Form or Function: Considerations in Presenting Historical Documents on the Web

Form or Function: Considerations in Presenting
Historical Documents on the Web

Cokie
Anderson

Oklahoma State University Library Digitization
Center
cokie@okstate.edu

Julia
Crawford

Oklahoma State University Library Digitization
Center

2001

New York University

New York, NY

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

When the OSU Library began its digitization program, the first work chosen for
digitization was Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, a
multi-volume collection of all U.S. laws and treaties dealing with Native
American tribes edited by Charles Kappler and published by the US GPO in 1913. A
key reason for choosing this item, in addition to high demand for it and its
limited availability, was its unique appearance and features. Mr. Kappler, in
addition to collecting all the laws treaties, added marginalia which is of great
assistance to researchers. The marginalia is not editorial comment, but selected
keywords indicating the subject matter of the passage and citations to related
legal materials. A researcher can scan the marginalia to find the portion of the
treaty or statute that deals with the subject in which he or she is interested
or to get a quick overview of all matters covered in that particular treaty or
law. A chief objective of the initial phase of the project was to preserve the
appearance of this feature in the web version. In 1996, when this project began,
web technology was fairly new and its possibilities were not yet fully
appreciated. The project team was focused on preserving the appearance of the
document, i.e., the marginalia literally in the margin next to the text. Grant
funding was obtained for this purpose. Much time and effort was expended to
acieve this goal, but nothing worked satisfactorily. The use of frames was
considered, but was ruled out because of their limited browser compatibility at
the time, and the hurdles they posed for the disabled user. In the end, it was
decided to place all margin notes at the beginning of the document with links to
the relevant passage so they could serve their original purpose as an overview
and browsing tool for the researcher. To preserve for the user the unique look
of the original , links to JPEG images of the book pages are provided at the top
of each treaty. In the second phase of the project, the site architecture was
redesigned to provide access to the text and page images from a variety of
points. The margin notes are again presented at the beginning of each document,
but this time in a table format that not only provides the text of the
marginalia but also indicates the section of the statute to which the marginalia
occurs. This gives the researcher a better sense of context for the notes. The
text hyperlinks to the exact place in the main document where the marginalia
appears in the book. JPEG images of the book pages may be accessed from a
referral link at the top of each document, and from links at each page break
throughout the document. Both form and function are thus preserved.