Product Name: STIM\'s Online Archives

Product Description

In their presentation for the '98 SHOT Meeting, David Kirsch and James Sparrow, two STIM primary investigators, pointed out that historians of recent science and technology are increasingly confronted with capturing and representing an ever widening array of different types of historical materials. These include diverse media such as e-mail, software, data tapes, video and simulations. Historians not only face a quantitative extension of research material but additional technical problems. What to do with electronic texts written with a software not available anymore? How to preserve a collection of electronic texts so that they are usable in 50 years from now? These issues get even more complicated when applied to a 'messy' environment like the World Wide Web. Not only do STIM participants have to think about how to convert paper-based into digital documents. They must also consider how to structure, connect and make available several hundreds of threaded e-mail messages, electronically submitted 'documents', and digitized historical material. Since STIM's primary investigators use the World Wide Web as a tool to gather data and interact with their target community the term 'archive' takes on an additional meaning. The intent of threaded e-mail discussions and on-line surveys is to lend a voice to the historical subjects - the participants of the events being researched who are still alive. They are provided with an opportunity to make their voice heard, to offer their point of view or perspective, to tell their stories, and to submit their 'archival' material. These on-line contributions become the 'stuff of history', the basis for writing the history of these events. A visitor going to any of the five STIM web sites will find not only interesting, 'traditional' archival documents such as governments reports, research papers, scholarly and newspaper articles but also first-person narratives from those who were part of the events researched here. The challenge for the project teams lies in integrating the different sources and making them accessible to the scholarly and general audience. The following pages show how some STIM web sites approached that challenge.

Company Details

Encourages electric vehicle enthusiasts to help preserve the recent history of electric vehicles by posting to online archive, where other contributions are available to be read. more