The Historical Text Archive began as an anonymous FTP site created by Don Mabry in the early 1990s. Mabry, a history faculty member at Mississippi State University, has since evolved the site from the original FTP to a gopher site and then to a Web site by 1993. His ultimate goal was to construct “a world‐wide network connecting all the various electronic facilities of use to historians ‐ ftp, telnet, gopher, and others.” In 1998, the site, originally stored on Mississippi State’s server, had grown to such an extent that Mabry decided to move several components to various commercial sites. Today, most materials are housed on Geocities.com. There are still some remaining pages on the msstate.edu site.
The introduction screen of this site is clean, crisp and invites readers to “Explore the past!”. Being a geocities site, however, users initially face the inevitable Geocities search feature and those ever‐present advertisements and pop‐ups. By the way, the Geocities search feature does not even retrieve items from the HTA site; so it is totally useless on this page. Ignoring these features, one can focus on the site itself.
The first part of the site is laid out in broad geographic areas (i.e. Africa, Asia, Canada, Europe, USA, etc.). After this section are links to topical history. Currently this features African‐American history, genealogy, Native American history, teaching, war, and women. Lastly, there is a list of useful resources ‐ archives, bibliographies,databases, journals, general information,and history departments.
Each link is accompanied by a suitable graphic which did slow downloading time on my 486 considerably.
Under each of the geographic links are further pages with links to either the country as a whole or further subdivisions under regional areas. For example, the European History page has a link to National Histories and also several links to unique sites on Europe as a whole. National Histories contains links to individual countries and relevant sites about these places. The hierarchy is logical and you can work your way through the links rapidly once you ignore the advertising which appears again and again.
Once you locate your subject destination, you are offered a vast selection of sites on the topic, full‐text e‐journal articles, encyclopedias and other reference sources, and full text historical texts for the area. The amount of resources available is overwhelming to take in. Unless you know specifically what you are looking for, browsing can take you a very long time. A chronological arrangement within each geographic area would be a welcome addition to these pages.
Some of the links also lead you to unexpected pages. When attempting to access various biographical links under the United Kingdom page, I kept being sent to an American history page called A Hypertext on American History (http//odur.let.rug.nl/∼usa/). This did lead to some confusion as to what I was looking at.
Duplication of links also occur in some of the pages. Under women’s history, Women’s Studies and Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains both appear twice on the same page. Works such as ARTFL, which are accessible via subscription only, are listed on the page also. Mabry’s work on the HTA is strictly voluntary and is highly commended but problems like the ones mentioned above are bound to occur when a site is created and maintained in such a manner.
Inclusion in this site appears to be by suggestion to Mabry; but this is not really explained in any detail. The site is being currently maintained but a couple of major new Canadian sites are missing. One such example is the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions’ site Early Canadiana Online (http//www.canadiana.org). Once again, this is a problem with the voluntary aspect of the site. A clearer definition of the contents of this site would improve its quality and currency. This could easily be explained in a brief side page.
A unique aspect of the Historical Text Archive is that it is a publisher also. A bibliography of the publications completed by HTA participants are listed in a separate page and include a wide range of articles, bibliographies, documents, reviews, photos, books and songs. All of these resources, even the books, are fully accessible through the links provided. Unfortunately, a lot of these citations are not found within the subject listings and most of the ones that are listed do not properly link to the article.
HTA has won numerous awards over the past decade and justly deserves them; the most recent award being GO Network Web Site Award, May 1999. The content of the database is its strength and now, moving to geocities, perhaps the inconsistences listed above will be corrected.
