Interestingly, digital mapping is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: the process of digitizing and archiving analog navigational texts.  Perhaps the most pleasurable site is the archive devoted to the Goody Parsons Witchcraft case, which displays not only old maps but also gives viewers the chance to examine present-day pictures of select locations.  For the wonky historical tourist, there is no more licit thrill than standing at a place of historical significance (marked or unmarked) and knowing that a story happened here.  Conveniently, the map of Northampton, for example, gives the reader the present day street names in instances where the names have since changed, so the local user can use both street addresses and landmarks to locate historical sites.

The Goody Parsons archive features a glossary and plenty of context to draw the reader in.  Aesthetically, the site is simple, meaning it is (con) plain, except for the recreated texts and (pro) simple to navigate.  Sometimes it’s nice to get lost in a deluge of content, but for the tourist or local armchair historian who just wants to ready his or her digital camera and go, this site is a great directory to a dark and weirdly fascinating period in New England’s history.

The New York Timesutilizes the voyeuristicintrigue of GeoEye to bring to its readers a greater understanding of the devastation a powerful earthquake wrought on Haiti last January.  While certain landmarks are contextualized through explanitory captions, the site mostly serves to give the reader a sense of geography and a better grasp on the the widespread destruction and its consequences.  For example, it is impossible not to nervously observe just how sparsely located the rescue sites are for such a densely populated area.  By carefully navigating the map, the reader is left with an unshakable concern about the chaos the area must have plunged into after sites of religious, governmental, and civil authority in an already politically unstable location collapsed. 

Using the sleek, downright pretty Dave Rumsey map collection as an example, a YouTube tutorial gives historians and researchers a way to utilize Google Earth’s and Google Map’s technologies.  Complete with visual assistance, the video offers a step-by-step method of repurposing maps to offer Web readers a more interactive experience.  (Incidently, this video is a great example of what a powerful educational tool YouTube could be.  The viewer can pause and complete the last recommended step before moving onto the next one.  It’s certainly more helpful than trying to interpret recreations of  computer screens imaged onto paper pages and approximating their meaning.)

Again, digital mapping appeals to that part of our brains the likes narratives and empowers readers to better understand their historical surroundings.  Instead of vaguely describing what happened here, digital mapping allows reader to go there and encounter a more visceral experience with a historical account.

The narratives that online museums can put forth have much more potential flexibility than the exhibits housed in traditional museums, and while online exhibits can never replace the aesthetic experience of standing in front of an actual historical artifact, they can offer exciting ways of understanding such an artifact’s historical significance.  As Steve Dietz illustrates through several fascinating examples, the Web enables historians to provide an degree of interactivity and an volume of information that was previously impossible.  The ways in which narratives are constructed (via hypertext, more comprehensive databases, wider accessibility, et cetera) allow audiences to tailor their experiences while still empowering archivists and historians to construct possible experiences and moderate the information available to their patrons.  Perhaps the most powerful example Dietz offers is also the most innovative: RalphAppelbaum discerningly evaluatedpedagogical practices as well “key architecturaland environmental metaphors… so that space traditionally left neutrual is given a voice” when constructing the United States Holocause Memorial Musuem and the American Museum of Natural History.  The site is carefully constructed with not only a sense of narratology, but also an understanding of an individual’s attention span ability to interact with large amounts of data.

I looked at the History Channel’s seemingly omniscient Web site.  Since we have all heard a great deal about the Supreme Court over the last few days, I decided to see what I could find about the Court’s history on its Web site.  Type “Supreme Court” into the site’s search engine and History Channel directs you to a full three pages with Britannica-approved information about the Court’s history, including landmark cases.  The final page is a complete list of every Supreme Court Justice in the nation’s history, replete with their dates of service.  (Out of personal curiosity, I would have loved a correlative list of the presidents who nominated them, but I suppose it is a simple enough matter to look cross-reference their first year of service with whichever president was serving at the time.)

The History Channel is a Bermuda Triangle of a site… in a good way!  Each page includes links to relevant pages, allowing the user to examine details of each page more closely.  Under “Recommended Articles” are “Women Who Fought for the Vote” and “Dred Scot Case.”  Among the several entries listed under “More to Explore” is “Voting Rights Act” and “Fifteenth Amendment.”  There are also links to audio recordings and photo galleries, in which Howard Taft is most prominently featured because of his resume-busting status as former president and former Chief Supreme Court Justice.

