cc  >> Welcome to the Wisconsin  Historical Museum, I'd like to  introduce our speaker today,  he's gonna be talking on the  subject of the Abraham Lincoln  historical digitization project.  This is Drew VandeCreek, and  he'll be with us today, thank  you.  >> Drew VandeCreek: Thank you.  I'm basically gonna spend about  30, 40 minutes giving a  demonstration of what our  website has to offer.  But before I get started on  that, I want to talk a little  bit about what our purposes were  and what our goals were.  And very briefly about what the  origins of the project were, the  project dates back to 1998, I've  been doing this job for 11 years  now.  In the mid-90s, the internet  kind of happened, and librarians  were no different than anyone  else, historians, too, they were  looking for ways to make use of  it.  And one of the best ways that  they could think of was the  digitization of library and/or  historical materials, to find  new ways to help people use  them.  The big way, obviously, being  putting things on the web.  The three real purposes that we  had fall under, two of them fall  under what I would call access. 

 As I just alluded to, for  library materials and  particularly primary source  historical materials, a lot of  these things are rare and/or  fragile and there are quite a  few things that you would have  to go to one particular library  or a special collection or a  museum to see one particular  object.  Or manuscript or something like  that.  So if you scan something, that  is, if you take a digital image  of it on a flatbed scanner like  you would use at home for  photographs or whatever, and  make a high-resolution copy of  it, then you can put it on the  web in a size that it will  download quickly.  People all over the world can  use that and that's obviously a  big plus.  There are people who are  perfectly able to travel and it  probably save them time and  money, and there are people who  can't travel who would not have  an opportunity to use whatever  it is, this text or this image  or this map, in the same way  that other people would.  One of the other things that you  can do, once you get this ball  rolling with digitizing things,  is you can really organize  things on the web much more,  much differently, much better.  I think one of the clearest ways  to talk about that is in the  case of text, you can make text  searchable.  We all know how to use Google  and Yahoo and things like that  and you just put in a string of  words or characters or whatever  and the search engine will find  it for you.  We have on our site, we have  text that is searchable.  I think we have about 30 or 35  million words of text, and it's  very helpful if you're a school  kid doing a paper, or if you're  a scholar doing a book, if  you're looking for something in  particular, that searchability  function is really helpful. 

 I know that I'm old enough that  when I was in college, when I  was asked to write a six or  eight page essay for history  class, I would go through the  books and I would underline a  particular passage, or worse  yet, it would stick in my mind,  but when I was reading it I  would think, "Oh, this isn't  that important," so I wouldn't  mark it or anything.  And then when I'm writing the  paper, I'm thinking, "Where is  that quote?"  In which of these five books,  or 20 books or whatever,  depending on how studious I  felt, where is that quote that  I'm looking for?  And you spend your time going  through the pages and you can't  find it.  The searchability factor really  helps with that.  Now, I want to add right here  that one of the things that we  need to bear in mind is digital  texts, which make up a lot of  our site, which make up a lot of  the digital library materials on  the web, really aren't a  substitute for reading a book.  I don't think it's nearly as  pleasurable or as comfortable to  sit and look at a screen and  read a whole book.  Obviously, the codex or the book  is a, things have been with us  for a long time and it's very  high-adapted for its purpose and  it works.  But this is a very good tool for  working with a different kind of  historical materials.  As I mentioned earlier, the  third major purpose is  preservation of historical  materials.  If you have some of these things  that are rare and/or fragile, I  think that in a lot of cases,  people that work in library  special collections, archives,  things like that, have sometimes  a view toward seeing their job  as keeping the riff-raff out.  That is, you don't want to have  people come into your library  that will handle and mangle the  text that you have that is one  of the three extant letters of  this or that, or the other  thing. 

 And that's not really a very  profitable attitude to have, if  you were in the business world,  that wouldn't be very good  customer service.  But what digitization lets you  do is it lets you make a very  high-quality copy that people  can look at, they can read, they  can get the intellectual capital  that it contains very easily  without touching it.  So not only do they not have to  travel, but they don't put any  wear and tear, they don't tax  the actual primary source  materials, and so that's a big  plus.  Now at this point, I want to  talk a little bit about how we  wanted our project to be a  little bit different.  From digital libraries and  digital history as it is  generally practiced, digital  libraries, I think that that  speaks for itself, you take  library materials and you put  them on the web so that they're  searchable, generally texts,  sometimes images.  When you talk about digital  history, that can mean a number  of different things, but I think  it's fair to say that the  historical discipline has taken  to the web especially well  because it's based on the use of  primary sources.  And I think that once you become  a graduate student, or become a  practicing scholar, you make it  your business to travel to the  archives to be able to use  primary sources.  But what about the clueless  college kid like me?  I was at a small, liberal arts  college and we had a few special  collections of this or that or  the other thing, but I generally  had to write my paper based upon  whatever quotes were in the  books that I read.  That author would write a  200-page book about the populist  movement and there'd be a few  quotes in there.  I think that most people that  teach history and most people  that practice history as a  scholar think that the best  possible way to teach students  about history is for them to  work with the primary sources. 

