The History Center Announces New Website

In February 2013, The History Center unveiled its new website, featuring a beautiful new design and many new features. Staff hopes the site will encourage both casual browsers and interested researchers to stay awhile and use the new features. While a visit to The History Center in person is still the best way to get to know our collections and do research, the new site should offer more resources to our offsite users.

Visitors who want to visit The History Center in person can use the Plan Your Visit tab to find directions and know what to expect when they get here. Using the Exhibits tab, offsite users can browse selections from our photograph collections and see some of our on-site exhibits as well. The new exhibits are easy to navigate and even feature the ability to download some of the photos in a larger, more useful size.

For researchers, one of our most exciting sections is our Oral History tab. By clicking on Oral History, those interested in Diboll and East Texas’ history can find a list of over 300 oral history interviews from our collections. Each interview transcript is downloadable as a pdf and staff is constantly updating the collection as interviews are transcribed. Additionally, staff can now add photographs of each interviewee. Most exciting, though is the ability to add the audio of each interview as a streaming digital file. More recent interviews have their audio available to stream from the site and staff is continuing to add more audio files as older interviews are digitized.

For researchers interested in our collections, the Finding Guides and Online Collections tabs will give them access to some of our most requested resources. Our most important finding guides are available as pdfs for download, and researchers can use these to see what collections we have. Most must be accessed in person, but researchers will know what they are looking for when they get here if they’ve looked through our finding guides. Our online collections feature digital reproductions of some of our most requested items. They are all available for download as pdfs. This is only a tiny fraction of our holdings, but is a good peek at what we have available for researchers who come visit us. Staff is always adding new items to our online collections.

Finally, the most useful feature of the new site is its search function, located in the top right corner of the home page. Researchers can enter any word associated with their topic and receive a list of results from across all of the site’s sections.

Staff at The History Center hopes its users find our new website useful. We are excited about its new features and are eagerly adding new content as fast as we can.