Students at University Park and Penn State Harrisburg will design and launch a Web site that will preserve the court records, newspaper accounts and census data from Pennsylvania's Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was part of the Anti-Slavery movement of the 19th century and was a network of people throughout Pennsylvania.

Overseen by IST's Computer-Supported Collaboration and Learning (CSCL) Lab, the project is funded by the Pennsylvania Federation of Museums and Historical Organizations and the Center for Anti-Slavery Studies.

"We are getting from Penn State a technology designed specifically to meet the needs of the Pennsylvania Underground Railroad Network," said Karen James, administrative officer for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission's Underground Railroad History project. "We want to give people the tools to do historical research, and this Web site will be the best way to do that."

Historical information will be only a part of the Web site. It also will contain a calendar listing conferences, speakers and other events; discussion forums to foster collaboration and communication among Underground Railroad historians and students; and papers on 19th century Pennsylvania. The site will be implemented using CSCL's Basic Resources for Integrated Distributed Group Environments software.

Eventually, the site would contain an interactive map to link significant places such as African-American settlements and Underground Railroad "stations" with documents and discussion about these locations from historical and 21st century perspectives.

"A lot of the materials are old, and they refer to buildings that are no longer there," said Jack Carroll, the Edward M. Frymoyer Chair in Information Sciences and Technology and the project's primary investigator. "We'd like to configure a map to directly show events and where they happened."

Besides four interns, the project will involve Penn State Harrisburg students enrolled in IST 331 who will specify the site's requirements, said Roderick Lee, the instructor at Penn State Harrisburg who will be teaching the class. Those students will work with stakeholders such as James to determine what kind of system will best support the site's goals.

"There is a lot of information available, but it is in different locations," said Lee, also a doctoral student in IST. "This project will collate that information."

The Pennsylvania Underground Railroad Network is a geographically dispersed, grass-roots group. Facilitating the work of this diverse group of historians is also a project goal, said Carroll who sees the site as helping them collaborate and share information.

The National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom is an initiative of the National Park Service (NPS) with federal legislative support. NPS is coordinating the preservation and education efforts of community groups, statewide organizations and researchers.