 And the kind of thing that we're  doing here, digital libraries  that have to do with history,  bring primary sources to a very  wide public user group.  The thing that we wanted to try  to do that we thought might be  different was try to use some of  the potential that was inherent  in the web in a different way to  try to reach a public audience  the best that we possibly could.  I think that if you go and look  at most digital library  projects, like the things that  are coming out of the Library of  Congress, things that are coming  out of a lot of large academic  research institutions, they  obviously have very large  library collections, and they go  in and they digitize what they  take to be some of their best  holdings, put them on the web,  text in a searchable format,  images would probably be  searched based upon what we know  about the image, that is, what  is this a picture of?  If it's a painting, who painted  it, if it's a photograph, who  took it, date, whatever.  We thought that there was a  little bit more to do than that.  There's the whole matter of the  context that these historical  materials come from.  Say that we're talking about  Lincoln here, say that you're  reading a Lincoln speech from  the Mexican war.  He's gonna be making, this is  when he was in congress, and  he's gonna be making very  detailed references to how it  was that the president sent the  US army down to engage the  Mexican army based upon what the  president took to be an act of  war, and it had to do, what was  the spot on which the Mexicans  were found when the Americans  engaged them.  And Lincoln made a great deal  of, he made a great deal about  this spot, and his political  opponents made fun of him, they  called him "Spotty Lincoln."  But the point is that there's  a whole back story here about  the Mexican War.  One side saw the Mexican War,  Lincoln's side saw the Mexican  War as basically a fraudulent  land grab, looking for a  pretense to engage in  hostilities with the Mexican  army, with the idea of taking  some of their territory.  The other side saw it in a  different way, they saw it in an  opposite way. 

 So how you get some of this back  story into the user's lap, I  think that the web is an ideal  way of doing that.  And what I'm gonna do is I'm  gonna show you some of the  things that we have on our  website, and as I do that, show  you some of the ways that we  want to try to make people aware  of what some of this context is,  so if we enter the site here,  what we have across the top, as  a bar, we have texts, we have  about 30 or 35 million words of  text.  We have 3,000 some images, we  have some video and sound, that  may look odd to you because  obviously in Lincoln's age, they  didn't have video and sound.  Now I know that there are some  of us here that cannot imagine a  world without video, but in  Lincoln's day, they did not have  television.  So this may be tipping you off a  little bit to what I'm headed up  to, but let's just look at the  text first.  First, you're clicking through,  you get a copyright and a  fair-use statement.  Then you'd be able to do a  search here, and you have a very  simple search on the top and you  can then do a more complex  search on the bottom, and if  anybody wants to talk to me  about that later, I can show it  to you, but there's no real  reason to get into it now.  What this basically does, is we  put in the word "slavery," and  it brings up slavery in a number  of different texts, and it shows  you "slavery" is in red here,  and it shows you what the title  is, in this case it's something  called the "Western Gazetteer"  or immigrant's directory from  1817.  Now, I'd better talk a little  bit more about what the concept  of our project here, obviously  Lincoln did not write this.  What our project is about, it's  about more than just Lincoln the  person. 

 We have as the core of our texts  Lincoln's papers, letters,  speeches and things like that,  from his pre-presidential years.  We couldn't really do very much  with his presidential papers,  those are the property of the  federal government, and they're  on sites that are run by the  Library of Congress and the  National Archives.  But his pre-presidential papers  are widely scattered in a number  of different places, they have  been edited and published in a  couple of different cases, but  we thought we could do a service  by bringing all these papers  together and putting them on the  web, so that's the germ of it.  But in talking about the  context, what we really thought  was, Lincoln's life would be a  very good way to let people look  at what Antebellum Illinois and  really the Antebellum West,  because in the 1840s and '50s,  this part of the country was the  West, was like.  If you look at Lincoln's life,  he moved west with his family  twice.  He fought in an Indian war, he  rode a flatboat down the  Mississippi and hoofed it home.  He tried a number of different  kind of jobs, was largely  self-educated, and what I'm  driving at is that he had a lot  of things in common with a lot  of other average people of his  time.  And when he ran for the  presidency in 1860, he was kind  of a dark horse candidate,  people in the east hadn't really  heard of him, but he came  through the Republican  convention of 1860 as the  Republican party's choice, and  the Republican party leaders  were thinking, how can we spin  this guy, how can we present  this guy to the public?  And they decided to run him as a  representative man.  That's the tagline that they  used.  If there were a bumper sticker  in those days, something like  that probably would've been on  the Lincoln bumper sticker, and  the idea was that he was  somebody who had something in  common with a lot of people in  this country, particularly  people in the Ohio valley West,  which was kind of the  battleground, if you were gonna  win the election in those days,  you were probably gonna have to  try to carry that area. 

