Looking at Perspectives Online

This week I reviewed two articles from the May 2007 issue of PerspectivesOnline which is published by the American Historical Association.

Edward A. Riedinger in his article “Enhancing Internet Use for History byCategorizing Online Resources” talks about the importance online resources. He states that there are. Three types of resources essential for scholars are:

• periodical literature indexes, listing what has been published in a field or specialization;
• library catalogs, describing what an institution holds of what has been published and detailing bibliographic data on the holdings; and
• full-text retrieval databases of articles and books, often digitized facsimile versions of the texts.

He then talks about the differences in each area talking in depth about sources of information available online from synopses to full articles, journals and books. Never before has it been so easy to obtain information outside of the physical library.

In this article “Creating a Virtual Student Community at theUniversity of Maryland” Bud Burkhard talks about the concerns many have with so many internet classes. He stated that online class enrollment in history classes accounted for 85 percent of enrollments by 2005. With this large amount of online students it is very important to maintain contact with the students in an attempt to make them fill part of the department.

One thing there instituted was a secure online discussion site into which all students seeking a history major or minor are automatically enrolled and allowed for easy communication between faculty, current students and alumni. They also sought for online students to be involved with Phi Alpha Theta the history honor society, even to holding online inductions. He ends his article with something similar to what I have said about students and people in general that the main factor in a student’s success depends on them and how active they want to be in obtaining their goals.