Web Review 2

Travel, Tourism, and Urban Growth in Greater Miami: A Digital Archive
http://scholar.library.miami.edu/miamidigital/
Created and maintained by the Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami.
Reviewed Sunday June 7, 2009.

This site, Travel, Tourism, and Urban Growth in Greater Miami: A Digital Archive, uses essays, a detailed timeline, and an image gallery to examine the growth of Miami and the history of its travel and tourism industry. The website's homepage has an essay by the project director that introduces the archive. The site has seven main sections, broken up into advertising, architecture, environment, land use, migration, tourism, and transportation. Each section is introduced by a three-to-five page essay and features a chronology and bibliography. There is also an image gallery with more than 590 subjects, many with multiple images that can be searched. The visitor can browse the gallery by subject, location, resource (such as photographs, postcards, etc.), or collection. The site also offers an overall chronology divided into sections from 1800 through World War I, World War I through the 1930s, World War II through the 1950s, and the 1960s through the 1990s. The chronology can also be viewed by the many themes including civil rights, the Great Depression, hurricanes, land use, migration, and tourism. The bibliography lists various books, links to related websites, and other similar archives. It also offers incredible resources for teaching and researching the history of Miami and South Florida.

The content is sound and current due to the presentation of it, especially in the extended bibliography and ease at which the information can be located. The content is clearly presented for anyone to read and the information is up to date. The interpretation or point of view is that Miami became a growing center of urban development due to the unique architectural expansion of the city and the tourists that chose to help the city grow by remaining there. It also expanded due to the development and extension of transportation, advertisements, the unique environment that surrounds Miami, the land use and mitigation of the area. This website gives viewers an in depth analysis through text and many fantastic images that create a successful narrative about the city of Miami and its history.

The form is very navigable and easy for anyone to use, moving from one page to the next, from topic to topic without becoming lost in the information. Everything is very clearly presented for the viewer to examine at any time. It has a very basic design for a website which does not make it difficult to explore the image gallery, essays, and other content available as well. Whatever page a viewer is on, the tabs on the top and/or sides make it simple for the user to move from topic to topic and also go back to the homepage. The structure is coherent in that the site takes you through each section beginning with advertisement, architecture, environment, land use, mitigation, tourism and transportation in chronological order.

The archive offers many images associated with each section that are very colorful and grab the attention of the viewer, which is mainly directed towards historians, researchers, and teachers especially, as well as students and anyone interested in the history of the city of Miami itself. The site offers useful information that can direct historians, researchers, teachers, and students to additional information via books, websites, and other archives, serving their needs well.

The new media and web is used effectively due to the extensive bibliography presented for each of the seven sections. Each annotation has a description of what the information is and where it is from. It highlights the important parts of each annotation and draws in viewers that exhibits and films can not do, which is lead the viewers to further research about each topic concerning Miami.