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By Eleanor
Introduction:
Lehigh University’s digital archive I Remain: A Digital Archive of Letters, Manuscripts, and Ephemera presents over seven hundred primary sources possessed by the college. The archive’s contents date as far back as the 15th century and as recently as the 20th, and are penned primarily by Americans – famous ones in particular. That said, the archive prides itself in representing a “range of lives … from ordinary citizens to Presidents” and “writers in Europe and the United States.” Though it acts more as a showcase of Lehigh’s collection than as a coherent historical narrative, we still found the “I Remain” to be, on the whole, a perfectly functional and impressive digital archive. We will organize our assessment of the collection on three distinct criteria: 1) user interface and functionality, 2) the types and quality of the content, and 3) its intended audience and potential uses.
Functionality and Interface:
In terms of visual appeal, I Remain‘s user interface is nothing to write home about. There are no drop-down menus, no slick animations, no spiffy photo galleries – and for the most part, this is a good thing. Lack of visual bloat means that navigation is quick and straightforward, with only two real “modes” of operation. The first is “Browse”, which presents a list of the available categories and a short description of each. Clicking on a category directs to a filtered list containing only items in that category. The only discernible issue with this organization is that users are bound to the dozen pre-curated collections which, while interesting, may be too narrow in focus for many users. There is an “Honor” category but not a “Letters” category; a “Lehigh History” but no “American History”. Perhaps most concerning is the omission of a “View All” button – to see everything in the archive at once, users must head over to the “Search” page and perform an empty query.
Thankfully, said search feature offers a more advanced and research-oriented way of navigating the archive’s content. There are plenty of fields to tweak and tune, allowing users to fashion a highly selective search term. Of course, a search engine is as only as good as the body through which it searches – and in I Remain‘s case, the lack of transcribed sources presents a substantial obstacle for any interested in finding items containing specific words or phrases. The detailed item descriptions are considered by the search engine and help to counteract this shortcoming to some degree, but this still is not nearly as precise as a full-text search. Hopefully the archive’s creators realize the importance of a fully-featured mechanism for locating items, and choose to update the “Browse” and “Search” functionalities before refreshing the site’s ancient design.
Content:
I Remain contains 726 digital copies of historical media artifacts located in Lehigh University’s Special Collections library: a mixture of letters, manuscripts, and ephemera spanning the 15th to 20th centuries.Despite claiming such a wide span of temporal coverage, the archive focuses primarily on the 19th century. Almost two thirds of I Remain‘s content is from the the 1800s and only six items are dated before 1700. I think that the description of the archive should perhaps be altered to reflect this emphasis. That way, researchers looking for 19th century works could find this more easily and those looking for earlier works would know that they would be better off looking elsewhere.
On the introductory home page, the archive states that its purpose is to “study the evolution of communication, trace the development of social networks, examine material culture, and gain insight into the way working writers and scientists shaped their ideas and shared their thoughts”. The vast majority of the sources, 655 of the 726 items, are letters. That ties in well with the stated goal of the archive. Personal letters are a great way to gain insight into how people thought and to track historical social networks. Additionally, I Remain‘s content is broken up into eleven thematic categories in order to streamline browsing research. Looking at a bar chart breakdown of how many sources fall into the different categories, we can see that the areas that this archive seems to specialize in are “War and Politics”, specifically “Networking”, and the concept of the “Working Writer”, a category that they define as sources that speak about the process of writing and communicating information. This emphasis also supports the purpose of the archive. Political networking is an undeniably important historical social network and the “Working Writer” category clearly speaks to the second part of the archive’s goal.
The digital representations of the sources contained in I Remain are almost entirely very high quality and are accompanied with detailed content descriptions and metadata. However there are no text transcriptions of the handwritten letters and manuscripts. The old handwriting style and irregular spelling can make these documents very difficult to read. As the archive’s developers move forward, I would suggest working towards adding more transcriptions to make their content more accessible.
Utility and Audience:
As the archive was created by Lehigh University, there is an implied audience of the members of that specific school. This is further implied by the way that the site puts Lehigh history at the same level of importance as the Revolutionary War and other more global events. With this exists the implication that the university will be considered important to those who view the archive. This could be students or it could be faculty. However, the website is not private in any way and therefore, can be accessed by anybody with an internet connection. With this in mind, I Remain appears to be best suited for research purposes by college students looking for primary sources. The accessibility and navigational ease allow all age groups the chance to conduct research but the need for primary sources and a digital archive specializing in them really only presents itself for those in college and beyond. This, therefore, appears to be the intended audience and use of the digital archive.
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