COLD WAR INTERNATIONAL HISTORY PROJECT

The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) was established at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. in 1991. The project's digitization effort prioritizes making available previously inaccessible sources from former communist countries. CWIHP interested me because of the ways in which it seeks to eliminate practical barriers to research by digitizing materials in wide range of repositories and by providing documents in translation; the website states that the project “seeks to transcend barriers of language, geography, and regional specialization to create new links among scholars interested in Cold War history.”

The project is very much focused on government documents; there is little if any non-governmental material, and no multimedia materials. The archive contains about 50 collections such as “Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan” or “Ant-Colonialism in the Cold War.” These are primarily subject-based collections rather than the papers of individuals or agencies. The number of documents in the collections I looked at ranged from three to probably a couple hundred. The site also includes digitized versions of the CWIHP Bulletin, the historical journal published by the project.

COLLECTION PRINCIPLES
Though the CWIHP homepage refers to “featured collections” of special interest, there are no stated selection principles for objects to be digitized. The program administrators' assessment of the importance of a document seems to be a guiding principle, along with the desire to make previously inaccessible materials available. The nature of the existing subject collections also likely influences decision making for digitization.

OBJECT CHARACTERISTICS
The documents are available in transcription on the pages of the CWIHP website. This text can be copied and otherwise manipulated. For a small fraction of the documents, a PDF of the original is provided, which allows scholars to read the documents in the original language. These PDFs would likely be of great value to serious historians. I was unable to locate any information about the scanning process used, the processing of the text or any other technical data about the objects.

METADATA
The project provides quite a bit of metadata. Each document is accompanied by a list of 12 information fields including collection, format, creator, contributor, subject and coverage. Many of the fields are often blank, however. The “format” field indicates that a document is a translation. Rights information is also provided, as is information about the location of the original document, the name of the translator if applicable, and brief descriptions of the context and content of the document. The archive as a whole can be browsed by geographic location. The search function seems to provide keyword text searching, and the “advanced search” provides some Boolean functionality. Still, the site states that “Currently the search function is not fully implemented, so we recommend browsing through the collections rather than doing searches.”

AUDIENCE
The audience for this project is an international community of historians, mostly academics. I don’t feel that the site would be particularly attractive to a wider audience, especially with its lack of visual media.