Civil War Diaries and Letters

Project name and URL
Civil War Diaries and Letters
http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cwd/"


Organization name
This collection is a University of Iowa Libraries collection

Description of what was digitized
The University of Iowa has collected materials from Iowa citizens that were also soldiers during the civil war and digitized them. Pictures, letters, full and partial diaries are scanned in and completely searchable.


Audience for the project
The main audience for the project is the general public, anyone who has an interest in civil war materials.

Type of project background information available on the site
There is a brief project synopsis on the collection main page.


Additional comments

This is a small collection of materials (I think a total of 53 items). On the main page, they provide users with "Sample Searches" which do a good job of acting like a menu system, as all the "samples" cover the entire scope of the collection. That's not to say the search function is not necessary, just that they've given users a good idea as to what the limitations of the collection are.

For each entry there is a toolbar which provides users the options to fit the image to the page, rotate the image or zoom in and out. The toolbar is simple and easy to use, images load quickly with very little lag time.