SourceLab (An Idea)

How does it differ from other digital publishing initiatives?

Digital publishing has been developing for decades, reaching incredible scale with such mass digitization projects as Hathi Trust, Google Books, and Eighteenth Century Collections Online.  Thanks to long-term initiatives such as the Internet History Sourcebooks Project and Digital History, online versions of historical sources are now integrated throughout US history teaching, in high schools, colleges, and universities.  For-profit media companies such as Pearson respond to teacher demand by integrating such digital material into the textbooks they sell; the Open Educational Resource movement features them in its freely-distributed curricula.

SourceLab's place in this rapidly evolving publishing world is defined by three distinctive characteristics.

First, we aren't a mass digitization initiative.  Our focus isn't on bringing large amounts of new material into the Internet, but rather making fascinating but poorly understood sources ready to use, in classrooms, research, and public history. 

Second, we build our editions with their use as historical sources in mind.  Again, our goal isn't just to "get it out there," but to get it ready for historical analysis.  With this in mind not only do we provide scholarly commentary about the artifact and its evolution over time, but we also seek to put it into formats that make it easy to work with.  Want a paper copy of the edition to print off, or an audio file you can put on your I Tunes? We've got you covered.  In particular, our plan is that our first round of editions will emerge from proposals submitted by classroom instructors, who've found some gem they would really want to get into their students hands.  Unlike mass digitization projects, then, our goal is to build from the demands of specific users.

Finally, and most importantly, SourceLab is






What distinguishes SourceLab is the ambition to draw students into the process of preparing Internet resources for teaching and research.  We want to help them prepare the next generation of historical sources, for use by researchers, teachers, students and the general public alike.  Our graduates will get course credit for their work, towards their degrees; author credit on the resulting publications, for their résumés; and invaluable experience in applying their writing, research, editorial, and communications skills to an important problem facing anyone interested in history today.

We can't understand what the Internet's new historical record has to teach us about the past, until we improve our ability to investigate, understand and present its new riches.   In SourceLab, we're creating a curricular and technological structure which will provide students the space in their educational careers to do just that.

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