 So they ran him as a  representative man, we liked  that concept and we thought,  this was a way to open up  society and politics of this  period.  So we chose something like the  Western Gazetteer, not because  it mentions Lincoln, but because  it talks about this part of the  country and it will tell you  about different places, it'll  tell you anything that a visitor  to this part of the country  might need to know, or so the  author thought.  So that's a way of showing you  the searchability text function,  and it starts to get you into  the whole contextual question,  too.  Let me show you how our image  thing works.  We have the images sorted a  number of different ways, let's  say you were looking for  something that had to do with  the Blackhawk War, which Lincoln  fought in.  Uh-oh, that's no good.  Here's something from the  Chicago Historical Society, this  is an old campaign banner from  the campaign of 1840, which  Lincoln, who was at that point a  relatively young politician,  spent some time touring  Illinois, speaking on behalf of  William Henry Harrison.  Lincoln was at that time a Whig,  and this is one of our primary  documents, this is an image  document.  Down at the bottom it tells you  what the general title of it is,  what the date is, and very  importantly, where it comes  from.  A couple of other kind of  primary sources that we have. 

 And they're not the same kind of  primary source as a text or an  image would be.  One of these would be sound, one  of the major kind of primary  sources that we found, we found  a lot of these things and we  thought they were really very  under-utilized.  These were 19th Century  songbooks, and in this period, a  lot of people spent a lot of  time getting together and  singing, they didn't have radio,  they didn't have television,  they didn't have professional  college sports, things that we  think of as pastimes nowadays.  And they would get together,  somebody might have a piano or a  fiddle, something like that, and  people would sing.  Well, one of the things that the  political parties did was they  used songbooks as a way of  getting their message out.  People were organized into  political clubs and things like  that, party lines were much  firmer than they are nowadays,  generally you were by family or  by ethnic group, your identity  was generally very firmly fixed  as either a Whig or a Democrat  in this period, and later by  1856 and 1860, of course the  Whig party was generally  replaced by the Republican  party.  But especially the Whigs and  Republicans made a practice of  getting their campaign message  out by sending songbooks out to  these clubs and local party  groups and things like that, and  you would get together and you  would sing some of these songs.  So what we did was we digitized  the songbooks, which sometimes  will have musical scores in  them, and sometimes they'll just  say, "To the tune of 'Yankee  Doodle'" or something that any  musician of the time would know.  So we got people from our  college of music to get together  and play and sing these songs,  and we recorded them so you  could listen to see what the  song sounded like.  Now, that's not a primary  source, it's not a 100% primary  source because the recording  obviously was not made at that  time, but it's a representation  of a primary source, it's kind  of an expanded primary source,  and it's something that  particularly teachers, working  with younger children, like  because the songs are generally  short and they're generally  catchy. 

 And I think it helps get at what  some of the campaign issues  might have been in a very  compact, catchy way, whereas if  you were to read a speech or  something like that, especially  for younger children, it might  not be that appropriate.  So I'm gonna try to play one of  these for you, we have as you  can see a number of different  songbooks, here's one of the  first ones that we did, the  "Wide-Awake Vocalist or the  Rail-Splitters Songbook,"  Lincoln, another nickname that  they used for him was the  "Rail-Splitter," worked to his  kind of average-guy persona.  Here's one, it's called "Get Out  De Way, You Little Giant," his  opponent, one of the opponents  in the four-way 1860  presidential race, was Stephen  Douglas, who was a very short  stature, but was known as the  "Little Giant."  I guess it's not gonna work with  our new download here.  We just downloaded the software  today with the hope that this  would work, but anyhow, you can,  if you go to our site, you can  listen to the songs.  And this is something, it was  one of our efforts in trying to  reach a broader public audience,  to use multimedia as much as  possible, because I think that a  lot of younger people today  especially, really take for  granted that on the web you're  gonna have multimedia.  Another thing that we have is,  we have something called, we  have geographic information  systems, which is a way of  taking things like census and  voting data, which generally  would appear in a table, let's  say for the election of 1850,  we'd say, how many votes did,  for one particular state or  another, we'd say, how many  votes did Lincoln get, how many  votes did Douglas get, how many  votes did Bell get, who was  another candidate, and how many  votes did Breckenridge get.  This is a way of representing  data like that in a spatial  format, which is to say, in  space.  Voting terms were generally  collected by precinct or county,  and then by state.  And so this is a good way of  showing who won what county.  And here is 1840, you can see  Harrison, who was Lincoln's man,  the Whig, won certain places,  and Van Buren, who was the  Democrat, won certain places. 

