Footnote Review

Search through millions of images of original source documents, add comments, or post your own images on Footnote.com.

Summary

Ever wanted to relive your history class from High School, but using real historical documents as the textbook instead? Ever wanted to comment on a historical figure’s writing, like we do today on blogs? Footnote.com allows you to do just that. Just don’t expect a reply back from the author though if you do leave a comment. The conversation will have to remain in the present day.

Footnote is an amazingly vast and visually stunning web site that presents an online archive of historical documents. The site boasts over 18 million documents, including many from a partnership with the National Archives and is adding over 2 million documents a month. Footnote combines their documents with a number of social features, attempting to bring a communal experience to studying history and looking to start conversations about the documents and stories within. Trouble is that unless you pay, this potentially great resource will likely remain untapped and the user community seems to be a very insignificant part of the site at this point. Membership fees to access all of the content on Footnote are $7.95 USD for a monthly subscription or $59.95 USD for an annual membership. Single images can be purchased for $1.95 USD.

The site consists of 3 primary features: documents, pages, and spotlights. How these features all interact can be somewhat confusing, but hopefully by walking though the areas we can gain a better understanding of how all the parts move together.

Documents are collections of scanned images about a topic. The documents on Footnote cover a wide range of topics, from periods and subjects such as The Revolutionary War, The Civil War, the Spanish ship, Amistad, made famous by the movie of the same name, and even UFO sightings. Without a membership, there is a limited set of documents available (65 titles available currently), but you do get a chance to experience the best part of the site, the Footnote image viewer. The image viewer utilizes the Adobe Flash player for a fully interactive experience. Taking a look at perhaps the most famous document in U.S. history, the Declaration of Independence, the viewer allows users to zoom, rotate, download, add comments and annotate.

Searching for an image by title

Viewing an image on Footnote

Annotation can come in several forms and lets users become scholars by transcribing text, or noting names, places or dates. Those comments and annotations are collected into an area off to the side of the image viewer for easy scanning. Annotations are going to be the make or break feature in our book, because while it’s fun to look at some of these documents, there is only so much that our 21st century eyes can understand when looking at the writing in these documents.

Spotlights are user created collections of images that draw from the documents in Footnote or images you upload yourself. The goal here is to find the most interesting documents from the collection and try to spark a conversation about it. There have been just over 600 spotlights (at the time of this article) created, with the most popular having only two comments.

Users can share their own stories in the Pages section. Much like creating a blog, or another online document, pages allow you to add sections to it as you go along, allowing you to track research or share information as it comes to you. There is a neat picture viewer that you can add to your posts when sharing photos as well. There have been over 1300 pages created, so this is getting more use than the Spotlights, however there is still only a handful with a comment. Outside of the Footnote collection, this feature can be an interesting collaboration platform for history buffs and genealogists working on their own collections.

Conclusion

Footnote certainly draws you in with its great design and interesting content, but it may not be worth the price of admission. We certainly understand that this is not your typical sharing site like Flickr, YouTube, or Scribd which utilizes user uploaded content, and that a tremendous effort has been made by the Footnote team in order to bring all of these documents online. But, we can’t help but wondering what would happen if Footnote were opened up to all for free. The biggest problem we see right now is that there is very little visible user participation, and if the goal is to start conversations about these documents, then it needs to have a low barrier for users to get in there. It would be interesting to see it free for students at least, who could be a great source of content as they are studying about topics covered in Footnote. Ultimately, Footnote will have a tough decision to make. Will it be a sandboxed document archive that deemphasizes the social features or will it be a thriving community that wants to learn about history?

Pros:

• Visually appealing
• Vast collection of documents can keep you interested for hours
• Social features bringing the conversation about the past to the present online world. 

Cons:

• Fees for full access keep away all but the most dedicated history buffs
• Navigation can be confusing (with pages, documents, spotlights
• The distinction is easily lost for newcomers)
• Little noticeable user activity
• The images are more often than not unintelligible to modern eyes
• Image loading is slow.