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Thursday, February 21, 2008 6:33 PM CST
Graduate assistants' Past Tracker Web site a link to Illinois history
By AMBER WILLIAMS, Staff writer
awilliams@jg-tc.com
CHARLESTON — With a click of the mouse, you can see a soldier’s petition for naturalization in 1866 in his own handwriting.
Or a hand-drawn diagram of the Fayette County Jail from 1821.
Through a Web site project, two Eastern Illinois University students are giving teachers and history buffs a resource to experience documents from Illinois history.
The Past Tracker Web site has been developed over the last two years by graduate assistants in the Historical Administration graduate program at Eastern.
This year, graduate assistants Catherine Carman and Dan Grzesiak have put a considerable amount of time to developing the Web site and digitizing documents so they can be an available resource for teachers.
Under the guidance of Eastern history professors Debra Reid and Charles Titus, Carman and Grzesiak have been determining what kinds of Illinois history documents could be of use to teachers and have not yet been digitized.
The two began by researching what documents were already easily available online, so they were not repeating work that had already been done.
Then, they surveyed history teachers at a history teacher’s conference at Eastern about what documents would be the most helpful to them in their classrooms.
“Our priorities have been to address the specific needs of teachers,” Carman said.
In researching what documents were and were not available about Illinois history, Carman said she found a lot of information about Chicago and some older laws.
However, there did not seem to be much information available relating to the rest of Illinois.
The research Carman and Grzesiak are doing goes back to the 18th century in Illinois and covers topics from race relations to the military.
In order to digitize documents for the Web site, the students sought out books through interlibrary loan as well as documents from the Illinois State Archives that were scanned into digital images.
Some important Illinois history documents that already exist on the Internet as digital documents are linked to on the Web site as well, Carman said.
Some of the books they have been able to get from the libraries are very old, Grzesiak said.
“It is pretty neat just to hold a 100-year-old book,” Grzesiak said.
Carman and Grzesiak both came to Eastern from Michigan, so the process of doing this project has taught them a lot about Illinois history.
Along the way they have also learned how to build a Web site and get copyright approval, he said.
Some topics on the Web site not only contain the primary documents or links to other documents, but discussion questions and lesson plans for teachers. Carman, a former teacher herself, said she tried to tailor the lesson plans to the way future social science teachers at Eastern learn to do theirs.
Carman and Grzesiak are continuing to do research and add more information to the Web site until they have finished their historical administration programs this spring.
“I think we are both really proud of how the Web site turned out,” Grzesiak said.
The site can be viewed at www.eiu.edu/~localite/illinois/Online%20History%20Teaching%20Archive/index.html.
Anyone with questions or input on the site can also contact Carman at cacarman@eiu.edu.
Contact Amber Williams at awilliams@jg-tc.com or 238-6858.
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