While nowhere near as additively interactive, the History Channel’s easily-navigable site is less dazzling than, say, HistoryWired, but for the later, a casual browser had better read the instructions.  The home page is where all the fun is, but it’s hard to know what you’re doing until you read the “About” section, where the site adminstrator(s) explain, “Each ‘square’ on the map face represents an object, and the relative size of the square reflects the ratings given to objects by previous visitors to the site.”  It’s to online guidebooks what trending topics are to Twitter.  While researchers may find little immediate value in figuring out what everyone else is looking at, there is some virtue in having a pulse on the nation’s curiosity’s.  After arriving at a better understanding of what HistoryWired, you know, was, it was a pleasure to take a closer look at little secular totems like the original Woodstock promotional posters and Duke Ellington’s manuscripts.  In a wonderful turn, the site’s unique navigational device divides its popularity-based rhombuses into categories, such as art, military, people, or politics, to name a few.

While HistoryWired has a more exciting interface and makes the best use of a medium as conducive to interactivity as the Web, additional research would be necessary for any historian trying to come to a more complete understanding of a subject’s significance.  With so much of history in the details, it’s easy to forget the importance of a good overview.  While online museums must distinguish themselves from more generic endeavors  in order to truly standout enough to both engage and educate their readers, historians should be charitable enough to provide some context for their studies.

While compiling research for her historiographic metafiction novel Alias Grace, acclaimed author and Victorian scholar Margaret Atwood wrote, “The past is made of paper; sometimes, now, it’s made of microfilm and CD-ROMs, but ultimately they, too, are made of paper.  Sometimes there’s a building or a picture or a grave, but mostly it’s paper.  Sometimes there’s care of; archivists and librarians are the guardian angels of paper: without them there would be a lot less of the past than there is, and I and many other writers own them a huge debt of thanks.”  The mention of CD-ROMs dates her essay, but the basic claim remains true. 

Patrick Leary strikes a refreshing balance between the digital evangelists and the bibliographic purist who just can’t seem to tear themselves away from paperbacks and card catalogs.  Part of digital research is knowing when to use digital archives and when to forego electronic resources and conduct research the old-fashioned way (i.e., methods that researchers used in the mid-90s).  In a perfect world, in which I guess writers would utilize a perfect method of research, writers could not only make distinctions between when to go digital and when to leave the computer in sleep mode but also synthesize their abilities to parse through digital archives with their training in more traditional modes of research.

Cohen and Rosenzweig point out that teachers and professors must equip students with the tools to distinguish what information on the Internet is useful and, of course, accurate as well as giving students a methodology for exploring the Web for educational purposes.  Of course, the Web will have to be incorporated into pedagogical programs, just a electronic calculators have been used in classrooms for years.  Aside from an introduction to rudimentary search tools (which students more than master in their free time), schools have to teach students some tools for discernment as well as access.  It actually might be better to students to use the Internet to search for the answers on an exam.  (The subject of standardized testing is a muddy and inevitably political discussion, so it is difficult to discuss the Internet’s role in such tests without becoming entrenched in more partisan discussions.)  Names and dates only stay with a student for so long.  Learning how to learn is just as important to the education experience.

Interestingly, the Internet can be an invaluable tool for grappling with public documents, so it might be useful in teaching the necessities of citizenry to students.  For example, a classroom, equipped with the proper tools for research, might provide a kind of support network for students as they wrestle with difficult documents such as Supreme Court briefs or tax laws.  So much of the public debate of such documents has little to do with the primary sources.

It is hard to imagine an archivist’s nightmare more disheartening than the story of the Ivar Aasen Centre of Language and Culture in Norway, in which a vast electronic database was rendered inaccessible after its sole administrator, the only person who knew the site’s two security passwords, passed away.  (Amusingly, in the kind of twist one would have to flip through a whole John Grisham novel to find, one password was the late administrator’s name spelled backwards while the other was simply the proper spelling of his surname.)  If there is a lesson to learn, it’s this: Even the most meticulously assembled digital history page is essentially useless unless it also functions to preserve the information it collects and the site itself remains up and running. 

