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I have been working with Glen Bull, Scot French and the students in the Digital History Seminar to design a prototype for an electronic index card used to catalog resources from the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The conceptual prototype looks like this:

This image is a JPEG, and the working prototype has not been made yet. This card would be used to display information from the database, as well as serve as a form used to enter data. As of right now, I have built an initial form used by the students in Professor French’s class to populate the database with some pilot data on events from the 1920’s and 30’s.

At the heart of the this tool is the debate about which information should be the focus of the index card. One possibility is to make the resources from the LOC and SAAM the focus of the card, while the other option is to focus each card on the content K-12 social studies students are held responsible for on the state assessment. Our goal for this project is to focus on the content taught in schools, while offering contextual information about the resources associated with those events.

Some indexing issues not yet resolved are:

1. Many events will have more than one resource associated with them. There are likely multiple resources, such as images, paintings, letters, maps, newspaper articles and even audio or video files, associated with each event cataloged in the database.
2. Many resources will be associated with more than one historical event, person, place, thing or idea. For example the following painting of Marcus Garvey by William H. Johnson could be associated with several items for which students are responsible in their social studies classes:
3. We want to add an assessment piece to the cards that will allow teachers to build quizzes or flash cards. Currently, there is one question per resource, but eventually there could be multiple questions of varying difficulty on each card.

I am continuing to work on this project and develop a working version that has both the data entry function, as well as an interface similar to that which is displayed above. I encourage everyone to offer their thoughts on what we’ve done so far.

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