 You can see there are some  patterns in there, and one of  the things that GIS lets you do  is start to explore maybe why  those patterns are so.  We have a proposal into the  federal government right now to  try to do a national map for  this period that would have all  the voting returns and all the  census returns, so we would be  able to explore what a  particular region's voting  tendencies have to do with what  are the predominant churches  there, what does it have to do  with what were the predominant  industries there, was it  farming, manufacturing, does it  have to do with whether there  was slavery there or not.  The idea is to be able to start  to dig into some of this primary  source materials on your own,  and kind of make yourself your  own historian, to start asking  your own questions.  That's something that history  teachers call "active learning,"  as opposed to reading it in a  textbook, working with the  primary sources and trying to  pose questions and look at data  and figure out what some of the  answers might be.  So on this map, if I had a  little bit more time I could  show you, we do have things like  churches and things like that so  you can start to evaluate what  voting has to do with religion,  and it would not be a foolproof  answer, but you could see  whether or not there was a  correlation there or not, and  then the idea would be that then  you could start turning to the  text and some of the other  things and start digging in.  Now, you may have noticed that  I've overlooked the bar at the  left here, this is one of the  ways that we really want to try,  this is the major way that we  want to try to make our primary  sources more interesting and  accessible to a general  non-scholarly audience.  So what we've done is we've  taken the intellectual capital,  really, that's represented in  the scholarly literature, what  scholars write in articles and  books.  They really make quite a lot of  interesting points, but they  write it in such a way that only  a scholarly audience can really  understand it, and that's a  shame.  What we've done is we've taken  these eight major themes for  this period, African-American  experience, economic  development, frontier  settlement, law and society,  Native Americans, politics, and  so on.  If you were to look up all of  the literature of this period,  this doesn't cover all the  bases, but these are eight major  groups, these are eight major  discourses, things that scholars  talk about. 

 And we think that scholars have  something to say to the general  public.  If you were to know some of the  general points that scholars are  making about this period, it  would help you to understand  some of our primary sources.  So what I did, was I read the  literature and wrote essays  about some of these themes and  basically kind of boiled some of  it down.  Had kind of a head start,  because at that point I was  recently out of graduate school,  so I still had a pretty good  grasp of the literature, so this  for the general period of our  site, which is to say Lincoln,  or Lincoln's Illinois, about  1819 to 1860.  That is, from statehood when  Lincoln would've been a very  young man, to when he leaves  Illinois to become president.  So this is one particular set of  things, now, one of the other  things that we've done is we've  made a video out of this, which  is kind of mini --- movie, which  is basically a voice actor  reading this text with images  and things in the background.  We don't have the software on  this computer to play it, but it  would be a way to get the  meaning that's in this essay in  another way.  You could read it, you could  also watch it.  So we have these themes, one of  the other things that we have in  addition to talking about this  period in terms of themes, we  also talk about it in terms of  change over time, and the device  that we wanted to use for that  was Lincoln's life.  At the start of this period,  Lincoln was a very young man,  obviously he was born in 1809,  so we talk about the things that  were going on in his life in  each of these different periods,  and that, the idea is to help  you understand some of the major  things that happened in this  period, the 40 or 50 years  before the Civil War. 

 And how one thing kind of led to  another, change over time, kind  of a temporal access, if you  will.  And how these things happened,  it would've been through  Lincoln's eyes.  So for instance we have one,  here's Indian fighting and  politics in New Salem.  In this period in Lincoln's life  he had just left home, moved to  a small Illinois village called  New Salem, that is not there  anymore, he got into the  Illinois volunteers and fought  in the Blackhawk War.  He said that he never actually  saw an Indian but they spent  quite a bit of time chasing  around Blackhawk's band, but  that was helpful when he went as  a very young man to run for  office, because he was a  veteran.  He ran for office once, and  didn't get it, and I think that  he got it on his second try, so  that tells you this story, and  the essays have been constructed  such that they tell you  something about the particulars  of Lincoln's life, but they also  tell you about the general  context of the period, and in  1832, Indian fighting was a big  thing that was going on in this  country.  If you read the historical  literature about, say, at this  point Jackson was president,  Jackson's first term, Indian  fighting was the major thing  that was going on, at least from  a diplomatic point of view in  this country.  So Lincoln's, the lens of  Lincoln's life lets you see  that.  So we have those two things.  Now, in addition to the essays  and the little movies that we've  made out of the essays, we also  have a different kind of video. 

