Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Political Campaigns in Lincoln's Time

The history department arranged for the Kentucky Historical Society's History-Mobile to be on campus this week. Local elementary and middle schools were invited to bring their students to visit the History-Mobile and the archives was asked to create an exhibit that would be on display for the same days.

In conjunction with this we decided to create an electronic display that would add information to what was available in the display case. Even though I've drooled over some great online exhibits (my favorite being Not For Ourselves Alone), I hadn't tried to do one myself.

I've been out of the web site creation field for several years now (maintaining a created page doesn't count), so I had a big learning curve to make this page do what I wanted it to do. Fortunately Dreamweaver made it fairly easy to do a cascading style sheet even though I had very limited experience with them. It took several uninterrupted hours of trial and error trying different properties to see what each one would do and how it worked, but overall Dreamweaver made it easy.

The image below shows the physical exhibit and clicking on it will link to the online version which includes more information about each document, including biographical sketches on key individuals of the era, information about the political climate and events and external links to other information. We also scanned some speeches in our collections to OCR to add as links.