Digital History Guide For Dummies

From the onset of the introduction of the Roy Rosenzweig's weekly reading: Digital History: A guide to gathering, preserving and presenting the past on the web by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, I could tell that I needed to keep the highlighter handy because this digital preservation guide would be the "how to" manual for the Loudoun Freedom Center's efforts to digitize our groundbreaking research of Loudoun's enslaved communities at Belmont and Coton plantations. According to Rosenzweig, there are three main advantages of gathering, preserving and presenting the past on the web that every museum must capitalize on:

3 Advantages of Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web

1.    The first advantage of digital media for historians is storage capacity - digital media can condense unparalleled amounts of data into infinite small spaces, providing limitless storage ability.

2.    The second and even more important advantage advantage of digital media is accessibility - online accessibility means, that the documentary record of the past is open to people who rarely had access or interest before.

3.    The third characteristic of digital media is flexibility - online digital archives can contain images, sounds, and moving pictures as well as text, allowing the past to be presented in multiple media formats that combine sounds, images, and moving pictures with words.

For my final class project I'm going to digitize some of the primary source documents from the Belmont Plantation and previous owners and start the Loudoun Freedom Center Museum Online.

The most interesting concepts noted in the introduction of Rosenzweig's guide, was the convincing arguments of why the Loudoun Freedom Center shouldn't waste another second waiting on a brick and mortar building to share our primary source documents and archaeological evidence collection of Loudoun’s enslaved communities with the world. Check out Rosenzweig's guide online http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/introduction.