models to follow

For my future digital project, I would consider the following models:

Parallel Archive

A project developed by the Open Society Archives in Budapest, which according to the About section of the site, "is at once a personal scholarly workspace, a collaborative research environment, and a digital repository." The project started in 2008 and is still a beta version. As a matter of fact, the website is designed to be a gathering place of numerous documents hidden in the personal computers of the researchers or other professionals in the preservation and scholarship business. In order to gain access to the full functionality of the site, the visitor should register with the site. The site features two kinds of possibilities for the members to keep their collections: they can either place the documents in the public collection or they can keep them on 50 MB of a private collection for two years, after which if not deleted the private collections automatically turn into public documents. Any non-registered visitor to the site can browse through the narrow public collection. One of the positive aspect of the repository is the possibility to search through different collections of OCR-ed files. Among some weak features of the site, I would mention the limited number of documents available in English and the overwhelming dominance of documents in Hungarian, which as we know is not a easy language to speak or to learn. Another weakness of the website is their copyright policy. The contributors to the website cannot apply any type of Creative Commons licenses on their uploaded content, and instead all the documents are under the copyright laws. This also limits the possibility for contributors to make use of attribution as one of the main gains of the digital media.

The Valley of the Shadow

This is a well-known website, which represents a milestone in the first attempts to explore possibilities offered by the digital media in the research of the past. This web project started with the idea of Edward Ayers, a scholar from the University of Virginia, to write a book on the different experiences of the Civil War by the people of two communities from the US. In turn, this initiative has developed in a different direction, along with the new possibilities which the Web offers for the comparative study of two local communities. As the years passed, the once envisioned analogue, individualistic and static book has been transformed into a digital, collective and dynamic repository of numerous possibilities to research the history of the Civil War from different perspectives. The idea for the book came to Ayers in 1991, and the final version of the site has been released in 2009. So, it has been 18 years of experiments, but the work is not finished yet. Now, the library of the University of Virginia works on the preservation of the whole website in its digital collection. If the Parallel Archive provides some examples of preservation techniques, then the Valley of the Shadow is in line with my intention to shape a repository or, to what Roy Rosenzweig and Michael O'Malley refers to as "an invented archive," of two neighbor communities. Among the positive features are the ease of use and the clarity of the design, as well as the ability to capture a multiple audience for this site. In my view the main weakness of the website is the same concern with the copyright. All the content on the website is under the ordinary copyright law and does not allow for a diversification of the options provided by Creative Commons.