The way digitized information can act as something of a back-up is one of the many benefits of digitization.  From first editions to historic photographs to iconic film, art can be preserved as a digital image.  But what happens when thedigital image is lost?  Of course, the Internet is a powerful tool of replication.  (Just ask any copyright lawyer.)  Preservation is not the biggest practical consequence of supremely frustrating mishaps like the one the befell the Aasen Centre of Language.  Most likely, the information therein existed in some other form elsewhere.  Digital museums differ from their brick-and-mortar counterparts; instead of preserving original works, they preserve an organized method of searching through vast amounts of information.  Sure, the historians in Norway probably could have recreated the computerized archive, but any scholor would shutter at the utterly dispiriting prospect of redoing years of research and work.

As Cohen and Rosenzweig point out, “The fundamental rule of storage is that you should have copies, or ‘back-ups,’ of the files and data that make up your Web site.”  By now, most music lovers have their entire CD collections stored on their hard drives so they can transfer audio files to portable listening devices.  But what happens when that hard drive is compromised?  Anyone who’s had to upgrade from eight-track to cassette to compact disc will attest: history judges the value of analog technology, in part, by how easily technocrats can use those technologies to organize their content into digital information.  It seems not only reckless but arrogant to assume that our technologies, based on XML codes and JPEGs.  The authors of Digital Historyforesee this problem and note the need to, for example, convert certain codes like Unicode and ASCII to more “complex” and presumably durable codes such as Rich Text Format.

Of course, while looking through archives like the Hurricane Katrina Digital Memory Bank, one cannot help but wonder whether the Internet’s ample powers of recreation can work against the digital historian.  Say a donor wishes to remove his or her content from the site.  According to the archive’s stated guidelines, the site administrators must comply.  However, it would be a simple enough matter for another view to copy the content and distribute it independently.  Something this troublesome would become deeply unfortunate given the sensitive nature of the site’s content.  Conflicts like these dredge up seemingly old questions about ownership and free use.  However, the historian is the stewart of the material, so the historian can (at least in theory) be the final word on whether or not the content survives to another incarnation whenever the historian upgrades the site to more adaptable software. 

Preservationist might feel tempted to get complacent, but digital archives have to not only be organized and resilient enough to preserve the information historians collect, but they must also be adaptable enough to withstand multiple upgrades and whatever overhauls are necessary as software technologies evolve.

Digital historians are plagued with questions about access, but so is everyone who wants to utilize the Web to distribute or locate information.  Comparatively easy access is the great draw of online research, but when it comes to the Web, users and programmers often make up ethical and legal guidelines as they go.  First comes the technology; then come the rules.  What happens when some users mindlessly consume intellectual property as free content?

Cohen and Rosenzweig detail the history of copyright laws in the United States.  Anyone who’s ever read Al Gore’s The Assault on Reasonmight like to embrace the former vice president’s idealization of the Internet as a dialogic and pedagogical tool.  The Web has the potential to truly democratize political discourse by empowering users and readers instead of waiting for citizens to parse through whatever information is circulating through more prominent media outlets.  However, as anyone who has ever generated content for the Web can attest, this is not simply a conflict between those who advocate access and those who want to privatize content, although the accounts Cohen and Rosenzweig offer of scholars defending themselves against distinctly commercial entities might lead one to believe it is.  Digitizing historically useful information is often expensive work.  (The tools  historians use to create digital archives cost serious capital.)  If an author or an archivist’s work is reproduced for free without attribution or expense, historians might even be dissuaded from posting their valuable work online.

Expressed in Article 1, Section 8, the right of an author or artist to own their intellectual property is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.  Of course, like so many of the presumably sacrasact rights in the nation’s founding document, this clause offers few specifics.  Courts have been arguing for years about when a text, an image, or a piece of music should shift from private ownership to public domain.  Recounted how the Rural Telephone Company went so far as sue in an attempt to protect information in the white pages, Cohen and Rosenzweig write, “[P]reviously the courts had held that the ‘sweat of the brow’ invested in… [written] compilations made them eligible for copyright protection even though the contents were factual and organized in an obvious way and copyright doesn’t protect facts” (194).  This precedent allows digital historians the opportunity to participate in an academic conversation while still retaining the rights to their intellectual property, i.e., their words expressing the culmination and synthesis of their research.

Copyrights might be difficult for the digital historian to navigate because he or she is absorbing content as well as creating it.  The virtues of proper citation and academic honesty will not charm the copyrigth lawyers who police the Internet for free distribution of copyrighted material.  As Lawrence Lessig points out, “Increasingly, the rules of copyright law, as interpreted by the copyright owner, get built into the technolgy that delivers copyrighted content.  It is code, rather than law, that rules.  And the problem with code regulations is that, unlike law, code has no shame.”

