Historians have been taking their scholarship to the web for sometime now, creating an amazing array of online projects, archives, and courses that embrace all types of new technology. Many of these new digital projects were the focus of sessions at the 122nd Annual Meeting. Below we highlight projects from three of these sessions, to give you just a taste of the excellent history-related scholarship currently being done online. Also see the end of this post for a note about the new “Roy Rosenzweig Prize in History and New Media.”

Session 31
Tech Tools for Historians
At this poster session-like gathering on Friday morning of the Annual Meeting, five laptops stood open to showcase some very different projects being conducted online. Four out of the five presenters hailed from George Mason University, evidence of the excellent work being done at the Center for History and New Media. 

• World History Matters
  Kristen Lehner (George Mason University) presented “World History Matters,” an award-winning site that acts as a “portal to world history on the web” and features two separate sites: World History Sources and Women in World History.
• Zotero
  Daniel J. Cohen (George Mason University) drew quite a large crowd as he gave a mini-tutorial on and answered specific questions about Zotero, an online research tool that collects and manages research sources. On AHA Today we’ve noted Zotero a handful of times in the past (for example, see Making Bibliographies Fun and Bibliography Built Right In).
• Making the History of 1989
  T. Mills Kelly (George Mason University) discussed the ongoing creation of the Making the History of 1989 site, and the upcoming seminar for high school teachers that will use the site and “deepen [participants’] understanding of the momentous events of 1989 in Eastern Europe and China.”
• Omeka
  Tom Scheinfeldt (George Mason University) displayed Omeka, “a free, open-source, standards-based, easy-to-use web publishing platform,” that is behind such sites as The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, The April 16 Archive, and The Object of History. 
• Searching Across Online Archives
  Joseph Wicentowski (Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State) started a discussion on how to create a way to search across multiple archives. He noted the need for “a federated metadata standard for archival materials” and called on scholars and archivists for their input. Contact Wicentowski at history@state.gov.

Session 73
Learning Digitally: New Resources for History Teachers and Researchers
Using a more traditional format than the session above, session 73 allowed presenters to walk the audience through their online exhibits, collections, and projects.

• Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives
  Steven A. Barnes (George Mason University) presented an advance look at the online exhibit: Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives. Once the site is completely operational, users will be randomly assigned a prisoner’s identity from the Gulag upon entry, and will learn more about their assigned prisoner’s life as they explore the site, while also learning a broader overview about the Gulag.
• Meeting of Frontiers
  Sandra Bostain (Library of Congress) walked through the LOC’s digital library project Meeting of Frontiers, which is online in both English and Russian. The site contains over 17,000 library items and over 800,000 digital items, and presents many primary documents from Russia that have never been published and are very rare.
• Making the History of 1989
  T. Mills Kelly (George Mason University) further discussed the Making the History of 1989 site that was presented earlier at the meeting (and mentioned above) in session 31. He outlined the different sections of the site, including teaching modules, case studies, and scholar interviews (some of which are in development and are coming soon).

Session 196
From Dusty to Digital: New Historical Archives of the Twenty-First Century
This early Sunday morning session featured three digital collections, all of which make impressive quantities of primary sources available online.

• Digital Durham
  Trudi J. Abel (Duke University) presented this site’s “unique collection of historical materials and teacher resources for post-Civil War Durham, North Carolina.” Besides sources like personal papers, business records, and photographs, the site also features a number of student-created audio recordings.
• Documenting the American South
  Natalia N. Smith (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) read off the staggering numbers of resources available on the site, including 6,500 titles, 13,000 images, and 297 slave narratives. In fact the site houses the “single largest collection of slave narratives in the world.”
• Aluka
  Aluka is “a digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa.” Javanica Curry (Assistant Director for Library Relations, Aluka) explained some of Aluka’s most unique features, like user-created tagging.
• Rotunda
  Mark H. Saunders (University of Virginia Press) showcased Rotunda, which “was created for the publication of original digital scholarship along with newly digitized critical and documentary editions in the humanities and social sciences.”

Digital history also came in other forms at the Annual Meeting, like in the announcement of the new “Roy Rosenzweig Prize in History and New Media,” created jointly between the AHA and the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. This prize “will be awarded annually for an innovative and freely available new media project that reflects thoughtful, critical, and rigorous engagement with technology and the practice of history.”

This post first appeared on AHA Today.