Creating a Classroom for Democracy

David Clark, Truman Presidential Museum & Library, USA
Scott Roley, Truman Presidential Museum & Library, USA
http://www.trumanlibrary.org

Demonstration: Demonstrations - Session 1

The "Creating a Classroom for Democracy" demonstration will show how the Truman Library has transformed many of the static pages on its web site to pages that are displayed through a large relational database. The relational database contains President Harry S. Truman's daily appointment calendar, presidential travel logs, speeches, press conference transcripts, biographical sketches, student research files, chronologies, educational lesson plans, oral history transcripts and photographs. Using all these sources, the database displays content for the Truman Library web site in a myriad of ways, including showing a day in the life of President Harry S. Truman. For example, the daily calendar provides a list of the appointments for each day of President Truman's administration. Through the database, the daily calendar also displays biographical sketches of individuals that met with the President, photographs of meetings and events, and speeches given by the President. As documents are added to the database the functionality will increase exponentially.