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 Ratings
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| Reviewed: |
Jun 25, 2002 by History Editorial Board |
| Overview: |
This site is an ongoing digitization project. The site contains the full text
of over three hundred treaties concerning Native American Indian tribes. A
table of contents organized by year, an index organized by tribe, and a keyword
search engine are also included.
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| Learning Goals: |
N/A. The determination would be the instructor and what documents were selected
for classroom use.
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| Target Student Population: |
College.
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| Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills: |
1. Background in Native American history.
2. Confort in working with legal documents.
3. Knowledge of use of primary sources and methods of historical
interpretation.
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| Type of Material: |
Collection of primary source materials: legal documents.
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| Recommended Uses: |
Use would depend on the instructor's application of the materials to the course
content being studied.
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| Technical Requirements: |
N/A
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| Strengths: |
This site simply reproduces a compilation of primary documents. The site
authors do not provide scholarly or contemporary commentary about the documents
(other than a brief description of the source), do not make recommendations
about how to use the documents, and do provide contextual information for the
documents. That's not a criticism, but a statement. The authors are clear
about their purpose and have done an excellent job of providing easy public
access to this large volume of important material. An especially nice feature
of the site, is that the authors provide both an image of and a fully searchable
digitalized text version of each page of the original source.
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| Concerns: |
None.
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Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool |
Rating:  |
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| Strengths: |
The authors did not set out to design a teaching tool. Someone teaching Native
American history, legal history, the 19th century US, or historical research
could certainly make use of these documents in the classroom. The authors
probably do not see teachers or students as their primary audience.
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| Concerns: |
None.
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Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty |
Rating:  |
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| Strengths: |
This is a well designed site. The layout is simple and easy-on-the-eyes. It
also makes moving between pages and back to home easy. The search engine comes
with comprehensive instructions and works quickly. It produces both a summary
version of the results showing only the hits, as well as copies of the full
documents with a button that directs you to the first hit in each one.
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| Concerns: |
There are minor complaints. The authors should include a short explanation of
how the "margin notes" bookmark works within the text version of the documents.
It became necessary to compare the text version and the original page image to
understand that the margin notes were linked to the first line that apeared on
the screen after the button was hit. Using quotation marks with the search
engine didn't produce the results expected. If the viewer types "Ghost Dance,
"
you get results that inlcuded only one of those words or only one of a
variation of the words. There is no clear indication what the orange circles
mean that appear next to the search results. They may correlate to the
frequency of hits. Real purpose a mystery!
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| Other Issues and Comments: |
None.
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