Drew VandeCreek

University Libraries gets grant to create
Web site on ‘Mark Twain’s Mississippi’

by Tom Parisi

NIU is bringing Mark Twain and his favorite setting – the Mississippi Valley, circa 1800s – to the Internet.

University Libraries has won a $212,000 grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to launch “Mark Twain’s Mississippi,” an online project that will set the author’s celebrated Mississippi works into historical context.

The project will include the digitization of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Dozens of accounts of the Mississippi Valley from Twain’s contemporaries also will be digitized and placed online.

“This project will bring historical context and perspective to Twain’s classic Mississippi works,” said Drew VandeCreek, director of University Libraries’ Digitization Unit. “Twain, of course, gives us a very vivid portrait of what life was like in the regions along the Mississippi River from about 1830 to the 1880s. But dozens of others chronicled this location as well.”

In the 1830s, the “Mighty Mississippi” marked the western boundary of American civilization. Many easterners and well-to-do Europeans visited the uncharted area, writing journals, travelogues and other descriptive materials about what they saw and encountered.

VandeCreek said about 50 of these works would be included in the online digitization project.

“The idea is to document or show how the region changed through this period,” VandeCreek added. “Twain, particularly in his late years, is wistful about his youth in the Mississippi Valley as a less-civilized place. By the time he had become a mature author, the region had become pretty much like any other place. We want to use Twain’s voice and the voices of others to document those changes.”

The Web site likely will launch in the fall of 2004 and be completed the following year.

“It will be of use to students, historians and anyone interested in one of America’s greatest, wittiest writers,” VandeCreek said.

NIU has three partners in the Twain project – Chicago’s Newberry Library, Tulane University in New Orleans and the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Each of the institutions will contribute materials to the Web site.

Like NIU’s previous digitization project on Abraham Lincoln (http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu), the Twain site will include multimedia, such as images, drawings, maps and songs from the era.

One key feature will be an interactive map built with geographic information systems software. The map will highlight as many as 30 locations along the Mississippi River, such as St. Paul, Hannibal, St. Louis and Memphis. A click of the mouse will allow visitors to call up all of the Web site’s materials on a particular location.

The Digitization Unit at NIU University Libraries has conducted several similar projects, attracting more than $1 million in funding over the last five years.

10-13-03