We would like to take a moment to thank you for visiting and using the Special Collections website and for continuing to tune in to our weekly ramblings. We are rather unique in the archives world because we have combined our website with our blog to create a sort of one-stop-shopping environment. We combined these functions about a year and a half ago and all has gone rather swimmingly ever since, but we couldn’t rid ourselves of this nagging feeling that we could do more. Our purpose with this whole darned website/blog thingy is to make our content easy for you to locate and we have been working on a redesign that we hope does just that. So, effective yesterday, we put on a new face.
Our intent, as previously stated, was to make our resources easier to locate. For example, you can now go straight to the index for our archived student newspaper, The Echo, from our front page. You can also link directly to our newly created search page for our finding aids (available in HTML, PDF, or EAD). Simply go to the finding aids page, type in your search term (“civil war”, “cherokees”, etc.) and, voila, finding aids to collections of interest magically appear. A brand new section on our front page, Public Programs, holds information on our activities to engage our users and will soon feature information about our exhibits (physical and digital) and our outreach offerings. We now feature only one “blog” post on the front page, but you can easily see previous posts by using the Site Search function or by simply scrolling to the end of the first post and clicking on “older posts”.
We still have some tweaking to do, but we are pretty happy with the results. Look for all of our pages to continue to acquire a more uniform look and feel and our posts to continue with the same regularity to which you have become accustomed. Tell us what you think: good or not-so-good. Not only can we take it, but we want it! Knowing how we can improve your experience with us and our materials is what we live for! Comment here or zip us an email at archives@utc.edu.