Discussing digital archives and the copyright issues entailed in digital preservation seems almost insensitive in the aftermath of such comparatively recent tragedies, but as discourse invariably politicizes such events, historians must recognize the need to preserve verified primary accounts.  Because the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, the shootings at Virginia Tech, and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina all occurred in the last decade, historians must take care to respect the privacy of those who donated artifacts to the digital displays without compromising the historical  integrity of the site.

The April 16 Archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory, and the September 11 Archive each address the complexity of creating such a resource.  According the the Hurricane Digital Memory’s fact page, “contributors retain the copyrights to any objects submitted… because [they] still own the materials.”  Interestingly, the site also invites unreliable accounts or artifacts, the authenticity of which they presumably determine after their submission.  Rightly, it believes these faulty materials can determine just as much about the public reaction as more reliable sources.  Of course, the process by which the site goes about determining which artifacts or materials are authentic remains somewhat vague.  The site only notes that it keeps in contact with every contributor.  Better understanding the verification process such a site uses would prove helpful when another historian is faced with the challenge of authenticating his or her own digitized archives.  However, as competing narratives emerge years later, as they inevitably do in regard to every historical event, it is reassuring that the public has something of a referee in that fight that can suss out reliable information amidst a deluge of false claims.

Of course, maintaining contact with contributors also helps historians maintain ethical practices in regard to the ways in which they use the contributors’ donations.  For example, the Hurricane Digital Memory insists that users technically own their own material, which is more grace than Facebook or Flickr extend.  By cultivating a relationship with the contributors, the Web site ensures no donor will ever have to navigate the legal minefield of taking back their content in the event of it being used in a way in which they disapprove.

Thankfully, the September 11 Digital Archive vets researchers and (presumably, by extension) the materials those contributors submit.  By posting their guidelines, the archive asserts its legitimacy.  (One can imagine this sort of thing is like Everest for conspiracy theorists.)  Considering that all the footage of the Twin Towers belonged to either individuals or news organizations, it is a wonder the digital archive could cull so much footage for its use.  Of course, if an individual captures an image, he or she has a certain right to that image in regard to its use.  Thankfully, enough people cooperated with the archive so the Web site could digitize and post numerous images without paying exorbitant costs.  Surely, several sources were consulted about donating their footage or pictures.

Possibly the most delicate online exhibit was the memorial for the Virginia Tech shootings.  While some incontrovertible historical information is available, it is primarily a remembrance of the college students who lost their lives on April 16.  Unlike the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center or Hurricane Katrina, calamities with real political implications, the tragedy at Virginia Tech is not likely to be mined for historical detail beyond.  (Of course, pundits cynically seized the opportunity to trod out tired arguments for or against gun control.)  Archival news accounts will likely suffice for any curious armchair-historian.  Again, it is comforting to know that there are some agents that can sort through conflicting stories to create a more cohesive picture of what really happened.

Audio distraction is a way of life.  Without the means to create personalized soundtracks for our more mundane activities, road trips would be excruciating, exercise would be unbearable, and long walks would feel a little lonelier.  Of course, not everyone with little white ear-buds wedged into their head is listening to music.  Online services like Audible and iTunes also feature spoken word performances (comedy, poetry, et cetera), audiobooks, and, yes, podcasts.

Podcasts started enjoying immense popularity just iTunes launched its online retail store.  On iTunes, most podcasts are free, and users can easily search the databases for podcasts germane to their interests.  Because of their nature, podcasts are not interactive like, say, call-in radio shows, but consumers still listen to them passively in their cars or on portable devices.

More portable listening devices capable of holding seemingly huge amounts of digital information have liberated audio data from compact discs and delicate, battery-operated music players, and numerous museum archivists and curators have taken advantage of that technological progression.  Some museums or specific museum exhibits offer pre-recorded audio walking tours in the form of podcasts, which the public can download before their arrival.  As he or she wanders around the displays, free to stop and start the audio playing on his or her own portable listening device, the podcasts narrates the walking tour, contextualizing the exhibits and elaborating on the information in the museum.

Some smaller museums, such as the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, have no such available service.  The Emily Dickinson house would certainly benefit from offering a podcasts to the public.  Many critics argue that readers should always encounter poetry aloud, so why not enhance the museum’s mood by allowing listeners to not only absorb additional informtion about Emily Dickinson but listen to her work as well via podcasts?

