Calisphere

www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu

Intended Audience: This site is primarily aimed at K-12 teachers in California. A project of the California Digital Library, it provides primary source materials that could be used to support lessons in history, political science, visual arts and writing. This site could also be a good starting point for historians and academic researchers.

Usefulness of Content: The Calisphere site is a one-stop access point to digital images from the archival collections of the UC campuses, private California universities, and California public libraries. The material is accessible in several ways: through themed collections, a search function, and an A-Z topic list. There is also a great page that provides links to the Special Collections and Archives departments of the UC schools – it describes each university’s online digital exhibits, a fun way of browsing the collections in one spot.

One major problem I found at this site is that very little contextual information is given for each image, which makes it difficult for the user to understand what he or she is looking at. Clicking on the “More Information about This Image” link only provides the collection name and contributing institution. The person familiar with archives might know to check the link to the collection, and then to the complete finding aid, to look for a scope and content or biographical note further down the page, but this wouldn't be obvious to the average user.

Consistency of design: The designers maintain a similar layout for each type of page. Individual images are displayed on the left side of the page, with (limited) information shown on the right. Themed image collections are displayed in a table layout on the right side of the page, with general information, K-12 content standards, and pertinent questions listed to the left and below. Most information is contained in boxes with rounded corners, with different background colors corresponding to the type of information.

Ease of navigation: Other than the difficulty of finding detailed or contextual information about the images, the site is set up well. The content is specific and limited to the themed collections (with extensive lesson plans for the California Cultures and Japanese-American Relocation collections), search and browse functions, UC campus links and administrative information. Links are displayed in orange type, and there is a navigation bar at the bottom of the page.