One challenge of historical research is being able to easily access a representative swath of primary source material. Increasingly the expectation is for these sources to be located online, yet the vast majority of archival holdings are not digitized. Many of our partner institutions along the Missouri-Kansas border lack the resources or expertise to provide standards-based digital repositories. KCPL had the opportunity to bring disparate collections together, tell a comprehensive story and shed light on original artifacts that were often difficult to discover or access. Many digital repositories are simply isolated catalog platforms that lack beneficial analysis, storytelling or contextual information. The Library’s technology solution allows us to bring those elements together in a rich, interpretive website alongside scholarly writing, maps, a timeline and semantic visualizations. Prior to the Civil War on the Western Border, there was no authoritative online source of information about this underappreciated aspect of Civil War history. While there have been both scholarly and popular treatments of the topic, traditional publishing and broadcasting do not offer the flexibility and rich multimedia experience that a Web presence does.

We effectively brought together scholarly, library and archival communities in our attempt to tell this important story online. The Library’s Civil War programming has brought more than 13,000 attendees into our buildings over the past several years. We wanted to build on that enthusiasm by offering a new digital resource. We approached the best scholars in the field to populate the site with long-form essays and shorter encyclopedia entries. A Border Wars Conference, held toward the beginning of the Civil War project, effectively started a public discussion about the topic, and it even generated new scholarship. Seven of the presenters went on to write content for the Civil War website, and they later contributed essays to Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri : The Long Civil War on the Border, published by University Press of Kansas in 2013. In their acknowledgements, the editors credited the Library as the “intellectual and cultural heart of the Kansas City region,” able to “host and financially support the project.” Marrying these scholarly accomplishments with digitized primary source material from disparate institutions was a significant achievement, one that is rarely accomplished in the realm of digital history. This project serves as a proof of concept for sites on other historical topics, which will involve different partner organizations. Having demonstrated our ability to collaborate and produce a high-quality product, the Library is recognized locally as a leader in digital history.

The project has generated significant interest in future collaborations from a number of local cultural and historical institutions. It has facilitated a working relationship with the history department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The school proposed that the Library host a portion of interns from its public history program, primarily to concentrate in the field of digital history. The UMKC history department has expressed interest in having the Library host another conference in advance of our next major digital history project in order to generate similar outcomes for the related new website, local history enthusiasts and the scholarly community at large. We anticipate that digital history projects modeled after Civil War on the Western Border will become an established part of the Library’s reputation as a doorway to knowledge for all people in our community. The website is already living up to expectations, as more than 20,000 individual users have visited since its launch on August 21, 2013. This project was an incredible learning experience and will allow the Library to approach similar collaborative endeavors much more efficiently. We have a working model for managing these projects and have established an effective and sustainable mechanism for staffing and supporting them.