Innovative approaches to presenting archival content online developed by Associate Professor Elizabeth Yakel and students in the Archives and Records Management Program at the School of Information are helping Michigan history come to life at the Bentley Historical Library and on the Web.
The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collection (at polarbears.si.umich.edu) commemorates the contributions of Michigan soldiers in Russia during World War I. The site features digitized collections on the history of this American military intervention in Russia, in which Michigan troops fought Bolshevik revolutionaries for months after the Armistice ended fighting in France.
“The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections Project is the first example of rethinking archival finding aids to provide better access to primary sources on the Web,” Yakel says. “The project makes it easy for researchers to discover interrelations and links between various Polar Bear collections, something that was very difficult to do before.”
Users can comment on collections and individual items and search comments. Visitors have created user biographies explaining their background and interest in the topic, provided new information about the soldiers involved, and linked to their own Polar Bear Web pages. Archivists and reference staff can use the comments to answer user questions or offer research advice or help. The comments capture and preserve the knowledge of archivists and researchers, something not possible with a traditional archival setting.
Yakel says the site is a work in progress and will expand and grow with innovative features, including a tagging feature that allows users to assign one-word descriptions to categorize and organize content. While users can bookmark items of interest on the site, in the future they may be able to annotate and share bookmarked “virtual” collections with others.
“We are very excited about every aspect of this project,” says Francis X. Blouin, Bentley director. “For the first time we are able to deliver an entire set of related archival collections to our users via the Internet. There is interest all over the world in this small chapter of a very big story.”
Mike Gorbbel of Sterling Heights, Mich., president of the Polar Bear Memorial Association, calls the site, “a marvelous method of easily making the Polar Bear collection available to anyone who has both an interest in this obscure military expedition and access to the Internet. I find it to be intuitively organized and easy to navigate.”
