Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 2, 1995 TAG: 9511020047
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ELISSA MILENKY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
In Blacksburg, history now is being preserved in the newest medium - cyberspace. During the last few months, the Blacksburg Electronic Village staff has been developing the groundwork for a history database with help from a $25,000 National Science Foundation grant.
The database details the genesis of the BEV from a concept in 1992 to a reality in 1995 with everything from summaries of news articles to e-mail messages. The BEV was launched in 1993 by Virginia Tech, the town of Blacksburg and Bell Atlantic as a grand experiment to determine whether a community could interact via computer and how electronic services could be priced and marketed.
But the database is more than a dry look at a project, said Courtney Martin, the electronic village's information manager. It's a look at Blacksburg.
"The BEV is the community," she said.
The database has been under development for less than a year but the materials detailing the BEV's genesis already are voluminous. There are summaries of every article about the BEV that that appeared in newspapers, magazines (including Playboy and the National Enquirer) and on television. An article written for a French publication was summarized this way by Will Schmidt, a computer science graduate student who worked on the database project: "This article is in French so I can't read it."
The grant application the BEV prepared for the National Science Foundation also is included. And even the messages of the day that appear on the BEV home page have been saved for posterity, reminding people that the first BEV social was a "smashing success," for example.
"Digital information doesn't have that self-archiving function like paper does," said BEV Director Andrew Cohill. "The history base is a way of creating that archiving function."
The community can contribute to the database through the home page. Plans also are under way to archive community home pages set up on the BEV. Electronic forms for community groups to create home pages are being created with prompts that make the process so easy, even the computer phobic can calmly sit at a terminal in the library and make a mark in cyberspace.
"If people use the BEV community pages and these built-in forms, we're going to archive that information automatically," Cohill said. "Over time, you 'd be able to look at what was happening in this organization.
"In reality, this kind of community information is never archived at all," he added. "It's lost."
Although the database is ready for public viewing, there are still larger questions to be considered. Schmidt, the graduate student, said anyone who wants to can contribute a document they believe has historical significance even if it does not directly relate to the BEV. But how much of the database will cover the greater history of Blacksburg as a community is still unclear.
"Do we want to separate the history of the BEV from the history of the town?" Schmidt asked. "But then the village is becoming the town."
The Blacksburg Electronic Village history base can be found at this address: http://history.bev.net/bevhist/.
by CNB