 We made a documentary film  starting about 2001 and we  interviewed a lot of scholars  about Lincoln, and in order to  make about a 50-minute film, you  have to shoot 20 to 25 hours  worth of video.  It's because you have your  general, it's not really a  script, it's what you'd call a  treatment, you have your idea of  what the story within is going  to be, but you can't sit down  with someone who's a scholar  from Columbia and say, "Okay  now, when the camera turns on,  say this."  You have to interview them,  and they say what they're gonna  say, and then the filmmaker with  whom we worked goes through and  picks out their quotes that the  different scholars say in order  to kind of carry the story  forward.  So you've got 50 minutes, maybe,  that you use, and then you've  got about 20 hours that lie on  the cutting room floor, and we  thought it would be a good idea  if we put that video to use.  We filmed it in digital format,  to see scholars talking about  different kinds of themes, and  one of them, there's just a  general theme of Lincoln, as a  -- and you can see we have a  number of different scholars  here.  And the first one that I used,  and I'm not at all sure that  this is actually gonna play, but  you get the general idea that  you can go, and these will be  anywhere from like three to six  or eight minutes long.  (video plays)  >> Video: There's  no way to understand American  history unless you understand  Abraham Lincoln.  The war and his leadership of  the war is just too crucial to  the kind of nation the United  States was at the time and has  become.  So I think you have to, whether  you like Abraham Lincoln or not,  you have to think about him, in  the same way that you have to  think about other such leaders  in the history of the world.  >> Drew VandeCreek: Okay, so,  it's pixelating quite a bit  because we actually have it full  screen here.  It will look better, and I  didn't have time to set it up  perfectly, if you look at it on  a smaller screen as opposed to a  full screen. 

 But once again, the idea that I  had in mind here was a Ken Burns  film.  If you watch a Ken Burns film,  what does a Ken Burns film, you  generally will have what they  call a "talking head," a scholar  or some kind of expert talking  about something that happened,  and then the camera will cut out  and will pan across a map, or a  letter, or a photograph or  something, while a voice is  going on.  Our site tries to be a kind of  make-your-own Ken Burns movie.  You've got access to the primary  sources, if you get into a  primary source and you want to  know, what are they talking  about?  They're talking about the  Mexican War, what are they  talking about?  You can go over here to  Lincoln's biography, when he was  in Congress, this is about the  Mexican War, or you can go to  the video and see what do we  have scholars talking about this  period, what do we have scholars  talking about this issue.  So it's a site that has a number  of different raw materials in it  that you can use and shape in   different ways depending upon  what you're curious about.  Now, in the course of building  the site, we did a couple of  other things that are more  straightforward and practical.  One of which is we got a grant  and we made some classroom  lesson plans.  When you have quite a bit of  stuff on your site, obviously  teachers might be able to find  something that's useful to use  in their classroom there, but  they're gonna have to sort  through a lot of these things  and think to themselves, "Okay,  how does this fit in to what I'm  supposed to be teaching for this  week or that week?"  So what we did is we had  someone who worked for us who  had her Illinois social studies  certification, so she knew how  to put together a lesson plan  and so on, she had been a  student teacher and she had  taught, and she put together  these packages, lesson plans,  and this is in a format that a  teacher would recognize.  And basically it's chosen some  things that we thought were  particularly interesting, a  group of things that fit  together on a particular theme  so a teacher doesn't have to  spend hours and days digging  through our site.  Of course they certainly can,  but we wanted to make something  available that was a little bit  more ready to go. 

 So we have a number of those  things.  We also have tried to make a  foray into cultural tourism, and  this is much less elaborate, but  it's basically just a number of  different Lincoln-oriented  places that you might find  something that has to do with  the period or some of the topics  on our site.  Here is the Lovejoy Memorial in  Alton, this is a site where a  prominent anti-slavery editor  was killed by pro-slavery mob in  the pre-Civil War period.  Obviously we want to try to  encourage people to go to  historic sites and things like  that and we think that naturally  integrates with some of the  information that we have on our  website and we would love to be  able to get money to put up not  only texts that you could print  off so when you go to this place  you could learn some additional  background, but we'd also like  to be able to have multi-media  things that you could download  to your handheld or your cell  phone or whatever.  The issue is that the funding  agencies aren't quite there yet.  They're not, there's no one in  place to really fund that kind  of thing yet, so we're trying to  figure out how to do that.  But we think that there's  definitely a niche for that.  So that's the Lincoln site.  I've gotten done a little bit  sooner than I thought, but I  think that that will leave  plenty of time for questions.  If anyone has any questions, I  would be happy to answer them. 

