Professor launches archives Web site

Hoping to shed light on the Civil War era, History Professor Robert Engs recently created an archives Web site offering access to primary documents in their original form.

Using a grant from the University, Engs worked with the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image, work-study students and various members of the History Department to scan approximately 225 documents into Penn's system to be displayed on the Web site.

Engs was inspired after working with the local independent Library Company on an exhibition of their historical documents in 2000.

"The goal is to introduce students to primary materials as they actually look. What makes our site somewhat different is that rather than transcripts of original documents, these are the actual documents as they looked when they were published," he said.

"It struck me that these were the kinds of things that students, ... as well as secondary teachers and college teachers, might like to have greater access to because most of these documents are relatively rare," he said. "There are only three or four places, perhaps in the country, where you could actually see them."

The development of the archives Web site has been evolving over the past three years but it only became accessible to the public last month.

"The origins of the Web site go back to 2000, when the Library Company in Philadelphia developed an exhibition in commemoration of the first Republican Convention that met in Philadelphia in 1856."

Michael Ryan and a team at SCETI worked with Engs to organize the collection of documents.

"We now have a very flexible Web site that we can add to [and] ... modify," Ryan said.

The documents that are featured on the Web site were written mainly during the period from the 1850s to the end of Reconstruction in 1876.

"Our idea was to take some of the most important and the most manageable [documents] that help explain why the country came apart, what happened during the Civil War, what happened during Reconstruction. The documents are primarily political and social history," Engs said, adding that within the documents on the Web site, "there is a lot of emphasis on what happens to women and to African Americans."

Engs felt the Web site would be useful because it offers accurate historical information.

"There is a lot of misinformation on the Internet, and it's hard for a student [who is] navigating it to know which things are reliable and which things aren't," Engs said, adding that he and his team made the Web site as user-friendly as possible.

"I like to joke that students at Penn are very hard-working, but some of them would rather do their research at 3 o'clock in the morning in their bedroom slippers than during the day, and this allows them to do that," he added.

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