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Web Site Review
Kelly Schrum
Contributing Editor
The Journal of American History, in collaboration with the Web site History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/, publishes regular reviews of Web sites. The reviews appear both in the printed journal (and its online companion at http://www.historycooperative.org/) and at History Matters. History Matters provides an annotated guide to more than one thousand Web sites for teaching U.S. history. The goal is to offer a gateway to the best Web sites and to summarize their strengths and weaknesses with particular attention to their utility for teachers.
The Web reviews are edited by Kelly Schrum; please contact her at kschrum@gmu.edu if you would like to suggest a site for review or write a review. We also welcome comments on our review guidelines, which are available at http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/websitereviews.shtml.
| The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition (access by subscription), http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu:8080/pgwde/. Created and maintained by the University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville. Reviewed Sept. 15–Oct. 15, 2007.George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741–1799, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html. Created and maintained by the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Reviewed Sept. 15–Oct. 15, 2007.
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| These two products may be defined as electronic archives, strictly speaking, as they both provide primary documents and there is significant overlap in content. But in every other aspect, discussing them is like comparing apples and oranges. The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition (PGWDE) is a "living edition," access to which must be purchased, with the subscription cost tied to a sliding scale based on institution size. The George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741–1799 (GWPLC) is a static archive and access to it is free. |
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The PGWDE is comprised of the fifty-two volumes published since 1969 by the documentary project at the University of Virginia. The most comprehensive edition to date, the total number of documents in PGWDE is not disclosed at the top level, which would assist observant users in quickly assessing the completeness of the product. PGWDE unquestionably trumps GWPLC and all earlier editions as the edition of choice for scholars of George Washington. The GWPLC is comprised of sixty-five thousand documents, a number that is unlikely to change, from the world's largest collection of Washington's papers, at the Library of Congress. In PGWDE, we learn only after drilling down six layers from the introduction that the entire corpus of Washington is "more than 100,000 documents." Of course, the number of documents in any given documentary edition constantly shifts, but it would be nice to have an overall statement of content and scope at a more prominent place in the electronic edition. |
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