This exhibit, A Great and Growing City: New Orleans in the Era of the Louisiana Purchase, was created in 2003 by the New Orleans Public Library as a contribution to the Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial celebration. It was designed to tell the story of New Orleans during the fifteen years between 1797 (the beginnings of significant influx of Americans) and 1812 (the year Louisiana became a state).
Collection Principles
Utilizing documents and maps from the New Orleans City Archives, archivists attempted to illustrate the social, economic, and political life of New Orleans as it passed from Spanish to French and then to American control. The entry page to the collection contains a good introduction about the period of time that the materials cover. It also contains three documents, that must be very important since they have been pulled out of the collection and placed on the entry page. The exhibit is entered by clicking on a tab on the bottom. Once there, you are confronted by a two column table in the middle of the page. One item is listed per row. But instead of posting a thumbnail of the item, they have the words “Page 1” in place of the first item, “Page 2” in place of the second, etc. You must click on the page number to view the item. The second column is filled with text detailing the significance of the item (that you can’t see). This text is also repeated above the image of the item. There is no discernable reason as to why the documents were chosen (other than fitting in a particular timeframe) . There are 51 items, which appear to be arranged by date.
Object Characteristics
The documents are various combinations of printed and handwritten materials, many showing signs of iron gall ink corrosion. In addition, the exhibit contains materials in English, Spanish, and French. Therefore, it’s understandable that they have not been processed using OCR. Each object contains an English translation that along with the table text is browser searchable. But there is no search tool on the collection itself. The three documents shown on the entry page of the exhibit appear to be related to the actual transfers of land but the metadata is so sparse I’m not sure why the second one merited inclusion. None of the jpgs can be zoomed.
Metadata
As stated above, the metadata in this exhibit is lacking. Each item only contains housing data, which appears to be a folder name and a unique number. Other than that, you must piece together other important data by reading the table text and the translation. Even document dates are not explicitly presented on the site. There is no information concerning acquisition, acquisition date, material composition, size of item, creator, important persons mentioned, etc.
Intended Audience
Since this was part of the Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial celebration, I assume this was created for the public interested in learning more about the Purchase. With its lack of jpgs on the exhibit’s main page, I don’t believe the public would be interested in venturing any further into the site. They would see a column of text staring at them and leave. Researchers would probably not find this site very helpful either unless they knew exactly what they were looking for and searched using their browser search tool on the table text. However, as mentioned above, important information concerning the item is not always mentioned in the table text, even something as basic as date of execution, and a researcher would have to go into each individual item and search the translated text. Not only is the site not very useful, it’s not very appealing and would turn most people off regardless of their reasons for visiting.
I’m a big fan of New Orleans and New Orleans history and I found this site to be a big disappointment. It was nice to look at the archival documents but I didn’t come away from the exhibit with a good idea of what the Louisiana Purchase was all about and, most importantly, what it meant to New Orleans in becoming a “great and growing city.”
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