Rivers, Edens, Empires: Lewis & Clark and the Revealing of America

Rivers, Edens, Empires: Lewis & Clark and the Revealing of America

This Library of Congress online exhibition gives a prologue and is split into three segments: before, during, and after the Lewis & Clark Expedition of 1805-1806. A physical exhibit occurred in the past (when is not immediately clear). The online exhibition showcases a portion of what was displayed in the physical exhibit. The online exhibit includes a virtual tour and a handful of Flash animations.

Selection Decisions:

Many of the physical objects they had to work with are maps so the collection is heavy on cartographic materials. There are also photographs of some interesting artifacts from the expedition like tomahawks and guns. They chose to digitize and display a cross-section of materials that clustered around the themes they wanted to highlight: cartographic formulation and mapping of the Western frontier, “discovering diplomacy” (relations with the Native Americans), botanical specimens, early survey photographs, etc. It’s hard to tell what percentage of the total physical exhibition got digitized, largely because there are not hyperlinks from the object checklist to the digitized objects where they do exist.

Metadata:

Title, date, author, subject, medium, and any additional info are included. The metadata doesn’t follow a clear structure and isn’t particularly easy to read/digest. This is probably what leads to the issues I found with the search function, which has no advanced options and did well on some full-text searches and missed on others.

Object Characteristics:

Maps, document, and photos of artifacts are jpgs. The ability to enlarge is hit and miss and they don’t allow viewing of much detail. The exception is the maps. They can be enlarged at 6 different levels of zoom. A navigator view allows dragging of the viewing box to the portion of interest. There is the option of downloading a very large MrSID file but when I tried, there was no program on my computer that knew how to open it.

Audience:

The audience is the general public that is interested in the history of North America. There is a special section about making it more interesting for children and sections “especially for teachers” and “especially for students.” Serious scholarly research does not seem possible with most of the materials except maybe with some of the zoomable maps.