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Connecticut History Online (CHO), a collaborative on-line database of Connecticut images, is expanding an initial pilot project to create a digital resource center that is composed of a variety of research materials serving the needs of scholars, secondary school teachers and students, genealogists, and the general public. This new project builds upon a very successful collaboration of libraries and museums carried out in 1999-2002 that focused on digital capture of historical graphics.
The three initial partners, the Connecticut Historical Society, Mystic Seaport, and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, will be joined by the Connecticut State Library and the New Haven Colony Historical Society. The partners represent three major communities – libraries, museums, and historical societies – who preserve and make accessible historical collections within the state of Connecticut. Their combined assets include book and periodical volumes, linear feet of manuscript materials, photographs and graphics, oral histories, maps, artifacts, and broadsides.
Drawing on the rich collections of the sponsoring institutions, Connecticut History Online will provide a comprehensive chronicle of events, people, and places documenting Connecticut, and American, social, business, political, educational, cultural, and civic life. The project will add more than 2,000 broadsides, more than 550 maps, 450 artifacts, 40 oral histories with audio clips, 3,800 manuscript items, 200 journals and minute books, and 2,000 photographic images. Materials will cover the period 1760 to 2000 and will be selected from the five thematic categories developed during phase 1: diversity, livelihoods, lifestyles, environment, and infrastructure.
There will be four different modes of access to Connecticut History Online:
1. The materials can be searched by key word and advanced keyword searches by subject, creator, date, place name, collection, institution, and title.
2. Materials can also be searched using the unique GeoLocator that allows the user to view a map of Connecticut and seek materials from a particular area or city. The feature allows the user to continually narrow or widen the search of the map getting into finite detail of towns and other geographic features.
3. Materials can also be found through the use of defined searches entitled “Journeys” that allow the user to review material related to a pre-defined topic that places the material into an historical context.
4. There will be a fourth link to material via collection-level cataloging records that will be contributed to the OCLC database, widening Connecticut History Online’s accessibility.
The project will continue to build resources that can be used by secondary school teachers and students, but will also include scholarly researchers, diverse Web users, and other museum and library professionals. As the project expands, we hope that it will provide a model to enhance access to historical digital collections for other statewide coalitions.
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