Chronicle Article
The free, nonprofit project, called Smarthistory, is winning honors and gaining traction at colleges. Its model could offer a template for similar open textbooks in other disciplines.
It seems to be working. Smarthistory, begun in 2005, gets about 65,000 visits a month, up about 60 percent over last year. It won the Webby award for best education Web site in 2009. It has been used or recommended by dozens of colleges, including Princeton, the University of Texas at Austin, and Vassar.
Smarthistory’s creators are really interested in getting more text and video contributions from art historians. But don’t think of it as some kind of crowd-sourced online art-history encyclopedia. Ms. Harris and Mr. Zucker retain editorial control. The content is fact-checked.
“We’re open to contributions, but we’re not Wikipedia,” Ms. Harris says.
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