Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/

This site is the result of a collaborative project between the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the American Social History Project at City University of New York. It provides essays by scholars on themes of the French Revolution, provides the images, text documents, music, maps and a timeline.

Collection Principles
There are 625 documents on this site which they summarize: There are 245 images, the largest number of which are political cartoons. But they also include paintings and images of artifacts. The images are drawn from many repositories, but particularly from the Museum of the French Revolution in Vizille in southwest France and the Rare Books and Manuscript Division housed in Olin Library at Cornell University. There are 38 text documents (personal memoirs, official reports, newspaper articles, treatises, eyewitness accounts)—most of them translated from French to English and edited for the student and general reader. Thirteen maps, which were created especially for this project, illustrate changing European borders in this era, military campaigns, and sites of Parisian revolutionary activity. Thirteen songs document the changing musical landscape of France in the revolutionary era. 382 timeline entries chronicle the key events of the Revolution as well as those leading up to and emerging out of it.

What the site does not say is who chose what to include, what their selection criteria was, why they used images from certain repositories and not others, why they chose the number of items that they did include.

Object Characteristics
--Images are small jpeg files. Each image is pretty small so cannot be very easily studied, although a couple that I looked at had nice enlargement options. Selection criteria or any indication of why some images were enlarged was not given.
--The texts were not digital images of the original document, only translations.
--The maps, again, were not digitized primary sources. Rather, they were computer-aided graphics. As such, I was hoping they would be interactive, but were not.
--The music was streaming audio, using Quicktime. It didn't work well for me--it kept pausing and stopping, but I don't know if that was the site's problem, my computer, or my connection.
--Like the maps, I expected the timeline to be interactive with links to appropriate images, texts and songs, but was not.

The 'about' pages give credit to the people who worked on the project, but no further information about scanning or digitizing.

Metadata
--Each image has a title, a short description of the image, and a source number (although these numbers don't mean much for someone outside of the project). I didn't see any artist information or other pertinent information needed to be able to look up these images eleswhere.
--The texts had a short description with background information and standard bibliographic information.
--The music has context information, lyrics in French and in English and source information. The 'about this site' page explains: An ensemble at Texas Tech University performed about half of the recordings in 1989. Musicians associated with Boston University performed the rest especially for this project.

There was no metadata pertaining to digital characteristics of the files.



Audience
The audience is students or the general public, I'd imagine since this is a university project but does not have the professional level of detail that I've seen on university library sites. (It also says that the texts are edited for students and the general public). Since there is no information on the digitization process, only minimal data on image sources, most of the images are small, and audio consistency is weak, it would be difficult for scholars to do in-depth research here. Even for students or the public, a more interactive site would be more fun and more educational.