis of the Documenting the South Archive
Part 3 - How do the archives as a whole represent new ways of researching and presenting history?