Poor HistoryHodgePodge has been accumulating dust for the past two months–but don’t worry! This was only temporarily neglect because I’ve been working on this:

Presenting…The Natchez Trace Printed Materials web tool

What is this? This is a side project in which I built a Drupal website for a portion of the Natchez Trace Collection held at the Briscoe Center. It’s not an official tool for the Center; rather, it’s something I just made for the Digital Frontiers Conference.

Basically, the print materials (books, catalogs, pamphlets, newspapers etc.) within the Natchez Trace Collection (NTC) can only be found by searching the UT library catalog. When the NTC was being processed, these materials were considered better suited for a library so they were removed from the archival holdings, defined as their own sub-collection and shelved in the rare books library. Researchers who want to find a particular item have to consult the UT library catalog and sift through results from the library-wide holdings. Additionally, researchers who would like to browse the collection are unable to (it’s a closed stack library), so there’s no easy way to comprehend the scope of the collection or what’s inside. To help with this, I made this website/exploration tool. Although, again, it’s not being officially used or anything, I just want to show it off since I spent a lot of time on it and have finally gotten over being overly critical and self-conscious of it. I also thought it would be a handy topic for my stagnating blog.

I should also mention that it is not completely finished; ignore any Latin blurbs you find.