2009-05-01 New Pilgrim Archives Web Site
Pilgrim Archives
new website
Today, the Pilgrim Archives in Leiden unveiled their new and improved web site. The unveiling was done by Peggy Baker, the director of the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
This event was part of day-long visit to Leiden arranged by Jeremy Bangs, the owner and curator of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum.
The photo shows Peggy Baker viewing the new web site together with the director of the Pilgrim Archives.
Pilgrim Archives
The Leiden Pilgrim Archives first opened its doors on 2001 Nov 22 (Thanksgiving Day). The museum is situated on the Vliet, the waterway on which the Pilgrim left Leiden. The Pilgrim Archives houses an exhibition created from the collection of the City Archive and the Lakenhal Museum that gives an impression of the seventeenth century Leiden that the Pilgrims lived in.
On 2003 May 31, the Pilgrim Archives introduced the Leiden Pilgrim Tour, a leaflet-led walk through the historic city centre of Leiden that highlights buildings and places related to the Pilgrims.
looks
The look of the site has changed.
The screen capture below shows what the site used to look like; the home page showed one big graphic in the middle of the screen with buttons on the lower right side to choose between the Dutch and English website.
This screen capture shows what the new site looks like.
bilingual
The site is still bilingual, but there is no longer a page that makes you choose between Dutch and English. You immediately arrive on an English page, and have an option to switch to the Dutch in the upper right corner. The option to switch between Dutch and English page is now present throughout the site; you can switch back and forth between corresponding Dutch and English pages.
Pilgrims
The new design makes it very clear that the site is about the Leiden Pilgrims, and not just with the logo and name of the Pilgrim Archives, and the new home page immediately links to some highlights, such as the page of American presidents descended from the Pilgrims.
There is an image of the Mayflower in the upper left corner, and the name and logo of the Regionaal Archive Leiden (the Leiden Archives) below it. This left-hand column contains the main navigation menu and is present on all pages.
The screen capture of the English home page shows a bar with some text, the capture of the Dutch home page shows a view of the city. It is actually the same flash movie that keeps alternating between several scrolling images.
broken links
The different organisation of the web site makes that old links no longer
work. Attempt to follow such links results in a rather unceremonious 404 page.
The archive should add a few pages that redirect visitors following old links to
the new pages.
content
It is not just the looks that has changed, there is a lot of new content too.
original record
The new site now contains images of the original vital and other relevant records from the period. This example shows the famous 1609 Feb 12 letter from the City of Leiden granting the Pilgrims stay in Leiden, at 6% zoom level, thus showing the entire document within the page with its description.
You do not need to view the document that small. The site offers the ability to zoom to 100% and includes a full screen mode to see as much of the document as possible.
The famous letter full screen at 100% zoom. Notice the inset of the full image in the upper right corner that shows what part of the document is being displayed.
transcriptions
Note that the site does not just provide high resolution images, but a full transcription of the text too, so you do not need to be an Old Dutch handwriting expert to make sense of the documents. You do not even need to understand Dutch, as all documents have short English descriptions too.
search
The old site had limited search functionality provided by KSearch, an open
source Perl script. That old search worked quickly, but provided exact matches
only - if you searched for John Robinson
, you’d only find the documents
in which his name is spelled exactly thus, and none of the other documents he
appears in.
The new site provides much better results not only because it supports wildcards, but also
because the Pilgrims Archives has made sure that if you
search for John Robinson
, you will also find documents that refer to him as Jan Robberts
or Jan Robbintsz
.
presidents
The new site now contains an overview of all American presidents with Pilgrim ancestors, including the latest American president, Barack Obama.
The link on the page is to a single PDF that contains schematic lines of descent for John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, James A. Garfield, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack H. Obama.
This image show the page for Barack Obama. The PDF does not just contain these schematics, but information on original sources, such as the ondertrouw between Franchoys Couck en Hester Mahieu, in the Leiden Archives - and these sources are now available on the Pilgrim Archives web site.
Leiden Pilgrim Tour
The old website had a slide show of the Leiden Pilgrim Tour. This tour is
highlighted on the home page, but what should be link to the page of the tour is
not a link. This is a small mistake and soon will be fixed.
That oversight seems to be the biggest mistake. I tried the site with several
browsers, and encountered problems in none.
view and print
You can order a high-resolution scan, a photo print, and even poster prints of the documents of the website. The ordering process goes through the regular ordering software for the Leiden Archives, which is in Dutch only.
Luckily, you will probably find that you do not need to order anything. You can view all the documents on screen, and the viewing software includes options to zoom in and out, save to disk and to print.
The Pilgrim Archives web site itself a free resource, provided by the Pilgrim Archives, paid for with our tax Euros.
links
web sites
- Pilgrim Archives (Leiden Archives, Dutch & English)
- Regionaal Archief Leiden (Dutch, Leiden Archives)
- Pilgrim Hall Museum (Plymouth, Massachusetts)
- Leiden American Pilgrim Museum (Jeremy Bangs)
- KScripts: KSearch
- Perl
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.