The eWilliamsburg Project
Williamsburg's restoration to its eighteenth-century appearance is based on
exhaustive documentary and field work by several generations of scholars.
Over the years, the Foundation's architectural specialists, archaeologists,
and historians have examined the town lot by lot and have produced volumes
of reports to document their work. Today, as ongoing research work on the
buildings and their surroundings continues, the archive of documentary reports
grows larger. The problem we face is how best to manage this archive so that
it can be preserved and accessed by researchers today and in the future.
Colonial Williamsburg already has excellent systems for creating and maintaining
the formal catalog descriptions for our many physical collections. But like
many large organizations, we face challenges in managing the body of associated
materials related to our buildings and artifacts. Over the years, the Foundation's
library has collected and bound some of the reports produced by the research
departments. However, much information we knew remained out of view, stored
in file boxes or file cabinets, not cataloged, and sometimes forgotten. To
add to the problem we had to deal with the body of electronic material created
over the past two decades created in myriad formats and stored on various
hard drives and floppy disks. Our files were in every format from early versions
of WordPerfect to recently created Adobe PDF. In 1998 we began converting
some text files to XML for the purpose of delivering them through our digital
library and maintaining them long-term in a format best suited to preservation
of digital texts.
In 2003 we began a three-year project to improve our management of these materials
and create a better means of accessing them. We had several goals in mind.
First, we wanted to formalize our processes for handling the kinds of materials
that researchers create, particularly documentary field reports. Because so
much material remained dispersed in the offices and the hard drives of researchers
throughout the Foundation, it was important for us to develop procedures for
moving material into the library. Second, we wanted to convert this material--as
well as a large body of older documents--to XML using a standard document
type definition created by the Text Encoding Initiative, a set of tagging
protocols produced and maintained by a consortium of leading universities.
Tagging the files in XML allowed us to create structured documents that were
independent of proprietary software used to create them initially and offered
us flexibility in delivering the material to the web. Finally, we wanted to
create a browser-based map tool to offer access to this digital library material.
Ultimately, we produced two tools. The first is a specialized program for
Colonial Williamsburg's research departments built using geographic information
systems (GIS) technology. GIS provides a way to link information to spaces
on maps. We created a system that identified the specific area that a researcher
was interested in, whether it was a lot, house, or a neighborhood. We then
linked the project report to that location on a digital map of the town. A
researcher can click on any location on this map and retrieve all reports
written about that area. The reports, stored on the server as XML files, are
transformed through a stylesheet and delivered to the screen. Researchers
can also perform geographic queries, selecting specific buildings or lots
and browsing through material related to those spaces in the database. This
program has been developed using ESRI Inc.'s suite of GIS software, specifically
ArcInfo, ArcSDE, and ArcIMS.
The version of eWilliamsburg presented here is a lighter version of the more
specialized tool used at Colonial Williamsburg. The same maps and library
of information are accessible, but the web version presents a more streamlined
user interface built using Adobe Flash® technology and lacking
the full search capability of the original program. Nevertheless, this web-based
version of eWilliamsburg allows researchers to access the much of the same
information available to our staff by clicking on site markers on a map of
the town.
Credits and Acknowledgments
The creation of eWilliamsburg was funded by grants from the National Endowment
for the Humanities. Previous work on this project was funded by the
L. J. and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation.
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