Monday, November 5, 2007

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History . Home


The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

Intended Audience

• History teachers and professors
• Researchers
• Students
• History buffs
• People interested in buying history books
• Potential donors

Usefulness of Content

The Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History is a private organization focused on the study and teaching of history. Their website is rich with instructional images/media, features, and resources. The homepage is visually striking, with a Flash video showing visual images of photographs, drawings, documents, alternating with text describing various Institute programs and offerings. The homepage also includes visually stimulating links to the Institute’s publication History Now, various teacher-training programs, the History Shop, and a link to information about donating (allowing for income on two levels).

A particularly rich feature linked to the homepage is “This Week’s Document.” This link takes you to an introduction to the document, a facsimile of it, a detailed item description and credits, a transcript of the manuscript, and suggested reading. There’s also a link to print page, another to an overview of the “featured document” feature and another to an annotated archive of past documents, subdivided by ranges of dates.

The website also includes links to the Institute’s physical collections, while also highlighting online collections/exhibits and an online collection called “Treasures of the Collections” which shows highlights of the Gilder-Lehrman collections.

Consistency of Design

I love the way this website looks. It’s refreshing to see historical images used in a consistent and interesting way, and I especially like the Flash video on the homepage because it provides movement -- you’re not just looking at static images, and especially where pre-motion-picture history is concerned, we tend to think of historical documents, objects, and persons as static and immobile. (It’s interesting that a PBS station contributed to the design of the website).

I like the use of historical images as icons throughout the website. Their creative use of these images speaks directly to their interest in and support of the teaching of history at all age levels. At the same time, their research collections and fellowship programs, also highlighted at this site, speak to their support of scholarly research. The design of this website strongly reflects those goals – it helps to bring history alive. In that sense, I think the site can also be attractive to students, and features like “This Week’s Document” are likely intended for classroom use (or out-of-classroom assignments).

Ease of Navigation

The homepage does a good job of providing links and information in a way that looks good but is not too cluttered or too text-oriented.

There is a tab on the homepage for each intended audience. Each of those pages includes, at the right, icons and links to relevant sections of the website. Each “audience” page includes some but not all of these icon/link pairings, and the icons for each link are consistent across the pages (that is, the same icon is always used for the “History Shop” on these pages, though the image is different from the one used for the Shop on the homepage – I’m guessing these thumbnails are from the same larger image). These pairings allows for access to a wide range of offerings, while maintaining both variety and consistency across the subpages.

Throughout the website, visual images have brief captions, which link to detailed information on the pictured document, including a link that takes you to copy request forms and visitor information. Some documents are digitized, but not all, and this information is a valuable way of conveying the information needed for a copy request to be processed, or for the viewer to learn how to get to the physical collection.

Overall, I think this is a very inviting website for the history teacher, the researcher, and the general history buff.

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