Part 3 - How do the Archives as a whole represent new ways of researching and presenting history?
 

The Two Archive Sites Compared and Contrasted in their treatment of Hypertext

The two Archive sites have differing levels of treating the processes of historical research.  Both share a propensity to treat the internet and the hypertext format as simply a tool for digital transferral to gather up as wide an audience as possible.  However, both sites do not exploit the dynamic nature of hypertext in order to research history.

The issue of search engines is an important one in that the internet's greatest feature is the ability to search for material very quickly.  Michael O'Malley and Roy Rosenzweig argue that when analysing websites, in particular archive sites, full text searches create opportunities to research, not only quantitatively better, but also qualitatively due to the possibility of making 'new intellectual connections between the past and the present and among disparate bodies of material'¹.  The search engine of the Documenting the South Archive links to an internal search, which is powered by Google.  The search engine allows searching for images and thus takes the ability of the internet and innate properties of hypertext into a more historically useful setting.

The search function on the University of Southern Mississippi Civil Rights Archive site links to a library search, which is comprehensive and has two functions, one of which deals with text and the other with images.  These two functions are no different to a library catalogue and are not really a new way of researching history.  The search functions do not themselves lead to a new way of researching history apart from the obvious one of a smoother research process.

In both archives, having the medium of hypertext leads to a new audience for the archives.  The accessibility of the information via the means of the internet and relatively non-threatening medium of text on a screen means that not only serious historians can access and study the material that has been faithfully reproduced by the archivists at both universities.  This has an important impact on the presenting of history because non-professional historians now have the resources to create histories based on legitimate historical sources and are not limited to publishing only via the publishing houses based in major academic institutions.  This has ramifications for the way history is presented; the potential for scholarly traditions to be ignored perhaps weakens the authorial presence of academic institutions.

However, transferring the archive from a paper to an electronic archive does no more than produce a more tightly integrated archive that is not limited by storage space or the condition of the paper sources.  Hypertextual archives give a greater audience and therefore potentially greater variety of historical opinion thorugh the ever-widening contextualisation of the sources that are being scanned and placed on the internet more frequently and in greater quantities.

^{1 Michael O'Malley and Roy Rosenzewig, 'Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web', Journal of American History, 84, 1, June 1997, viewed on 16 June 2002.}
 

 Introduction - An overview of what is to be done in this analysis
Part 1 - An analysis of the University of Southern Mississippi's Civil Rights Archive
Part 2 - An analysis of the University of North Carolina's Documenting the South Archive
Part 4- Conclusion