By Chrissie Perella

Our long-awaited (and worked upon) digital history project is finally what we can call "complete"!

Please welcome Doctor or Doctress: Exploring American history through the eyes of women physicians. Doctor or Doctress is not just a digital collections website or online exhibit; it is both, and something more.

Our original intention for Doctor or Doctress was "to enable students to become history detectives, conducting their own research in American history by exploring the stories of pioneering medical women." We wanted to create a website that featured our collection material as 'stories'; as a new way to discover, engage with, and interpret primary source documents. We wanted to create a site that would allow primary source material to reach and be interesting to high school students. High school students are generally underserved by resources like digital collections and online exhibits. Students don't know to look for them, and if they find them, may not know how valuable and engaging they can be. Such sites don't often market to high schools students; however, at least in the archives field, outreach to younger people is a hot discussion topic, and one that many repositories are acting upon.  But that's another blog post.

Our 'stories' are created around primary source documents. These materials are put into a larger historical context, giving students a chance to place individual people in events during American history, and allowing them to connect with history in a more meaningful way.  The core documents of each story can be explored in several ways: a digital version of the original, through an excerpted typed transcript, or through an audio file (a huge hit with students!). Discussion questions help guide interpretation and give students a focus when interacting with historical documents.

Our development team customized the out-of-the-box Islandora software, allowing it to support this complex interpretive content and functionality that makes Doctor or Doctress stand out from standard collections management databases.  Islandora's potential for an innovative collections management database and exhibit showcase had not been fully explored, so our work was new and, of course, quite challenging at times.  However, the end result meets our requirements, is attractive, and functions well, and because Islandora is open-source, others can learn from our project.

It's hard to believe that the project formerly known as "the digital history toolkit" is now complete, and ready for Phase II development (which will include more content and possibly more interactive features).  From post-it notes to the web, it's been a challenging, but satisfying, journey to Doctor or Doctress.