A not-for-profit educational resource which streams science programmes and is used as teaching and research resource. Includes in-depth interviews with Nobel Laureates and eminent scientists such as Max Perutz, Joseph Rotblat and Gustav Born; distance learning modules.
The Apple II was officially introduced at the First West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977, one of the very first trade shows dedicated to the newly emerging microcomputing industry. I loved the Computer Faires because they were attended by passionate hobbyists in the days before commercial forces completely dominated.
In April 1981, a few members of the Mac team took off the afternoon and drove up to San Francisco to visit the seventh West Coast Computer Faire at Brooks Hall. The biggest splash at the show was the unveiling of the Osborne I, from a brand new company named Osborne Computer, which was touted as the world's first portable computer.
Folklore.org is an online history collecting site that allows users to view stories, rate and add comments to these stories, and create stories of their own. The site serves as both an archive of popular histories and a facilitator of new collecting projects. The only project hosted as of yet is about the original Macintosh development team.
Folklore.org is an online history collecting site that allows users to view stories, rate and add comments to these stories, and create stories of their own. The site serves as both an archive of popular histories and a facilitator of new collecting projects.
Currently, the only project hosted by the Folklore.com site is a collection of stories about the original Macintosh development team. This project served to launch the site and attract users, so most of the stories are written by Andy Hertzfeld, who is also the author and designer of the site. Hertzfield chose the Macintosh history as a starting point because he says, it was “the most important event that I played a part in.” Although the site has not yet benefited from a large group of contributors, there is a significant body of information contained in more than a hundred entries ranging from 200 to more than 1500 words. The stories are searchable, and cross referenced in categories such as “software design,” “bugs,” “personality clashes,” and “marketing.” The stories are well written, and in some cases, the comments add richly to the original content.
The Folklore.org site is not limited to Macintosh or computing history. New projects will eventually be added as the site expands. Users can propose projects for which they would like to act as editor, and if accepted, the Folklore.com administrators will help set the project. Users can also add their own stories to any current project by creating an account and obtaining a username. This process is quick and simple, requiring no additional information besides a name and email address. Once logged into an account, the user can create stories using an automated form; however, the site administrators retain a large amount of editorial control by approving or rejecting stories before they are published on the site. Comments posted to existing stories also undergo an approval process, although a user does not need an account name to post comments or submit ratings. Additionally, the site maintains a RSS feed so that users can be notified of new postings and updates.
Although the Folklore.com site is helpful for its stories alone, it also promises to contribute to the online collecting effort through the software Andy Hertzfeld developed to run the site. The software is a set of CGI scripts written in Python, and after it is stabilized sufficiently, Hertzfield plans to release it as an open-source download that other online collectors can install on their own servers. Collectors will have to have some technical savvy, but the scripts should facilitate the collection of popular history on user-friendly, easily customized sites.
Miles Travis
George Mason University
April 25, 2005
Based on Bob Greene and D.G. Fulford's To Our Children's Children: Preserving Family Histories For Generations To Come, The Remembering Site presents a guide to writing an autobiography. Using a series of over one thousand questions, organized into thirty-five chapters on topics ranging from on topics ranging from “Elementary School Years” to “Romance and Relationships” to “Vehicles," the site offers users a road map to recording their life story. The Remembering Site also highlights several completed biographies, and there are plans to make an even larger number available which would provide historians with a useful source for research.
Presenting opportunities for the preservation of memories has become an exciting and popular use of the World Wide Web. A recent addition to the online memory collecting presence is The Remembering Site. Based on Bob Greene and D.G. Fulford's To Our Children's Children: Preserving Family Histories For Generations To Come, this site presents a guide to writing an autobiography. Launched in the summer of 2005, The Remembering Site encourages the public to record their lives and share them, either with family and friends or better still, with the online community.
