War through the pages

released 08.24.07

By Tracy Culumber

NCSA aids a collaborative effort to preserve and digitize Spanish Civil War history.

Despite nearly three years of warfare and 70 years of wear, hundreds of paper artifacts published during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) remain intact today. Historians consider many of these surviving materials to be invaluable to the public, serving as both historical references and as pieces of art, yet many are too rare and fragile to be handled and examined. Jordana Mendelson, a 2006–07 NCSA Faculty Fellow, has developed a way to both preserve these materials and ensure that people no longer need to view rare historical materials from a distance.

She and a team encompassing several units of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—including NCSA, the School of Art and Design, the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library—collaborated to launch an interactive website in both English and Spanish. The site is hosted on a server provided by the Illinois Center for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS), a joint effort of the University and NCSA. The website allows historians, students, and Web users alike to browse a collection of 30 digitized Spanish Civil War magazines, page by page.

Viewing history a new way

In January, Mendelson, an associate professor of art history in the University's School of Art and Design, unveiled a digital kiosk version of the website in the "Revista y Guerra 1936–1939," ("Magazines and War 1936-1939") exhibit at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain. The exhibit was on view there until the end of April.

"We can't have 200,000 museum visitors handling these documents, but when you put them behind glass, it takes away the use function," Mendelson says. "[The website] enables researchers to call up materials on their own, and allowed visitors to the exhibit to virtually browse the magazines."

The opening of the exhibit, which coincided with the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, received international attention because magazines have rarely been presented as "high art" in Spain. Although the digital kiosk was a major innovation, its primary purpose was to enhance the experience that visitors to the exhibition had with the over 400 objects on display, including 250 original magazines, posters, and photographs from the war. Collectively from the warring factions, between 1,500 and 2,000 magazines were issued in Spain during the period.

"Magazines are normally limited to archives, private collections, and libraries, and prior to launching this website, it still wasn't possible for people to examine them first-hand," says Mendelson, who spent seven years researching collections, preservation methods, and the periodical studies, and two years working on the digitization of the magazines.

The exhibit, digital kiosk, and website are the result of a multi‑phase, multidimensional project, known as "Spanish Civil War Print Culture," which is meant to preserve, restore, catalogue and digitize the test-group of magazines that are housed in the University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the library of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. While the website draws from just these two collections, the exhibit included Spanish Civil War materials from over 20 different public and private collections in Spain and the United States.

Carmen Ripolles, a University of Illinois graduate student in Art and Design, traveled to Spain to collect exhibit materials from Spanish libraries and worked with Mendelson to digitize the magazines. Ripolles explains that for each magazine, they had to choose the method of digitization which would best serve the conservation of the piece. Some magazines were photographed, while others were scanned, depending on their level of frailty. The scanned images or photographs were then inserted into the Rare Book and Manuscript Library CONTENTdm, a flexible, multifunction software package designed to manage digital archives in a wide range of media.

"We used this software to create indexes for the images so they can be categorized thematically, by artist, by political group or by region," Ripolles says.

Turning concept into reality

Once the magazines were preserved, catalogued and inserted into the CONTENTdm, University of Illinois alumni Mason Kessinger and Phillip Zelnar, both of the multidisciplinary collaborative POCCUO, designed the website. From there, Vernon Burton, director of I-CHASS, and NCSA's Alan Craig, helped design the digital kiosk to display the website at the exhibit.

"Without I-CHASS and NCSA, we wouldn't have had the staff, the technology or the funding," Mendelson says. "We wouldn't have had the capability to develop the digital kiosk or the database in a format the public could access."

Simon Appleford, a visiting project specialist with I-CHASS, initially evaluated and approved Jordana's research. "From I-CHASS' standpoint, this is a compelling example of how there are many humanities and social science projects that just need something as simple as a little hosting space for them to put their project up," says Appleford.

Both Mendelson and Appleford noted that the content for this website is continuously evolving, so the design of the interface had to be very flexible, but still easy to use.

"Although there is a high degree of technology behind the kiosks and the websites, we wanted to keep it simple for the general public, while still maintaining an appropriate amount of content," says Mendelson.

In her NCSA Faculty Fellowship proposal, Mendelson explained that the long-term goal of the project is open discussion about developing new ways in which innovative software can be used to incorporate multi-dimensional visual documents into a Web environment.

"We want to see how people use the website and the kiosk to create a more robust site, and possibly add to it, because it is done through components," she says.

The project and Mendelson's research are ongoing because as more people experience the website, hopefully greater interest will be directed toward the project and the need to preserve, catalogue, digitize, and make accessible otherwise difficult-to-consult materials on the Spanish Civil War that are currently housed internationally in private and public collections. As long as they continue to receive positive feedback and funding, says Mendelson, the project will continue to expand.

For further information:

http://www.magazinesandwar.com/ (English)

http://www.revistasyguerra.com/ (Spanish)

Team members
Jordana Mendelson
Carmen Ripolles