 If anybody wants to have any  discussion, I would be happy.  Yes, ma'am?  >> Can you put one of those  songs on that sound one?  >> Drew VandeCreek: Excuse me?  >> That "Songs of the Day."  Can you play one of those?  >> Drew VandeCreek: Well, I  tried to play it, and...  (inaudible)  >> Drew VandeCreek: Okay, okay.  We just downloaded the software  right now, so here goes nothing,  we're gonna see.  (music plays)  >> Drew VandeCreek: I'm glad  that that was able to work.  But you kind of get a flavor for  what something like that might  have been like.  And we really didn't spend too  much time or money trying to  make the recording of this  perfect, first of all because we  didn't have the money to do it,  but in 1840 people sitting  around a tavern singing this  song would not have had time for  36 takes.  They just would've sung it.  And so it's just kind of a  warts-and-all recording.  But we think that it's something  that to our knowledge no other  digital library or digital  history project has done  anything like this, so we're  trying to make use as much as  possible of the multi-media  potential of the web to help  people learn about history in  different ways. 

 Yes?  >> Do you have any archive  material from the Wisconsin  Historical Society's collection.  >> Drew VandeCreek: No, no.  That's one of the things that I  didn't really get into in  talking about some of the  origins of this.  This is an Illinois project, and  the money for it came from the  federal government, and the  federal government gives money  to state library agencies for  the different states every year,  and in our state it's the  Illinois State Library, which in  addition to being a physical  place where there are a lot of  books is also kind of the  mothership for all of the  libraries in the state.  And they give grants for this  kind of thing, and they gave in  1998 a very large grant for this  and there were materials  digitized in a number of  different Illinois institutions.  But not anything out of the  state.  Now we have some subsequent  projects, we have one that's  about Mark Twain, that are from  different states.  But I think it would be safe to  say that putting together  something like this with all the  different institutions within  one state, much less over other  states, is kind of a diplomatic  initiative.  There are copyright issues, and  that's of course very serious  legal issues.  And different institutions have  different standards, and there's  also the issue of who controls  what the content looks like,  what do the graphics look like,  what does the format look like,  and things like that. 

 And the more players that you  get in a project like this the  more complicated it gets.  We could certainly benefit from  the materials from the Wisconsin  State Historical Society, is  that the proper title, the State  Historical Society?  >> Wisconsin Historical Society.  >> Drew VandeCreek: I know that  as a scholar in my own research,  I've been there many times and  they have one of the best  collections of primary sources  in the country.  But when we were putting this  together, things were  complicated enough as it was.  >> A follow-up question.  Do you have links on your site  to, for example, National  Archives and other places where  other presidential figures are?  >> Drew VandeCreek: We have some  links, there's so much linking  stuff out there that we don't  attempt to keep up with all of  it, but here are, for instance,  other Lincoln websites.  Here's the Library of Congress,  the presidential papers, the  Abraham Lincoln Association, the  Abraham Lincoln presidential  library in Springfield.  The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial  Commission, things like that, so  we have some.  Yes?  >> (inaudible)  >> Drew VandeCreek: Well...  >> (inaudible)  >> Drew VandeCreek: It took,  I was hired in the spring  of 1998 and we had  an actual site by 2000, it  didn't have very much on it, but  I had to hire some people and  kind of start from scratch. 

 So I would say that the site was  nearing the condition that you  see now by about 2003 or so, and  the way that it really worked  was, we had a generous grant  from the Illinois State Library,  and that helped us get going,  but we got subsequent grants  that added to this.  The whole site, by the time you  put together what the host  institution, I actually work for  NIU, Northern Illinois, by the  time that you look at the money  that they put into it in paying  part of the salary of some of  the staff, some of the grants we  got, it was probably about $1  million.  To do this.  And kind of my job, I have to be  kind of a jack-of-all-trades and  master of none, and it has kind  of an entrepreneurial side to  it, too, I have to figure out  where some of the money is going  to come from.  Let's see.  Here's some of the project  sponsors.  There's the Illinois State  Library, and that is the actual  physical Illinois State Library,  the National Endowment for the  Humanities, Humanities Council,  the Robert E.  McCormick Tribune Foundation,  the Institute of Museum and  Library Services.  As you can see, we had to  scramble.  So the site, we do keep adding  things to it, but we're not as  intensive, process of adding  things as we would've been in,  say, 2001, 2002, 2003. 