While similar to MemoryWiki and History Lived in scope, The Remembering Site is unique in its approach to harvesting memoirs. Whereas MemoryWiki is completely open-ended in what users may contribute and History Lived simply suggests historical topics for users to write about, The Remembering Site carefully guides users through a thorough assessment of their life's past. For users who struggle to identify which of their stories might be of interest to others, the structure of The Remembering Site is an indispensable tool. The site uses over one thousand questions organized into more than thirty-five chapters on topics ranging from “Elementary School Years” to “Romance and Relationships” to “Vehicles.” The process is completely customizable, as users only answer the questions they choose to, and can add stories which they feel do not fit into any of the proposed categories.
These questions provide a comprehensive and useful starting point for an individual seeking to preserve their memoirs, as evidenced by the completed autobiographies. In presenting autobiographers with a wide range of topics, many seem eager to recount experiences characteristic of multiple eras and facets of their lives. However, this method also has its flaws. Since they are structured in a question and answer format, the memoirs often lack a coherent narrative feel. This framework also seems to lead users to recording only a single story on a given topic, when likely a number of memories would be relevant and of potential interest to researchers.
Perhaps the most promising feature of the site are plans to make public the stories people have submitted. The authors of the site maintain that one of their goals is “to create an Internet-based anthology of personal histories so we may learn from one another.” After finishing their autobiographies, users have the option to either make them available to the world or have them remain confidential, sharing them only with people of their choosing. Currently, only a few “featured biographies” are available, but the founders of The Remembering Site hopes to soon make available a much larger number of memoirs.
As of this writing, there is a subscription fee of $10 to join the site which provides one with the questions and forms to create an autobiography. For an additional fee, professionally printed and bound copies of one's autobiography are available.
Ken Albers
Center for History and New Media
March 2, 2006
AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), and the Library of Congress have teamed up to collect and preserve personal accounts of America's struggle to fulfill the promise of equality for all. We invite you to share your story and explore this site, a tribute to those who were a part of the civil rights experience and to the continuing quest for equality. Begin by learning about the power of a story.
Visit the History Channel's companion educational website for excerpts from the documentary, Save Our History: Voices of Civil Rights.
Voices of Civil Rights is a website sponsored by AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), and the Library of Congress to collect and archive first-hand accounts of civil rights developments in the United States with a focus on the second half of the twentieth century. The site includes more than 500 primary accounts dealing with efforts to end discrimination based on race, gender, age, and disability. The site also includes supplemental resources such as images, timelines, music videos, links, and essays on continuing efforts to achieve a more equal society.
Voices of Civil Rights is a website sponsored by AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), and the Library of Congress to collect and archive first-hand accounts of civil rights developments in the United States with a focus on the second half of the twentieth century. The site includes more than 500 primary accounts dealing with efforts to end discrimination based on race, gender, age, and disability. The site also includes supplemental resources such as images, timelines, music videos, links, and essays on continuing efforts to achieve a more equal society.
The primary function of the site is to collect letters and historical materials from people who witnessed the civil rights movement first-hand. A user can read the accounts of others or submit a letter of their own. The submission process requires two steps. First, a writer must type their story and define certain descriptors such as year, subject, and state. Then the writer must agree to the site’s terms and conditions and provide their name, email, phone number, and contact information. The site reserves the right to edit, reproduce, and distribute submitted stories and images. Most of the letters range from 200-500 words.
For users hoping to read the stories, the accounts are searchable by state, topic, and year, or a user can search by keywords. Each resulting entry provides a title, the author’s name, and a two-line excerpt. A user can also browse the letters without searching, but this is a slow process because the site will only display ten entries at a time. In addition to the letters, the site offers a timeline, images, a feature on Jackie Robinson, and a quiz to test your knowledge. The site incorporates several different mediums in its presentation as well. Besides the letters which can be read, slideshows and music videos offer a visual element and a few interviews provide audio files along with their transcripts.
