Experiencing the
Library of Congress
with the
Wayback Machine

I used the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to look at how the Library of Congress website (loc.gov) has changed over the years. I personally have used the site extensively over the past decade.

 

 To start my look at the Library of Congress I began with June 16, 1997 and as would have been expected the site was very minimalist with a few major categories with drop down menus to go deeper into the site. I next checked a year and half later December 12, 1998 and found the site exactly the same.

  Fast forward to July 6, 2000 and we find the Library of Congress in the middle of their bicentennial celebrating with a new look for the web. They have jazzed up the site by a large commemorative graphic in the center with additional graphics for the different categories surrounding it. The site might not be really any easier to use than the previous design but much more appealing to the eyes.

 

 The site layout had changed again by July 17, 2002 with the large center graphics becoming smaller and the site had taken on a boxy feel with categories listed below in box form. A check for two years later on July 24, 2004 found them retaining the site design.

 A new layout was found on November 1, 2007 retaining the boxy feel but more columns added. The categories had moved along the left hand side with the center of the site being used to highlight some of the most popular sections of the site and exhibits. This layout was also present on October 13, 2010.

 The current site has been redesigned to place all the main areas of focus in the center of the site with small thumbnail images. The sides and bottom on the site include links to additional areas of interest and changing exhibits. Overall all the designs have been easy to navigate and the major change has been to streamline the look of the site.

 

Digital History - What is it?

In beginning my fall course HIST 6330 History in the Digital Age at UNC Charlotte I find myself thinking back the fall of 1995 when I began working in the academic accounting department at NCSU. I knew almost nothing about computers and an hour after I arrived at the office a professor came with a floppy disk with notes on corrections that needed to be made to his book manuscript. The manuscript was in Word Perfect 5.0 a dos text program. I spent the first four hours until lunch trying to look like I knew what I was doing and during lunch I went to my wife’s office to get a 45 minute lesson in Word Perfect. Since that time I have become a big computer user spending time creating lots of my own digital records in the form of websites, emails, word documents, digital photographs and scans of photographs in vast numbers. I have found myself faced with the best methods of preserving these records and dealing with the loss of some due to accidents and equipment failure.

Digital Age Presents New Problems for Historians (http://www.technewsdaily.com/775-information-overload-digital-age-presents-new-problems-for-historians.html) gives insight into the mind blowing rate in which new electronic data is being created. The article also covers the problems with obtaining some electronic records because of the companies that hold the rights and the blocks they put in place in trying to obtain the records. The introduction and first chapter of Digital History they discusses the progression of the web and creation of websites. I remember well learning to use Mosaic and Gopher, and then when I got Netscape 3.0 Gold I thought nothing could touch me I was the king of the web. I was creating webpages and making my place in the cyber world. Looking page at those pages makes me laugh now. They next talk about some of the forerunners in archival websites such as the Library of Congress’s American Memory, UNC’s Documenting the American South, and University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities’s Valley of the Shadow. Everyone is jumping on the wagon to get primary sources online some with extensive forethought and planning while ours appear to fly by the seat of their pants. The progression through this class and the detailed review of sites (both good and bad) will help to build my knowledge and refine my design process.