 We got a separate grant for the  songbooks, we did a grant on  Antebellum presidential campaign  materials, and it was songbooks,  there was also a whole genre of  presidential biographies, when a  person ran for the presidency  they hired somebody to write a  biography of their life, and  they talk about, depending upon  what party you were in they  played up different parts of a  person's life.  If you were a democrat, they  tend to talk about how many  bears you killed and how many  wars you fought in and things  like that.  And if you were a Whig, it was  like, of what faith were you and  what did you accomplish in  business, and had you gone to  college.  It's really a good way of  looking at what the two  different political cultures  were.  But that's how we got all the  songbooks, we got a separate  grant for a couple hundred  thousand dollars to do all that  kind of thing.  So quite a bit actually went  into it.  >> So if you just bring up this  lincoln/net, will this come up,  or do we have to go into it?  >> Drew VandeCreek: This is the,  the name of the site is Lincoln  Net.  And I have for everyone who's  here, I have some brochures that  I can pass out so you don't have  to try to remember anything  here.  Can you maybe help me pass some  of these things out?  And I have some things that have  to do with a couple of our other  sites, too.  This is just so you can take  this home and you know what the  URL is, you know what the thing  that you have to type into the  web browser is to be able to get  to it. 

 Are there any other questions?  Is there anybody here who's a  teacher?  No?  Okay.  I thought maybe you were a  teacher, you were asking  teacher-ish type questions,  yeah.  >> No, but I'm a fundraiser, so  I appreciate all the work that  you did today.  >> Drew VandeCreek: Yes, sir?  >> This is a great project, I  want to compliment you and your  team and so forth, it's just  fabulous.  It's been pretty fascinating,  actually.  When did you start and how long  did it take you, it looks like  there are an awful lot of  contributors.  >> Drew VandeCreek: Well, we  started in 1998.  I went to a graduate program at  Virginia that, in the early  1990s was one of the first ones  to get into digital technology  for the humanities in a big way.  So when I was getting my PhD I  thought this was something that  looked like something that I  might want to do, something like  this, it was a little bit more  entrepreneurial than a teaching  job, and teaching jobs are very  hard to get, and I was thinking  to myself, how good would it be  to have to scratch and claw to  get a teaching job and then  you're at Southeastern Oklahoma  A&T for the rest of your life,  you know, and I'm not from that  part of the country, I wouldn't  be comfortable there.  So I thought this gave you, or  this offered an opportunity to  do a different kind of thing, so  when I was at Virginia, I  learned, I don't want to say  that I learned the technical  skills, because I did none of  the technical work on this site  myself. 

 I don't know how to program, I  don't know how to process video,  I don't know how to process  sound, I don't know how to do  markup, but I knew enough about  the various specialties to know  where to go to get experts to  do that kind of thing.  And the team basically was  myself and there was a librarian  who was very talented, and she  handled really the library  skills, and the library skills  were the organization of the  data, in order to have things be  searchable and organized the way  that they are, they have to be  marked up according to precise  standards.  And you have to know what those  standards are and you have to  know how to implement them, and  that, as much as knowing how to  run a library with books in it,  that's why people go to library  school nowadays to know what  their standards are, and she  helped me.  She was also the person who had  her teaching certification, so  she was able to do the lesson  plans, she was also a very  talented musician, so she was  able to do a lot of the music  stuff.  So I was lucky.  One of the things that I found  that I needed to do in order to  get a project like this done was  something that I call  "scavenging."  If I were to do this purely on  the up-and-up, that is to say by  hiring outside professional  firms to do the web graphics, by  hiring professional musicians to  do the playing and singing, this  would've cost more than twice as  much.  But on a large university  campus, there are a lot of  talented people who are working  in jobs other than what that  talent might be.  Now, Northern Illinois is not a  school the size of Wisconsin  here, but it's a school of  25,000 people, and I found a  person who was a librarian in  our building who was the art  librarian, that is he's in  charge of buying the art books  and working with the art  department to see what they want  the library to do, but he's also  a very talented graphic artist.  So he did all these graphics for  us for free, and as far as  finding people to do the musical  content, we have a very good  college of music, and students,  particularly graduate students,  have an interest in doing that,  because at this very early date,  these things would've been done  in '99 and 2000, they're able to  do a performance that's on the  web.  So if they want to go get a job  singing or something, they can  say, "You can listen to me sing,  and it's right here on this  site."  So you've got to be able to  kind of play all the different  angles. 

