RCRNL 3.1 roanoke on internet

Roanoke Colonization Related Materials on the Internet
by E. Thomson Shields, Jr., Roanoke Colonies Research Office

Many readers may have noticed that in the Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter masthead are the electronic mail addresses at which we can be reached. These addresses are one small indication of the extent to which the Internet, the computer-to-computer component of the ubiquitously mentioned “Information Superhighway,” has entered into academic life. While not all researchers use the Internet, more and more do. And though it is not yet an absolute necessity to use Internet available resources to do good research, more and more material is becoming available through this means. In fact, there are already a very few materials that can be found only through the Internet, and more materials promise to be available only in this manner in the very near future.

With such realizations in mind, a short introduction to some of the materials related to Roanoke Island colonization studies seems in order. For those who are not familiar with what the Internet has to offer—or are not even sure exactly what the Internet is—a quick trip to your local library can help. Using the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature or Infotrac, the computer equivalent found in many public and university libraries, several good overview articles can be found. With background information from such articles along with the following list of Roanoke Island colonization materials available and a friend or colleague who is already connected to the Internet, anyone can explore and see if using the Internet will be a valuable tool for his or her own research or not.

It should be noted that, to begin with, there is very little directly about Roanoke Island colonization on the Internet. However, there are a few items of interest that can be found. First, the State Library of North Carolina has developed an Encyclopedia of North Carolina available on the World Wide Web (the multi-media area of the Internet, that is, it can transmit not only text, but pictures and sounds as well). The Encyclopedia includes both a history of North Carolina and a guide to historic sites. In the “Early History” section, information about eastern North Carolina’s Native American peoples and a short narrative about the colonization expeditions of the 1580s can be found. Under Historic Sites, information about the Elizabeth II site in Manteo is located. (URLs, or Universal/Uniform Resource Locators, for all Internet sites mentioned are given at the end of the article.)

There are at least two other locations on the World Wide Web with materials specifically related to Roanoke colonization. One is the Library of Congress’s on-line exhibition 1492: An Ongoing Voyage. Set up like a museum exhibition of words and pictures, this interesting overview of Native American and European cultures at the time of contact, 1492 to 1600, includes a section on the cultures of the southeastern United States. To illustrate these cultures, the Thedor De Bry engraving of John White’s drawing on Secotan is used. This electronic version of the engraving can be downloaded (as can the entire exhibition).

The other site with materials specifically related to Roanoke colonization comes from Gronigen University in the Netherlands. There, George M. Welling, who runs the university’s Historical Computing section, along with his 1994 class “Computing for Historians,” put the entire contents of the United States Information Agency booklet An Outline of American History into electronic form and made it available on the World Wide Web. One of the primary documents included in this booklet is Richard Hakluyt’s Discourse of Western Planting (1584), in an original spelling edition, as well as a short introduction to the work.

Though these are the only Internet available materials the Roanoke Colonies Research Office has been able to locate which are specifically related to Roanoke Island colonization, several other sites on the Internet may be of interest to researchers working on this topic. One well worth mentioning is the collection of maps from the Hargrett Library at the University of Georgia. Some twenty percent of its 800 maps are available through the World Wide Web. For example, early maps depicting the New World such as Sebastian Munster’s 1550 Tabula nouarum insularum and Gerhardus Mercator’s 1587 Orbis terrae compendiosa descriptio can be found here as well as slightly later depictions of what became the southeastern United States, such as Joan Blaeu’s 1640 Virginiae partis australis, et Floridae partis orientalis.

Aside from graphic materials, some academic journals can be found on the Internet. In some cases, such as with the American Historical Review, only the most recent issue’s table of contents, guidelines for submissions, and so forth, are placed in the World Wide Web site. However, with other journals, such as the Society for American Archaeology Bulletin, the entirety of several of the most recent issues can be found at their World Wide Web site. And in a few cases, journals are being produced to be distributed mainly—or even only—on the Internet. Two such journals are in the field of sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature and history. One, Renaissance Forum, out of the University of Hull in England, advertises itself as “an electronic journal of early-modern literary and historical studies” and has just announced its formation; no issues have been published as of yet. A second, Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature, has already published two issues, the first including the exploration-related article “‘This innocent worke’: Adam and Eve, John Smith, William Wood and the North American Plantations,” by Graham Roebuck. A good, though not complete, index of scholarly publications on the Internet is Scholarly Journals Distributed Via the World-Wide Web, by Charles W. Bailey, Jr., at the University of Houston.

Another use for the Internet is to access computerized library catalogs without having to go to the libraries themselves. Even though the British Library does not have its catalog on line (i.e., available over the Internet), several British universities do. One interesting example is Oxford University, whose system connects all of its different college’s libraries. Almost all university libraries in the United States are now on line, but perhaps the most comprehensive library catalog available is that of the Library of Congress. Though its system is a bit cumbersome to use at first, the variety of sources and the completeness of the catalog make it a valuable tool.

Aside from libraries, many museums have created Internet accessible sites to show off exhibitions, announce fellowships, preview publications, and so on. A good example is the Smithsonian Institution’s World Wide Web site, what they call their “Museum Without Walls.”

There are many other Internet sites similar to those already mentioned. Finding relevant material requires the use of the various search tools available on the Internet. Different disciplines have their own Internet indexes that can be used to find materials. In archaeology, the University of Connecticut has set up ArchNet, a World Wide Web page that can connect researchers to various archaeologically oriented sites. Also useful on ArchNet is its list of anthropology/archaeology newsgroups and listservs, that is, groups that carry on their discussions through electronic mail. In history, the index to historically oriented Internet sites is the History Department at the University of Kansas’s Full Index of Resources, a lengthy listing of all Internet sites in history they have located. Because of its length, an easier to use, though somewhat less complete, index is the WWW Services for Historians, assembled by George M. Welling at Gronigen University (mentioned above). In literary studies, an excellent starting point is Literary Research Tools on the Net at the University of Pennsylvania.

Finally, if you just want to see what is available on any subject (what is often referred to as “surfing the net”), there are two good general search tools available on the World Wide Web. If you want to explore by general subject area—such as reference tools, the humanities, the social sciences, or even more refined area headings, such as literature, history, or archaeology—the best search tool is called Yahoo, started at Stanford University by two graduate students but now a commercial venture that pays for itself through advertising on its World Wide Web pages. If you just have a keyword for the subject you are interested in, Webcrawler works well, a tool developed by America Online but for anyone’s use.

While there are no plans for the Roanoke Colonies Research Office to develop a World Wide Web homepage anytime in the near future, we do hope to inform readers of the Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter about relevant materials and Internet sites that come to our attention. If you have a site of interest that you have come across, please send it along to the Roanoke Colonies Research Office so it can be shared with all our readers.

URL’s (Universal/Uniform Resource Locators) for Sites Mentioned
FTP: File Transfer Protocol Sites
Gopher: Gopher Accessible Sites
Telnet: Telnet Accesible Sites
WWW: World Wide Web sites

Richard Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting:
WWW: http://grid.let.rug.nl/~welling/usa (From this page, select in the opening paragraph “original documents,” under which Hakluyt’s treatise can be found.)

Oxford University Library:
Telnet: library.ox.ac.uk (When asked for terminal type, indicate VT100.)