This is the official website for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library. The site includes 10,000+ on-line documents, 3500 on-line photos, indexes to the 400 Manuscript Collections and other information for K-12 and college students, teachers and professional scholars interested in Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Effort is made to include most requested materials in the Library's archives including documents locked in FDR's White House Safe Files. More Diplomatic Files, Oral History Transcripts, and ER materials to come.
Type of Material:
Archival collection.
Recommended Uses:
To be determined by the instructor.
Technical Requirements:
None.
Identify Major Learning Goals:
None are stated.
Target Student Population:
Although the Library has a K-12 Learning Center, I think the current on-line offerings are most appropriate for high school and college students, because the documents deal with wartime foreign affairs.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:
1. Background in the history of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s and the history of World War II. 2. Knowledge of use of primary sources and methods of historical interpretation. 3. Ability to ask interesting questions.
Content Quality
Rating:
Strengths:
This is a very nice site. It provides a wealth of documents form an important period of history. The on-line documents deal with foreign affairs only. The photo collections are of greater scope, but I expect that as the Library adds more materials, the scope of the on-line document collection will expand, too. The site provides both text and original image versions of the documents. Individual document and photograph collections are keyword searchable. The Library aims to make the collection as a whole searchable at a later date. The site has a K-12 Learning Center page that includes information on scheduling class sessions at the Library and a list of possible research topics. A few of the topics on the list should work with the on-line collection, but most of the topics can, at this point, be done only with the in-Library collections.
Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool
Rating:
Strengths:
The site's K-12 Learning Center page includes a list of possible research topics. A few of the topics on the list should work with the on-line collection, but most of the topics can, at this point, be done only with the in-Library collections.
Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty
Rating:
Strengths:
The graphics for this site are very nice-simple, tasteful, appropriate for the subject. The keyword search function is important for a collection this large; the efficacy of the site will certainly be enhanced when one can search the whole on-line collection rather than having to search only portions at a time. The current search engines seemed to work well most of the time. For a site this large, navigation was very easy.
Concerns:
There were problems trying to pull up documents from the Vatican Files. The authors should be encouraged to put a link to the home page on the navigation bar across the top of each page or somewhere on each page. This is especially important in the Vatican Files collection where the "back" button takes one back to the last screen you saw rather than back to the next highest page in a hierarchy of pages.
Other Issues and Comments:
None.
Creative Commons:
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