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calsfoundation@cals.org
calsfoundation@cals.org
A New Quiz Feature for the EOA—and More!
The online Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA), a project of the Central Arkansas Library System, has launched two major interactive features aimed at making Arkansas history more fun and accessible, as well as some other enhancements, such as improved browsing and a day-by-day history calendar.
“Earlier this year,” said EOA editor Guy Lancaster, “we received a grant from the Arkansas Community Foundation for carrying out various improvements to the website. Some of these were primarily technical, designed to provide a better reading and browsing experience, but others were designed to be more educational.”
The first of these new educational features is a series of quizzes on various aspects of Arkansas history. “This was actually suggested to us by our web developers, the Atlanta-based Army of Bees,” said Lancaster.
“Army of Bees had designed quizzes for other online encyclopedias, but we wanted something more robust,” said EOA associate editor Ali Welky, who oversaw the implementation of this project. “Instead of the user seeing the same questions each time, we wanted the quiz to draw from a larger reservoir of questions and randomize which ten the user sees.”
Earlier in her career, Welky had designed quizzes for Scholastic Inc., a multinational publisher of educational materials, and knew that such an interface was the best way to keep users interested.
The new feature offers twelve quizzes covering various aspects of Arkansas history and culture. Basic knowledge quizzes include counties and county seats, governors, official state symbols, and state parks. In addition, there are quizzes on books and authors, movies, blues music, Black women’s history, the Civil War, LGBTQ+ history, religion, and—since the EOA is a flagship project of the state’s largest library system—a quiz on the history of libraries in the state.
Shandrea Murphy-Washington, a PhD student in the Heritage Studies program at Arkansas State University, served as a summer intern for the EOA and designed two of the first quizzes, those on blues music and Black women’s history.
“As this was a new initiative,” said Murphy-Washington, “there weren’t many clear instructions in the beginning for what the quizzes should entail, so I was given the go ahead to create at my discretion.”
She thus drew from her own personal interests and her doctoral studies. “I have never been prouder to be a Black woman from Arkansas than when I sat down to read more than forty entries on all the ways Black women pioneered new advancements in industries from science to education to healthcare,” said Murphy-Washington.
At the end of each quiz, users see links to entries on all the subjects covered in that quiz for further reading and are also given the opportunity to challenge their friends by email or on social media to take the same quiz they just took. Users can also take the quiz again, with different questions. (Most quizzes pull ten questions from a bank of thirty; the counties entry has a bank of seventy-five to represent each county in the state.)
Be warned: These quizzes are challenging—you might have to read up on the subjects on the EOA to improve your score! 😊
The EOA staff will look into developing more quizzes over time. “We’re still going to focus primarily upon adding new entries and media to the site,” said Lancaster, “but we might be able to add a few new quizzes to the site each year, too.”
Future subject possibilities include sports, businesses, medicine, congressional representation, noteworthy court cases, fun facts, and more. The first dozen quizzes are now available online here.
The other new major site feature recently added by the EOA is an enhancement of “This Day in Arkansas History.” “This Day…” has long been a mainstay of the EOA homepage, showing a brief summary each day of a significant Arkansas-related event that occurred on that day. And now users will also be able to open a calendar view and find important historical events that occurred on any day throughout the year.
“We’ve been intending to do something like this for a while,” said Lancaster. “Each day in the calendar has at least four events included in this feature, and that’s a wealth of information from which teachers might draw as they plan future lessons.”
Over the past year, the EOA has also made its browsing function for entries and media more visually pleasing and user-friendly (as well as offering options to browse entries and media by county or category); added resources and activities for teachers and students such as downloadable coloring sheets, scavenger hunts, and slide presentations (and coming soon: high-resolution maps); offered National History Day subject ideas, with links to entries; improved the functionality for printing and sharing entries and media; added a pop-up preview feature for internal links in entries; and put a “surprise me” button on the homepage, which takes users to a random entry or image in the EOA, offering the option to “roll again” to see another random item. The EOA also maintains an active Facebook page.
“The Encyclopedia of Arkansas is an example of what libraries do best,” said Nate Coulter, executive director of the Central Arkansas Library System. “We make information available to the public, yes, but we also strive to make accessing that information both easy and fun.”
The CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas launched to the public on May 2, 2006, with approximately 700 entries and 900 pieces of media. The website currently hosts more than 7,700 entries and 16,000 pieces of media on all aspects of Arkansas history and culture. It is the only online state encyclopedia produced by a regional library system.
In addition to the grant from the Arkansas Community Foundation, the EOA has recently received funds from the Mellon Foundation and the CALS Foundation. You too can contribute to the EOA’s continuing efforts here.
