As more and more historical institutions enter into the world wide web, historians, students, teachers and the public must become adept at regulating which sites prove to be valuable sources and which ones can be tossed to the side. As stewards of the past, it is our responsibility to hold historical websites accountable for their content, accuracy, comprehensiveness, usability, fairness, and incorporation of up to date media and scholarship. Though this may seem a little daunting, fear not. A number of prominent organizations including the Journal of American History, Public History Resource Center and George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media have developed guides to safely differentiate historical fact from fiction. The guidelines for many of these organizations follow the same general outline and teach users how to analyze websites and ask the appropriate questions about the validity of a website. These guidelines can be utilized for a variety of sites including the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
The Tenement Museum, located in Manhattan, provides an opportunity for historians, students, teachers and the general public explore the history of tenement life in New York City and immigration in American. The museum allows visitors to enter into the apartments of five immigrant families who lived in the Lower East Side throughout the twentieth century. Each family lived in the tenement at 97 Orchard Street at one time and represents the various immigrant groups that flooded America in the 1900s. The museum’s mission statement states that the institutions goal is to “promote tolerance and historical perspective through the presentation and interpretation of the variety of immigrant and migrant experiences on Manhattan's Lower East Side, a gateway to America.”[1] In order to reach this goal for both museum visitors and individuals who cannot travel to the actual site, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum developed a comprehensive website which places the internet viewer within the walls of the tenement.
When using a website, one hopes that the material is credible and accurate. In order to ensure accuracy, users must analyze the sites reputation and scholarly accreditations. Savvy users easily recognize the accountability of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Not only is the organization reputable, but is supported by the National Trust of Historic Preservation, National Park Services, International Coalitions of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, and The Museums of Lower Manhattan. The site is also accredited by the American Association of Museums and financed by Goldman Sacs. Association with these well known and respected agencies provides the user with some gauge about the work and scholarship that went into the material on the site. In addition to its associations with respectable groups, “you can sometimes tell by the tone, style, or competence of the writing whether or not the information is suspect.”[2] The Tenement’s encyclopedia and information about the families is written in a fairly objective tone and is factually consistent throughout the site.
However, for individuals interested on researching tenements or the immigrant experience, the site is helpful, but not as a traditional historical source. In addition to offering information and links to other archives, the site’s virtual tour and tenement encyclopedia offer historical information about the subject. However, researchers must use the site in collaboration with traditional sources. The virtual tour is the interpretation of one individual tour guide who, despite efforts to maintain some form of objectivity, subjectively chooses the stories that she or he tells. Her version of the tenement’s story has been filtered by her own interests and opinions about the past. Thus, visitors to the site should expose themselves to other interpretations about the tenements and immigration in order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of this era.
More than an archival site, the museum’s site is essentially online exhibit of the tenement. The main audience for the site aims more to teachers, younger students and the general public more than traditional scholars. Using the modern technology, the Tenement Museum provides users with the chance to take a virtual tour of the tenement apartments. This unique feature allows users to go on a tour without ever physically visiting the museum. The virtual tour provides a comprehensive look at the museum. Users can enter every apartment in the tenement and listen to the narration by a guide. In addition to this feature, the site provides teachers with information on school programs and classroom activities and readings, prices and directions for visitors, community outreach through email newsletters, and community events and discussions about modern immigration issues.
The website’s design is somewhat mediocre. The home page has a plain white background. At the top of the screen the heading, which reads Lower East Side Tenement Museum, is in bold black font superimposed on a blue and green wallpaper pattern. This makes the heading somewhat difficult to read and bothersome to the viewers eyes. The seven main sub-columns are located above the heading in smaller black font on a gray color bar. These sub-columns are consistently located in this place throughout the site which makes it easy for the user to navigate the site.
