example uses of digitized material - brave against the enemy

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Pat Warren wrote:
> I thought I'd give people some visuals on some of the things I'm doing with
> the texts I'm digitizing. I posted the first chapter from "Brave against
> the enemy - Thoka wan itkokhip ohitike kine he" (1944), part of the BIA
> Indian life reader series, a bilingual english-lakhota modern story. ...

Site: http://free.hostdepartment.com/i/imageStorage/nodes/sources/afraidofhawk_br
ave/index.html

Font:  http://home.att.net/~jameskass/CODE2000.ZIP (download, unzip ttf
and htm files - the latter explains installing the ttf file and details
payment options:  $5.00 made on the honor system for single user use)

Comments

Very nice!  And nice looking, too.  I take it that the text format
material is the OCR version?

This makes me realize that Dorsey's two published text collections (and
the LaFlesche ms texts in the APS) are probably as important to scan as
the microfilm of the Dorsey ms material.  I have tended to think of this
project in terms of how to get access to something I have difficulty
accessing, not in the larger terms of how to make it universally and
conveniently accessible.  This approach not only makes the material
accessible to specialists who make a certain level of effort, but, really,
to everyone.  It solves the publication problem as well as the manuscript
access problem.

User Notes

I had a little trouble at first grasping the navigational system - I've
always been a bit dullwitted about icons - but once I had the suggested
font installed and understood the icons (two arrows means further in a
relevant direction than one arrow, like on music players all over the
world) and saw the structure of the site:  home page > index page >
material pages, with material in one of the six presentation formats
selected in the home page, and the index organized accordingly, I was OK.
You can stay in one format, or switch back and forth as desired.  It might
help if there were some of those help boxes that you get by hovering, or
if the home page said explicitly "Select a format." Maybe the index pages
could say index page for format x.