Beyond the historical materials, Voices of Civil Rights also includes much information about the continuing civil rights movement. In 2004, the site sponsored a bus tour, entitled “Across America,” that visited cities across the American South and South West commemorating civil rights advances, gathering stories, and assessing current knowledge and attitudes about civil rights. The tour is documented with videos of various stops, journal entries by tour writers, and photos. The site also offers several bios of new leaders who have recently founded or joined civil rights initiatives and essays about what the past has to teach the present, new challenges that must be faced, and the protests that can be heard in contemporary culture.
Voices of Civil Rights contributes to the civil rights discussion by stretching our understanding of what “civil rights” include. Among the many stories of freedom marches, voter registration drives, and sit-ins are other stories about discrimination against Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. There are also stories about the push to recognize and fight age discrimination and the experiences of people with disabilities, from physical handicaps to special education needs. These histories are sometimes overshadowed by the celebration of victories over Jim Crow in the South, but other issues certainly deserve the attention they receive here, and the collection of personal accounts in these civil rights battles should help raise the level of their study and discussion.
Miles Travis
George Mason University
May 6, 2005
The Civic Education Project (CEP), an international non-profit organization, has supported grassroots efforts to reform higher education in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia since 1991. In 2004 CEP completed its work in Europe and Eurasia and is now taking its highly successful programs to other world regions.
Centered on the belief that democracy requires critically minded and informed individuals, CEP’s network of scholars touches hundreds of students, faculty, and broader communities in the areas in which they teach.
CEP’s diversity and flexibility allow it to be a fluid organization, which responds quickly to the needs and trends of higher education in the former communist region. This website reflects those attributes and, like CEP, should be used as a tool and resource for those participating or interested in higher education.
This digital memory bank seeks to garner the experiences and recollections of those who have been involved with the Civic Education Project. A simple form allows users to record their memories, which can then be browsed. As of writing several substantial entries had been made.
Using Flickr's unique photo sharing platform, the Institute for the Future of the Book will gather pictures of the Gates from anyone and everyone who wants to contribute. The aim is to harness the creativity and insight of thousands to build a kind of collective memory machine - one that is designed not just for the moment, but as a lasting and definitive document of the Gates and our experience of them. 7,500 gates in Central Park made for infinite views and infinite ways to shoot a picture. As one observer said, there were as many views of the Gates as footsteps in the park. In that spirit, there is no pre-determined shape for this project, other than that it will be online and constantly evolving according to the contributions, suggestions and innovations of participants.
The Gates Memory Project uses the photo sharing website Flickr to create a public and collective memory of the public art exhibit "the Gates" created by Christo and Jeanne-Claude and on view in New York City's Central Park for sixteen days in February, 2005. Anyone and everyone is invited to add their photos to the project by putting them on Flickr and include them in the project by using the tag "gatesmemory." The Institute of the Future also hosts a blog to discuss how the collected images will be used and presented.
Pregnancy represents a true fork in the road of life. One can never know what would have happened had she gone the other way. Read women's stories to gain strength and connection with other women.
If you would like to share your story, please write it down and send it via email. We will assume you want us to publish it here.
The Feminist Women's Health Center has a comprehensive website about issues related to women's health and also includes an amazing collection of stories submitted by visitors to the clinic or the website, becase they believe that "feminism begins with women sharing their experiences." The section "Many Voices - Many Choices" includes experiences with terminations of pregnancy, birth control, and related issues. Stories by teenagers are included in another "Many Voices - Many Choices" section, and poetry and prose from visitors to the site is featured as well. Stories and writings are submitted via email or through the guestbook on the website, where they also invite women to share their personal definitions of feminism.
The Feminist Woman's Health Center (FWHC) of Yakima, Washington was established in 1980 by two women who wanted to "bring reproductive choice to women in the large rural area known as Central Washington." Now the Center operates three clinics throughout Washington State: the Cedar River Clinic in Renton, Cascade Family Planning in Tacoma, and A Woman's Choice Clinic in Yakima. Modeled after the Feminist Woman's Health Centers in California that grew out of the Women's Liberation Movement and inspired by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, the FWHC of Washington State defines its mission as "to achieve reproductive freedom for women."