The project would involve research not only about the house itself but the museum’s subject, namely Dickinson.  The podcast would combine elements of a traditional walking tour with supplemental information about the poet.  This would allow the tourist to explore the musuem at his or her own pace and further contextualize what there is to see.  The information on the podcast should be a synthesis of the information available at the musuem, information about the museum and its surroundings (id est, the town of Amherst), and spoken text (specifically, well-placed selection from Dickinson’s many untitled poems) for the listener to enjoy.

The Web site on which the podcast will be available should encourage the reader to visit the museum and act as something of a preview for audio tour.  Before composing the script for the podcast, I will listen to other such audio tours to try to get a feel for their pacing and structure.  It might also be interesting to create a podcast for a dual audience, meaning I would acknowledge some listeners want to listen to the tour in order to enhance their visit while other listeners who live farther away may want to listen to the tour as a way to “bring the museum to them.”

As something of a bibliophile who enjoys collecting books just as much as actually reading them, I find it difficult to argue against Google Books on anything other than aesthetic grounds.  Every flat surface in my apartment is littered with newly-acquired paperbacks that hardly fit into the tightly-packed nooks of my bookshelf, so when I look around for something to use as a coaster and find only the Penguin edition of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, it makes me feel like I accomplished at least a little something since I last moved.

Of course, the minds behind Google Books have an eye for aesthetics as well.  As Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig point out in Digital History, the resolution of flatbed scanners, a measure of the depth of input in digital scans measured by bots per inch,  is even more sophisticated than than the resolution of older technologies (e.g., photocopiers) , and the texts availiable on Google Books are broken up into the same page divisions as their hard-copy counterparts.  Cohen and Rosenzweig list specific improvements in scanning technology such as optical character recognition, “through which a piece of software converts the picture of letters and words created by the scanner into maching-readable texts” (92). 

I browsed Google Books for some obscure selections that one isn’t likely to encounter outside of a literature class.  I found Charlotte Lennox’s Eighteenth Century novel The Female Quixoteand Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s lesser-known American classic Hope Leslie.  Unfortunately, the epigraphs in Sedgwick’s novel are inserted out of alignment in that punchy Courier font I cannot help but associate with HTML codes and screenplay manuscripts.  Clearly, it was not scanned or replicated with the same delicacy as the manuscripts from the Early American Fiction Projects.  Of course, since the text was likely not scanned from any valuable printing of the book, there was no need to treat with the same care the Early American Fiction Project is showing to its first editions.

Open Content Alliance is an arm of the Internet Archive, a Web site that is an exciting realization of the possibilities the Internet has been promising for more than a decade.  (Interestingly, the OCA Web site details plans to use the economic stimulus package to scan and upload more digital content.)  As with YouTube, a site that essentially created a universal juke box of videos, the Internet Archive curates some long-forgotten footage, including old newscasts.  Before the Internet Archive, the news footage of yester-year was nearly impossible to find.  For that matter, how did anyone find recent news footage before the Internet Archive and the more egalitarian YouTube allowed users to sift through literally countless broadcast with a search engine that needs nothing more than a few key words.

I don’t see myself converting to digital books any time soon, but how did researchers ever get by without the use of digital archives to excavate news footage?  Microfiche has been archiving newspapers for decades, but how did anyone get bygone newscasts or television interviews?  Of course, news clips are reproduced in documentaries, and the more popular they become, the more they get replayed.  But these Internet search tools allow historians to cull through more newscasts germane to their own interests.  All of these advancements are progress toward a cyber-culture where virtually all information can be accessed with a lap top and WiFi connection, which remove some economic and spatial obstacles to research.  In other words, with comprehensive (albeit very expensive and exclusive) databases like JSTOR archiving scholarly journals, Google uploading entire books to the Web, and the Internet Archive and YouTube immortalizing the minutae of public discourse and broadcast journalism, we may soon be living in a world where we can write whole research papers without ever literally getting out of bed.

