Visualizing Records: The Web as Teaching Resource. Just about every Web site described in this technical report has the potential to be used in the classroom for teaching purposes or even within workshops for continuing education or training in organizations about aspects of records and archives management. One of the greatest needs, however, is to develop resources that can be used to illustrate various aspects of records management, everything from types of documents to office technologies to historical images reflecting the development of recordkeeping.

There are some current visual resources that can be used for this purpose. American Memory (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amhome.html) is the “online resource compiled by the Library of Congress National Digital Library Program. With the participation of other libraries and archives, the program provides a gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. Over one million items from our historical collections are currently available online. In the coming years, the National Digital Library Program plans to digitize more of the Library's unique American history collections and make them freely available to teachers, students, and the general public over the Internet. Special collections to be digitized include the documents, films, manuscripts, photographs, and sound recordings that tell the American story.” This is an easily searchable site, and you can find images of office equipment, autograph collecting, repositories, and a range of other items related to archives and records management. Searching for some particular types of records, equipment, facilities, office interiors, and other subjects does drive upward the desire for a Web site dedicated to creating a public domain repository of archives and records management images.

Another excellent visual resource is Library and Archival Exhibitions on the Web (http://www.sil.si.edu/SILPublications/Online-Exhibitions/online-exhibitions-title.htm), a project of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. “This site features links to online exhibitions that have been created by libraries, archives, and historical societies, as well as to museum online exhibitions with a significant focus on library and archival materials. These online exhibitions draw their inspiration and content primarily from library and archival materials, including, for example: printed books, book illustrations, manuscripts, photographs, printed ephemera, posters, archival audio and video recordings, artist's books, and the book arts (engraving, marbling, and bookbinding, etc.). The online exhibitions in this guide are listed alphabetically by title. A keyword search engine for this site is currently under development, to facilitate access to individual exhibitions by subject, geographic location, and institution.” A keyword search engine has long been promised, but the site is worth an examination because most of the exhibitions are very specifically focused on books, types of manuscripts, information technologies and other similar topics that can be used for teaching about the importance of records.

The Web is also full of personal homepages, reflecting personal interests, providing image resources that can be used in the classroom. Classicist Andrew Wiesner offers a small site (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~awiesner/oralit.html) on “Images of Orality and Literacy in Greek Iconography of the Fifth, Fourth and Third Centuries BCE,” described as a “growing collection of images (with some explanatory text) that may be used in studying how the Greeks conceived of their invention and assimilation of their technologies of writing.” Some universities have also built gateways to Web resources with many images of documents, such as Princeton University Library’s History Web Sites (http://www.princeton.edu/~pressman/hiswebs.htm#websgen) providing both links to full-text and other Web sites. Careful, although at times tedious, searching through the site and its links can bring up images of records useful for teaching.

Examining the Web for its utility in teaching and continuing education does bring up the matter of how the World Wide Web is supporting both graduate and continuing education in archival studies and records management. Suffice it to say that there are growing numbers of efforts to deliver education in the records profession via distance education, but this is a complicated topic needing to be treated in a separate technical report. The fact that the Web is beginning to be a mechanism for delivering education and training is part of the many challenges posed by the Web for archivists and records managers, the general topic for the remainder of this report.