Primarily the FWHC website serves as a portal to information regarding women's health issues. Some highlights include medical, safety and legal information about abortion; health related information about birth control, pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs); tips on breast care, sexuality education, and eating healthy; and information about the menstrual cycle, menopause, and woman's medical conditions and diseases. There is also a regularly updated portal to reproductive health news and editorial sources, as well as various "herstories" about reproductive rights and watershed events.
As a feminist organization interested in contemporary woman's rights issues, the FWHC helps to organize local, state, and national protests and rallies and encourages its visitors to get involved. Consequently it provides a links page dedicated to activist organizations and causes. The main links page supplies more than 400 links to pro-choice, feminist, and health websites, as well as online discussion groups and email newsletters . In addition, the site supplies links to a vast amount of resources, including books, videos, periodicals, woman's hotlines, and abortion providers.
Under the assumption that "telling personal stories heals us," the site gives visitors the opportunity to submit personal stories about their experiences with birth control, abortion, pregnancy, and other women's issues. Stories can be submitted by email or by signing the guestbook. Believing that "knowledge leads to empowerment," the site answers more than 40 reproductive and health related questions in its extensive FAQs section. There is also a merchandise section that sells various feminist books, posters, a self exam kit, a speculum, and other items.
The Feminist Woman's Health Center website is thoughtfully designed and content rich. The overall layout and aesthetic appeal is quite good; this reviewer found no broken links, unloaded images, or typographical errors. The search functionality is outsourced to a decent search hosting service, which provides clear and useable search results. Navigation is straightforward and user-friendly considering the vast amount of information on hand – although it would be more convenient to have a link to the homepage in the header of the site, not only the footer. Moreover, the homepage sidebar menu is so well designed one wonders why it's not also available throughout the site. Taken together the website is successful in presenting the wide-ranging issues behind abortion rights and woman's reproductive health.
Jim Safley
Center for History and New Media
March 16, 2004
Help the American Red Cross Museum document the response to this historic event by sharing your September 11 experience with us. We're interested in everyone who participated directly in relief activities, donated blood, money and time to help those afflicted by the largest man-made disaster in our nation's history. We are also interested in accounts of local community-based efforts that were launched in response to the needs of the victims. How have these events changed your attitudes toward volunteering in times of local or national crises?
The American Red Cross Museum in partnership with the September 11 Digital Archive is collecting stories to document the relief efforts and response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. Individuals can submit their story through the website and which they may choose to have featured on the site. The stories speak to personal experiences witnessing the attacks as well as local and community response efforts and thoughts on humanitarianism and volunteerism.
As part of our effort to preserve our national heritage, we are seeking stories, memories or anecdotes about the wartime home front embodied by "Rosie."
The Ford Motor Company has partnered with the Natioinal Park Service and the National Park Foundation to collect stories and memoirs from women who worked on the homefront during World War II. Visitors are able to submit their story online, and there is one sample submission for viewing. The narratives and materials collected through this online venture will be maintained by the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Site and used by the Park and others studying this period of American history.
These are the 18 artifact categories at The Bakken. Items can belong to more than one category. We have roughly 2500 artifacts. An electrostatic kit from the 18th century would be listed as a generator, a storage case, electrodes, a Leyden jar -- whatever was in the box the kit lived in. Here on the Web, we'll list things by their most noticeable attribute. You can learn a lot about a collection by studying the categories it is sorted into.
This website contains a directory and description of the artifact holdings of the Bakken Library and Museum. The Bakken is a not-for-profit educational institute founded by the inventor of the first transistorized cardiac pacemaker. Fittingly, the collection is largely devoted to the use of electricity and magnetism in medicine and the life sciences. The directory is sorted and listed by categories, but unfortunately the collection is not searchable. The entries for each item include an image, a physical description including materials, size, and weight, and a list of remarks that note special features or the condition of the item. The website also features a commentary that supplements the collection directory with a historical overview.