There is nothing more disheartening than checking a bibliography and finding a Wikipedia reference.  Admittedly, when I see the sheer disdain other scholars have for Wikipedia, I find myself unable to match their animosity.  Wikipedia can be a helpful tool for finding the answers to the random trivia questions a writer must ask himself while researching.  (e.g., “Wait!  When was Grover Cleveland president?”)  Of course, Wikipedia is no more an academic source than the university library home page.  By now, most students  know Wikipedia can be used on a “trust-but-verify” basis.  It is a great short cut for information, but because users–regardless of their knowledge, the accuracy of their knowledge, or the quality of their knowledge–can edit the site’s content, although Wikipedia recently announced it was making some nominal attempts to regulate the information users submit about famous living individuals.

So, to make my exploration of Wikipedia more interesting, I thought I should start with an individual of note who is not longer with us.  (To put it more crudely, I thought I should select a figure whose bio will always be subject to change because he or she will always be dead.)  Furthermore, to examine how information gets edited and then disputed, I decided to look up a topic contentious enough to draw conflicting reports from users.

I searched for Billie Holiday, the legendary jazz singer whose life story has always been somewhat mysterious despite the moviemakers and biographers that have treated it as source material.  In the discussion thread, readers call for a comprehensive discography, but because so many listeners experience jazz music primarily through collections or reissues of outdated or out-of-print releases, a definitive list would be difficult to compile.  The only other point of contention is the conflicting information about her parents’ marriage.

There was always some question about the authorship of Holiday’s most famous song, “Strange Fruit,” and symbol-heavy but explicit protest against racism that described gory scenes of the lynchings that were tragically commonplace in the American South.  According to some scholars, after she started performing it regularly, Holiday herself took credit for the co-writing the song.  Even though we now know she certainly did not, I was curious to see if any revisionist would flock to Wikipedia to give Lady Day credit for her most legendary song.

It turns out this article might be more credible than most.  The entry about “Strange Fruit” is professedly part of the Wiki Songs Project.  However, at the time I read it, it had not yet recieved any quality ratings.  The article is written in broad strokes, and contributors are attempting to figure out just how prevalent lynchings were at the time of this song’s composition.  While the page’s authors were more or less in agreement about the song’s composition and history, there is much dispute about the context in which the lady was singing these blues.  In the best of all worlds, Wikipedia would be the convergance of expertise the Wiki Songs Project is trying to facilitate.

Writing about public history sites can be difficult; doing so forces the writer to define public history.  Any news magazine that puts its content on the Web (which is, of course, virtually all news sites now, for better or worse) has not only a history specific to that journalistic institution but also content that contributes to and contextualizes readers’ understanding of any historical time.  When browsing public history Web sites, one must distinguish history from the journalistic or first-hand accounts that historians have to suss through and compile.  For example, one could argue the C-SPAN home page is, by all accounts, a historical Web site because surely historians will surely be quoting the Senate speeches it broadcasts.

After narrowing the search down to museums, I looked at the Web site for the Woodstock museum in Bethel, New York, but I was set back for a minute because I actually searched for the something called the Woodstock Musuem.  I traveled to the museum in the summer of 2008, weeks after its opening, and looking at the Web site for the first item that popped up after a speedy Google search, I was shocked that none of the museum’s sleekness or fun interactivity made it to the site, but I should have scrolled down a little further.  The museum’s content and information are availiable on on the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts Web site .  (I could not even verify the dubious site for the Woodstock Museum was in any way related to the Woodstock museum in Bethel.)

Unfortunately, while the center’s site is certainly attractive and easier to navigate, none of the museum’s content is availiable.  The museum itself carefully curates memorabilia from the famed rock festival of 1969 and contextualizes it by offering tourists or fans extensive looks at the television shows and the news broadcast from the 1960s.  Of course, I do not expect the museum’s exclusive concert footage to be available, but aside from some photographs that could have just as easily been culled from Getty Images, the Web site offers nothing, not even timelines or overviews.  Browsers can find an image of the museum’s layout, but that would be more helpful in planning a vacation than conducting research.

Turning my attention away from the prosperity and high spirits that fueled Woodstock, I found a musuem with content that elucidates the infamous turbulence of the 1960s the National Vietnam War Museum in Texas.  The site is certainly attractive, but it offers helpful content as well.  One can navigate the museum’s “themes” and find information about everything from the technology used in the war to exhibits about the culture and history of the nation.  With a video endorsement from John McCain, one might be skeptical about its potential to proselytze, but the site itself offers some fairly straightforward facts about the war.  The site does not look like just a blog or a PowerPoint slide show, and it offers a detailed enough historical overview that a curious reader could be prompted to click to find the directions.