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Site Source

A 15-volume, 12,000 page, unfinished typescript of a planned reference work. Includes hand corrections, additions, deletions, and illegible words. Contains a good number of figures and tables, and also some math equations. The figures for each volume are linked to from a separate file -- List of Figures -- at the end of a given volume's Table of Contents [Example].

Good quality color page images. Manual transcription. Lightweight but consistent TEI markup.

Site Design

The site design is modeled on the layout and design decisions of the Global Dartmouth site (and so is in keeping with the main Dartmouth website's look and feel). It aims to support basic teaching and research needs, allowing for searching and browsing choices to aid discovery, and the ability to cite at the page level (for references in student essays, etc.).

Search: the full-text search tool used is Google Custom Search (GCS), which is quick, flexible, and familiar. GCS includes the text of the Encyclopedia Arctica, as well as items from two databases of photographs taken by Stefansson, and a Library research guide on Polar Studies. A search box appears near the top of every page, which searches the entire site.

Browse: The 268 encyclopedia entries are browsable through tables of contents for each of the 15 volumes. Page images are linked from every page break. Simply click on the unique ID for a page (example: Vol_IV-0024), found at the end of the page break bar, that looks like this:

Read: the Encyclopedia Arctica's entries are presented in HTML, converted automatically from XML master files. The HTML pages retain some sense of the features in the typescript source (additions, deletions, illegible words, etc.).

To see exactly how the original page appears, please view the page images that are linked from every page break. The lineation of the original page is retained, which is useful when one is comparing the HTML text with the images of the pages.

Cite: Each HTML document has a fixed URL:

as does each text page in the HTML file. The page citation is made up of the document URL, followed by a # mark, followed by the page's unique id:

Each page image has a fixed and citable URL:

Discover: a prominent button on the homepage launches a search of the Summon discovery service for the term “Vilhjalmur Stefansson” with the “Full Text Online” choice selected: Summon. The results include books by and about Stefansson from HathiTrust, journal articles, newspaper accounts, and government documents. From this Summon page students can then search for other topics of interest.

Mobile: the site features responsive design, reconfiguring itself dynamically for phone, tablet, and PC.

Accessible: the site strives to meet a moderate level of accessibility according to standard accessibility tools such as WebAIM's web accessibility validation tool.