University Libraries’ representatives hope to transport visitors to the Mississippi River Valley, circa the 1800s, via a comprehensive Web site based on the works of author Mark Twain.

Drew VandeCreek, director of University Libraries’ digitization projects, said the Web site will use Twain novels like “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to educate visitors.

“The idea of the Web site is to put Mark Twain’s most popular works, which are the ones about the Mississippi River, into a historical context,” he said. “Twain gives us a description of life on the Mississippi in the mid-19th century, and what our project will do is take the accounts of other people who traveled the area in this period and their observations about what the Mississippi was like. The project is as much about this place as it is about Twain himself.”

The Institute for Museum and Library Services awarded University Libraries a $212,000 grant that will make the project possible. It will take thousands of man hours to complete the Web site, which tentatively will launch next fall, he said.

The Web site will attempt to replicate the success of the nationally-recognized University Libraries’ Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project.

It will feature an interactive map of the Mississippi River Valley that will allow visitors to click on locations and bring up specific related materials collected from Twain, other writers of the time period and scholars of today.

Tara Dirst, the project technical coordinator, said she’s thrilled to work on a project of this magnitude.

“I am excited about this opportunity,” she said. “It’s great that people can access this for free, instead of having to rely on a commercial project that might not be as high-quality in my opinion, and might have ulterior motives. Abraham Lincoln as a man is interesting, and Mark Twain as a writer is interesting in and of itself. The more exciting thing is their context and what they did, and how it applies to the contextual history of the era and that particular locale.”

VandeCreek said he is proud that University Libraries offers unique content like this site.

“We think it is a significant accomplishment for the library and for NIU,” he said. “We don’t think there is anybody else in the world that does what we do. There are a lot of other institutions that put library materials on the Web, but what we do … is we also put interpretative materials on the Web, which have significant educational value.”