Choices about Utilizing Synchronic MOO Archives

Whenever possible I utilized parts of TWUMOO and its archives, rather than creating pages resembling them. This decision was not made wholly out of the desire to save time, although, that idea did indeed drive my design of the Women's Collection of Electronic Texts where there are literally hundreds of artifacts to reproduce. In the case of the archives from The 2nd Biennial Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference, this decision was based on my desire to show the collaborative relationship and respect the contractual agreement between the University of Minnesota and TWUMOO to give credit to that university and its the graduate students who designed and coded all of the seven hundred or so abstracts found on their website. I should also mention that by linking to some of the original pages from TWUMOO, I was able to provide a taste of the original space, which I believe to be crucial to understanding our purpose, goal, and mission.

But linking a webtext like this one (created to make a specific point) to MOOspaces (produced some time ago for a different purpose) does not come without challenges. Once inside one of TWUMOO's original webbed pages---pages that were not designed with navigational links to this webtext---visitors can get lost. Back buttons on the MOOspaces are designed to help visitors navigate around TWUMOO not around this webtext. For that reason I have produced pop up windows for these linked MOOspaces that can be easily identified as different from the pages of the webtext and, of course, closed without losing one's place in the webtext.