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Missouri Humanities Council e-News | July 2009 | View Online | ||||||||||
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Southwest Missouri Civil War Archives On-lineBy Michael Bouman
The answer lay in the ability to create a "virtual reading room" offering access to a much wider range of sources than anyone could find in a single library or museum. The primary sources for understanding the impact of a war are widely scattered. The stories of everyday people are left to us in letters, diaries, and photographs. Many priceless items are in the hands of descendents of the people who wrote them. Other materials belong to private collectors. Still others are distributed across a vast network of libraries and museums. "Community & Conflict" represented a new direction for the State Library's "Missouri Digital Heritage" project. Rather than scan a single collection, this project began with almost no collection to speak of. The sources had to be found across a wide geographic area. Then they had to be scanned, transcribed, and indexed. You can imagine how something so vast in conception could bog down. To help manage the search for sources, the project team first created a set of themes for the project. Here are four of the twelve themes:
In deciding whether to scan and transcribe a source document, the project team would first see if it pertained to any of the twelve themes, and if it did so in a useful way. The capacity to index source materials made it possible to make the same letter or diary entry available within any theme that it covered. Thus, a letter about herbal remedies used by refugees from a farmstead could be available to people looking at any of three different themes. What if you're interested in materials related to Cedar County, Missouri? The Virtual Reading Room provides a portal to every county in the region surveyed. If you click on "Cedar County," you'll find that you can peruse the Order Book of the Enrolled Missouri Militia, 4th Missouri District. This resource is actually stored at the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection in Columbia, but you don't have to go there to see it. You can see it in this Virtual Reading Room. You may be interested, instead, in how one of the Civil War battles affected the population. When you look into the "Battles" section, you will learn that Carthage, Missouri was the scene of a battle in 1861. There's a full page of historical context for you before you click to examine the source documents that deal with that battle. The web site is gorgeous, too. This is part of the wedding of the humanities and the arts. It's also part of the cooperating among historians, librarians, and techies. More and more, the work of "public humanities" is going to be wonderful because of the way people collaborate. There would also be awards for "local" institutions that think beyond their boundaries. Isn't it wonderful that the Springfield-Greene County Library thought far outside its own jurisdiction in order to render this high level of service? [Return to Passages Front Page] Also in This Issue:
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 Published monthly by the Missouri Humanities Council, a tax-exempt, non-profit organization
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"Community & Conflict: The Impact of the Civil War in the Ozarks" is a brilliant combination of smart thinking and smart technology. At the center of the project is this question: How can we help the public understand the everyday person's experience of this war in our region of the United States?