The remainder of the page is situated within a boxed boarder which is divided into several sections that users might want to explore. The main picture in the box shows an image of one of the tenement rooms. Under this image are four sections that show users what is on the site. Each section has its own graphic and links to a different page that may be of interest to the viewer. These include, a virtual tour, an activity to design a flag, Webcomics and a link to an immigrant heritage trail. On the side of these sections is a list of links to tour information, group rates, a biography of the tenement and the tenement store. Below the divisions is a section for the user to sign up for the museum’s E-Newsletter and a list of the Corporate Sponsors and Affiliations which each have a graphic and a link. At the bottom of the page, the site has a toolbar with links to the site map, contact information and job opportunities. Finally, the location of the museum, email and phone number along with the copyright information are set on the same gray color bar that topped off the site at the end of the page. The site does a nice job of continuing the same layout throughout the site’s home page and the main sub pages. However the site uses different heading patterns on each page which creates a bloated use of designs that never looks appealing.
When viewers link to pages besides the main seven sub-columns the design of the pages changes yet again. The virtual tour looks drastically different from the rest of the site. Each apartment has a separate page and each page has a different background color. The layout of the pages is consistent with facts about the family, the view inside the apartment and a floor map of the apartment. Though the user has to play around with the navigation of the rooms, the cursor symbols and the zooming feature, once the user becomes accustomed to the new layout, the tour pages are fairly user friendly. The rooms’ images are clear, but the images of the family on these pages suffer from a poor scaling on the site and “appear to be the size of postage stamps when they are actually the size of postcards.”[3] Despite some of the design flaws, the site contains valuable information for the public.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum also attempts to use the latest trends of media technology. Though the site is generally successful in utilizing these features, sometimes the technology fails to work. The virtual tour’s Podcasts narrate the tour of each apartment and allows users to click around and navigate through the apartment. This element of the site is great as long as the user has access to Real audio player and Quicktime 4 for the footage of the room. Without these programs the tour does not work. However, the site provides links to download the tools and though it might be a process, is worth the effort. In addition to this problem, several links on the site led to a HTTP Error. These errors were most frequently found in the events and education pages.
Like some of the links, some site’s information is dated. For example, the museum talks about the creation of a new apartment that details the life of an Irish family in the Civil War era being completed in early 2007 in early 2008. Visitors to the site can still only access information on the five original families and has not created a view of the new apartment or even announced that it is completed. The site also advertises events from this past January and fails to let viewers know when the site was last updated. In order to keep the site timely and the information accurate, the site needs to regularly maintain and update their information.
As a public history site the Lower East Side Tenement Museum rates well. According to the Public History Resource Center, public history sites must provide users with “Interpretations of materials, Primary source documents, Education and Promotion of a Community of Interest.” [4] The Tenement’s site fulfills many of these goals. The site successfully provides users with an interpretation of immigration and tenement living on both its virtual tour and information about the families who lived in the house. The site also reaches the education criteria. Not only does it dedicate several pages to education materials for teachers (though some of the links do not work), but the site’s tenement encyclopedia, images of the family and artifacts and links to other New York archives relevant to the topic teach individuals about this era in American history. Though the primary source materials are not as prevalent as the amount of text on the site, they do a decent job of allowing visitors to access these materials. The site’s greatest failure in the public history criteria is in the field of raising community interest. The site advertises community events on the site, but fails to generate a large return traffic. Once visitors have completed the virtual tour, the rest of the site seems static. Without engaging visitors to comeback to the site, a community of loyal visitors will never exist.
According to the Journal of American History “the goal of the review is to provide guidance to potential readers.”[5] In reviewing the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, it is easy to see how even reviews are subjective and just the opinion of a fellow historian. Though the site has some flaws, it showcases one institutions noble attempt at merging the museum world with the World Wide Web. The site is interactive and provides valuable information for anyone interested in its subject matter. Ultimately, I encourage individuals to visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and make a decision based on their own specific needs.
[1] Lower East Tenement Museum (http://www.tenement.org/) 2006.
[2] Robert Harris, Evaluating Internet Research Sources, Virtual Salt (http://www.virtualsalt.com/evalu8it.htm) June 2007.
[3] Paula Petrik, Top Ten Mistakes in Academic Web Design, Center for History and New Media (http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/3) May 2000
[4]Debra DeRuyver, Jennifer Evans, James Melzer, and Emma Wilmer, Rating System for Evaluating Public History Web Sites, Public History Resource Center (http://www.publichistory.org/reviews/rating_system.html) April 2000.
[5] Journal of American History, Web Review Guide (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/jahguidelines.html) July 2006.
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