Part 1 - The University of Southern Mississippi Civil Rights Archive

The University of Southern Mississippi's Civil Rights Archive (USMCRA) is a, in the words of the site itself, a 'digital archive' and aims to 'enhance access to primary source material, preserve original materials by creating digital surrogates, create learning opportunities for remote users, and create an infrastructure for a continuing digitization program'¹ .  How does it attempt to achieve this aim and how successfully does it achieve the aim?

How does the Archive attempt to enhance access to primary source material and how successful is it?

The USMCRA is an archive that one level appears to be aimed at serious historians and yet on another is aimed at the novice user who has an interest in the Civil Rights era.  There is little contextualisation of sources; sources are merely presented in a fashion that allows easy access and research if one has the background knowledge to be able to read the sources as sources from which to form a historical opinion from.  However, it attempts to cater to a wide range of worldwide users, as stated in the About section of the USMCRA.  The introduction says that 'USM Libraries has the opportunity to provide a worldwide audience of researchers and learners with a firsthand perspective on the civil rights movement that otherwise would be restricted to local users and only the most dedicated of historical researchers'². However, the relative paucity of contextualisation and links to outside sources, that will be discussed in the individual sections, shows the failure of the website creators to exploit the innate dynamic properties of hypertext.

The Archive enhances access in the online environment to a degree by providing primary sources with easily clickable links.  On the home page are provided links to the material under the headings Oral Histories, Manuscripts and Photographs.  The links in the Oral Histories lead to a set of alphabetically arranged set of oral histories by various people involved with the Civil Rights movement.  The nature of the internet allows full transcripts to be written in easy-to-read format, including relatively comprehensive biographies, as well as a listing of topics discussed.  However, taking the first oral history as an example, the interview with Dr. Sandra Adickes, the transcript contains no links to outside sources.  It is simply her words and the interviewer's comments and questions placed on the World Wide Web verbatim.  This does not make full use of hypertext as a medium for historical research.  The only contextualisation that occurs is at the top of the article, with links to the USM's Centre for Oral History and Cultural Heritage.  These links lead to an information page on the Oral History Centre.  However, the links to the Centre do not enhance the Oral History section of the Civil Rights Archive in a way that it is useful.

Of more use is a small number of audio-enhanced interviews.  These are provided by links within the interviews itself.  The link to the Audio file is at the top of the page, however, the part of the transcript that are available in audio are highlighted in yellow within the transcripts themselves.  The short snippet of audio is useful in adding an extra dimension to the written word, the actual voice of the person being interviewed is not possible in a paper archive.  Granted that the original tapes could be used, perhaps it is not such a novel thing having audio sources online, but having them within easy access with a hypertext link on the same page as the interview gives historians a much greater contextual understanding of the biases within the oral history interview.

The Manuscripts section of the Archive is much narrower in scope for historians, for the collection of material is far smaller due to the nature of the material.  Manuscripts help historians to find out personal perspectives.  Presented as hypertext, it is difficult to see much difference except accessibility issues.  The manuscripts are easier to access online but as a new means of researching history, it does not do much new.  The USMCRA Manuscripts section is limited in what it can scan and present.  Indeed, material has to be donated by people involved.  In the John and Nancy Ellin collection, the manuscripts are limited to what they have provided.  The online archive is literally an online transferral, with no attempt to make full use of hypertext.  The manuscripts are scanned in; the transferral does not make full use of hypertext as a means of creating a more dynamic presentation on the web.  Although archives by their very nature are probably not the best candidates for dynamic historical interpretations, it would seem that judging by the Manuscripts section of the USMCRA, it would seem that historians do not gain much, if anything, new from having the material on the World Wide Web as hypertext, as opposed to paper.

The Photographs section of the Archive provides a dilemma for historians.  One of the greatest avenues for ease of historical research and presentation, that of the visual medium, is last on the agenda of the USMCRA.  While there are no actual photographs, there are descriptions of the photographs present, and links to outside publications, for example, 'Faces of Freedom Summer', a book of photographs that have been published by the University of Alabama Press.  This gives the historian researching the Civil Rights era in Mississippi a book to refer to for photographs, but one has to question the website itself.  The website currently does not have enough material to constitute a fully integrated researchable site.  Although it has a huge range of oral histories, and this undoubtedly is its focus at the present time, the transferral of oral history transcripts into a very simple hypertextual format does not constitute an entirely new way of researching history.  Some outside links are made but of the site itself, it is limited, as are all archives to an extent, in the way it uses hypertext to help historians research historical eras and historical issues.

^{1 The University of Southern Mississippi Civil Rights Archive, viewed on 15 June 2002.
2 Ibid.}
 
 
 

Introduction - An overview of what is to be done in this analysis
Part 2 - An analysis of the University of North Carolina's Documenting the South Archive
Part 3 - How do the archives as a whole represent new ways of researching and presenting history?
Part 4- Conclusion