Undoubtedly due to my lack of sophistication and imagination on the web, I designed the site (unintentionally) rather simply. With the main goal being preservation as an archive, and the secondary goal gathering new data to preserve, it still seems a simple project for which a large amount of funding would not be necessary. Unless I am missing something (and I do not doubt I am), the main task would be transcribing and typing oral histories and church data onto the site. I was thinking I was going to do this myself, although it would take a deal of time. The podcasts would also need to be recorded, and yours truly was planning on doing that (save for the female biographies) with the help of some volunteers, friends, etc. It may be that much more could be done with the site, but that is how I see it unfolding. Hence it seems the $0 funding (the most likely scenario) would have me painstakingly typing in all of the oral stories, all of the church data, sending all of the letters asking for other research, asking for permission, links, etc. All of those little (and not so little) things that would need to be done, setting up contribution forms, etc. The $50 K version would at least allow the website to be up, running and useful much sooner, as we could hire some people for that type of thing, to record the podcasts, help find all of the available oral histories, and organize and transcribe the church data on to the site. This would leave me to take care of the legal aspects of getting permission, drafting letters, etc. We could also hire at least one more web proficient soul to do proper directories for good URLs, to further our ability to be found by Google, and perfect our own search engine. We could then pay for those few items of data we had to pay for and we worth having. The $500K version would allow me to hire teams of interviewers, to go forth and succesfully accomplish the second goal of the site, acquiring all of the oral histories remaining to be captured. This would make us The Site for the Great Depression. As to Becky’s excellent suggestion, I have done a lot of research in the Virginia Rooms, and if I don’t do this topic as my dissertation (in other words, if it’s rejected) then I will still finish the project and ask the Fauq. Hist. Society to publish it for local interests. I do doubt any such organization would take this on as a website, but you never know.
I have not done much research on the internet (I know, you are shocked) so I’m not the best person to answer this question. As a lawyer, I subscribe to Lexis/Nexis but I don’t use it much. I have not found it easy to find what I am looking for there. It’s there, but getting to it, with the right searches, has not proven very fruitful. I have no doubt it is me, not Lexis/Nexis. I still find going to the law library faster and better for most research. The same generally holds true for history research on the net. I have not yet been required to do too much actual research, as historiographies have been a big part of my workload and my few papers were done with research at my fingertips, like the church research in Fauq. being hard data I went to churches for, and other books, etc. I already had. I have used it occasionally for a quick answer to a question, but not would you call true, exhaustive research. So it hasn’t changed too many things for me. But I have not been called on to do so, so I will have to wait and see. This should not be too surprising, since we are talking about a man who has 3 jobs, an agent, manages a men’s baseball team, coaches a men’s basketball team, coaches a youth basketball team, runs a couple of golf tournaments, runs the occasional political campaign, has a ten year old and still does not use a cell phone.
