Collegiate Times

An idea contrived in a Detroit airport lead to a database of more than 1,000 articles about American History - all written by students.

Originally intended for use with a class about the American South, the History Engine - located online at historyengine.richmond.edu - now contains articles about everything from the Civil War to women's rights.

Created in 2005 by Robert Nelson, Andrew Torget, Scott Nesbit and Edward Ayers, all from the University of Richmond, the History Engine is now in use by nine colleges and universities across the country, and is gaining more users as it grows and develops.  

Students at these schools, including UVa and Furman University, write short articles about varying aspects of American History, and then submit them to the database to share their findings with other students across the country. As the engine has developed, a new goal has emerged: The creators want to give the students a chance to act like professional historians.  

"It's what professional historians do in their careers. Encounter confusing sources and try to make sense of them," said Nelson. "They like to see their own work published, even if it is only on a small scale," Nesbit added.

Although the History Engine is still gaining users, Virginia Tech isn't one of them. History department head Dan Thorp had not even heard of the History Engine until recently.  

"It's certainly worth investigating. I'm not sure which classes would use it, or even how they would use it, but it has potential," Thorp said. "It's still a little rough, however, and the quality of the papers isn't that great. It may never be as useful as an official database, but the general idea is a good one."  

"It's still in the rough stages. This is the first year it's been open to schools other than the University of Richmond," Torget said in defense of the Engine. "We're still trying to get it right."  

The open source format style of the database has drawn comparisons to Wikipedia. The content of the database is moderated entirely by university professors and employs 3-D modeling to organize information by time period, geographic location and theme.

"We'll see how it develops," Thorp said. "It might be very useful to us in the future."

The service is free for those wishing to join and offers an alternative to searching the immense amount of information floating the Internet. Torget told the Chronicle of Higher Education that, "If a person were to read one book a day for the rest of his life, he would not even begin to approach the number of books that Google has already scanned into its database from college libraries. There is just too much information out there."