Internet Reviews

Joni R. Roberts and Carol Drost

Joni R. Roberts is associate university librarian for public services and collection development at Willamette University, email: jroberts@willamette.edu, and Carol A. Drost is associate university librarian for technical services at Willamette University, email: cdrost@willamette.edu.

MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive. Access: https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/.

The MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive is a collaborative project founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. The archive was created for students, teachers, and researchers to use as a core scholastic resource for Shakespearean education. The archive contains an extensive collection of filmed Shakespeare performances, with 238 clips and more than 100 full-length productions. At the time of authorship, 14 countries and 53 languages are represented in the archive.

The website is organized into six sections: “Site Guide,” “About,” “Videos,” “Education,” “News,” and “Give.” This organization is user-friendly and incredibly clear to navigate. The “Site Guide” page gives tips for getting started with the archive, including an “Anatomy of a Production Page” diagram that describes how to use the various features included in each individual production page. This is a key usability feature of the website. It allows users to explore the archive at their own pace and without assistance. The “About” section includes how the archive came to be, the team associated with the project, a list of six collaborators and affiliated projects, and a page with instructions to submit projects to the archive. The “Videos” collection defaults to display all productions included in the archive. Alternatively, users can organize the videos by play, language, or region, the last of which includes an interactive map of the world that visually displays the diverse array of countries represented. The “Education” tab links out to groups of essays, interviews, scripts, a glossary, a bibliography, and study modules for use both within and outside of MIT. The “News” page includes reports from around the world about Shakespearean works being produced and published, including books, performances, conferences, and more.

The site is current, with all collections, news, and videos with entries as recent as 2023, and the “Education” section was updated in 2022. Overall, this archive is successful in its endeavor to act as a core resource for global Shakespeare education.—Sydney Orason, University of Alabama at Birmingham, sorason@uab.edu

Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project. Access: https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/index.htm.

The Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project is a freely accessible online public history project based at the University of Washington. It examines Seattle’s distinctively intertwined civil rights and labor movements throughout the 20th century, including Black, Chicano, Filipino, and LGBTQ activism. Its diverse sources include 80 oral histories from civil rights activists, photos, newspaper clippings, essays, profiles, short films, slideshows, maps, and lesson plans. Graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Washington wrote many of the well-researched essays. This project is one of 14 public history projects covering a wide range of social and labor movements in the Pacific Northwest. These projects are produced through the Civil Rights and Labor History Consortium, a group of academics and community organizations.

Since 2005, the project has exposed Seattle’s long history of racial discrimination. A database of more than 500 racial restrictive housing covenants highlights the scale of the problem. Interactive maps reveal residential patterns over time. Partly inspired by the project’s research, Washington State has enacted four laws since 2006 to fight housing discrimination and address its historical origins. A 2023 law instituted a special tax on home sales, proceeds of which will support lower-income, first-time homebuyers with roots in Washington State since 1968.

The project’s website is easy to browse. The top navigation points users to “About,” “Segregated Seattle,” “Essays,” “Interviews,” “Photos,” “Maps,” and “For Teachers.” A button labeled “Explore the Project” opens a dropdown menu linking to pages on “Seattle’s Ethnic Press,” “Civil Rights Groups,” and “Films and Slide Shows.” Special sections tackle 12 topics, including the Seattle Black Panther Party, trade unionism among Filipino cannery workers, and Seattle’s 1919 general strike. Users can browse contents by decade and subject and can access subsets of materials on issues particularly relevant to African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ people, urban Indians, or women. A Google search box enables site-wide keyword searching.

The Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project is a valuable free resource, relevant to teachers, scholars, high school and college students, community activists, and others drawn to the history of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.—Michael Rodriguez, Lyrasis, topshelvr@gmail.com