 Yes sir?  >> The technology from '98 to  now has changed tremendously.  What issues, I was just down at  the state historical society  here and they were scanning in a  large collection of newspaper  clippings and period clippings  are very difficult to --.  What's the state of the  technology now?  >> Drew VandeCreek: It's a big  challenge.  One of the things, when I talked  about the thing that the  librarian handled, the idea of  the standards that we use, in  the best case, if you use the  standards properly, the data  that is housed or that is  encased within that standard,  and what I'm talking about is a  bunch of like markup pegs.  If you've ever looked at a  webpage and actually seen the  html that goes into it, there's  a bunch of little chicken  scratch looking things.  Any piece of digital data is  encased in code like that.  And if you do the code properly,  the data should be able to be  moved from one format to  another.  I don't want to say seamlessly,  but what you don't want is you  don't want to get things  stranded.  You don't want to be stuck with  78 RPM records in a compact disc  world, which is, if you don't  keep up with the technology, I  think that's what you're  generally dealing with.  For the images, you want to make  an archival scan at at least 300  to 400 dots per inch. 

 If you were to put something  that dense, that big on the web,  you'd never be able to download  it in any kind of time, so you  spin out another kind of web  file, something called a jpeg  file, which is another standard.  A web browser can generally only  show 72 dots per inch, so you  make a much lighter weight file  that goes on the web, but you  have in your archive that master  file, so if there are later  formats or later things happen,  you have something that has as  much of the data from that  picture that you took of the  painting or the map or the  photograph as possible so you  can spin new formats out of  that.  Does that answer your question?  >> (inaudible)  >> Drew VandeCreek: Newspapers,  as you said, are notoriously  impossible.  We have some newspaper stuff  in here.  We have more newspaper stuff, we  have a site about Illinois  during the Civil War and that  has a lot of newspaper stuff in  it, and what we really found  was, it's much easier just to  type them in.  We don't do whole newspapers for  that, we just go through and  pull out the Civil War stories  that are about "Local Unit is in  Battle of Gettysburg," or  something that was happening on  the homefront as far as politics  or anything like that.  And we just found students that  were good typists and we just  had them type them in.  Generally something from the  19th century, if it's on paper  that's not too badly yellowed,  it will scan fairly well, so we  haven't had too much problem  with that.  Obviously, the farther along you  get in time, the better the  scanning's gonna go.  And the scanning software has  gotten much better. 

 We actually use a scanning  product that's made in Russia,  and you can actually train it.  Say that you're dealing with a  long book and they're using a  font where the "r" looks  slightly funny.  You can go into it and tell it,  "this is an 'r.'  Read this as 'r.'"  And we think the Russians  were probably good at this  because they have such a  crazy-looking alphabet anyhow.  But it's something that's now  used by a lot of people in this  country, so we aren't the only  ones.  Yes.  >> Just one more quick question.  Are you familiar with the  National History Day Program?  >> Drew VandeCreek: Yes.  >> So this would be something  that would be great in terms of  primary sources that are  accessible to people.  >> Drew VandeCreek: Yeah.  >> How successful do you think  it has been?  Have there been a lot of people  using the site?  >> Drew VandeCreek: We have,  it's difficult to tell just what  use people are putting it to,  but we have generally over 3,000  unique users every day. 

 And we get inquiries from people  from foreign countries.  I've gotten inquiries from, I  don't know, Argentina and places  like that.  If something is on the web,  people are gonna find it.  You can't, people put it to  different uses.  And we get, sometimes a message  will be, "I think that there's a  typographical error on your  site, will you please go look at  it?"  And sometimes it'll say, "I  have a paper on Lincoln due  tomorrow morning, please send me  everything that you have on  Lincoln."  (laughter)  And the idea is,  the whole idea is, we don't have  to send it to you, it's already  there.  It's on your desktop, it's  already there, you don't have to  go check the mailbox.  But we get a whole different  range of messages.  But we think that we get about  3,000 individual users every  day.  Obviously, more during the  school year.  February is our biggest month  because it's Lincoln's birthday  and a lot of schools will run a  Lincoln program or something. 

 So yeah, we are very satisfied  with the use that we get.  Most people find us through  Google.  I do this kind of thing several  times every year to help people  find us, but generally our site,  when we check, if you put in  Abraham Lincoln in Google, will  come up on one of the first two  pages, which is where you want  to be.  Because very few people will go  on to the seventh or the 50th  page and some of that has to do  with the way that Google's  algorithms work, is, it has to  do with how many other people  have links to your site and how  many other people use your site.  So if we're coming out on top in  Google, or near the top in  Google, that would suggest that  other sites, be they at schools,  universities, different places,  have links to us, which is good  to know.  Because it would suggest that  they're taking us seriously.  Anything else?  Well, thank everybody for  coming, it's been very nice.  (applause)