reaction to reading 21/10/13

The works that I was charged to read this week were three chapters from Roy Rosenzweig's book Digital History and from an article Shelia A. Brennan and T. Mills Kelly entitled ''Why Collecting History Online is Web 1.5.''  A third work was assigned, but it could not be found on the website and was left off.  The textbook's three chapters went into detail about how to build an audience for one's history website, tips and steps for collecting history online and posing the question of who owns said history.  Rosenzweig puts forth detailed steps and suggestions for each chapter, such as having a guestbook or contact us link on a website to help build an audience, a very helpful table of published and unpublished works in the United States and when their copyrights take effect and the use of listserv and email to collect data.  The table for copyrights is especially useful in that it has the ability to stop plagiarism before it starts and to stop lawsuits as well.  Even if one asks permission legally, there will always be someone who does not want their work or a timeless piece displayed on the world-wide Web.  Email is still useful because so many people still heavily rely on it and trust it.  The building of an audience is important.  With no one to lecture to, the lecture is quite useless, so building and keeping an audience is important.  The chapters in this book were helpful and detailed; they were detailed enough to prompt readers to look up certain terms that they do not understand.

The second work is about collecting history and building a website and the lessons learned by the author of the article.  The site was an archive containing blogs, stories and media from Hurricane Katrina.  The site did not attract the 10s of 1000s that the creators hoped for, though.  The main problem with the site that was created was that it was not user-friendly.  People had to upload photos one at a time when Flickr was available and one could upload many at once.  Also, bloggers sometimes gave permission to upload their blogs and the site would only allow one blog at a time.  This decreased the amount of people coming on the site.  This is true of any site; it must be user-friendly and use the same technology as the other sharing sites, something that is mentioned in the site's section ''Lessons Learned.''

Both of these works stress the importance of planning when creating a website for history and by doing so, one can avoid the pitfalls that the Katrina Archive faced.