The Historical Society's collections on the Fire are unrivaled and are frequently consulted by researchers, but only a very small portion of them have been available for viewing by the general public in the Society's museum galleries. The "Web of Memory" project allowed virtually all the Historical Society's holdings on the Fire to be made instantaneously accessible not only to researchers, but to people around the world. Although the online exhibition is characterized by an elegant structure and a narrative line crafted by Professor Smith, it is a many-layered work. As a result, the online comment book indicates that it has been used productively by children as young as six, by senior citizens, by high school students, by graduate students, and by people of all ages and educational backgrounds. And the enthusiastic response of these electronic visitors to exhibition amply demonstrates the educational impact of this humanities resource.

The great contribution of the technology, therefore, has been to relieve the museum of choosing which audiences it wishes to address since the technology makes it possible to address many audiences simultaneously and to engage people at many levels in the excitement of historical investigation. To date, the online exhibition has been visited by people from every state and more than ninety countries. While software that measures "hits" to the site is notoriously unreliable and measurements of "hits" are themselves subject to varied interpretation, our best estimate is that we are now transferring an average 100,000 files per week representing visits to the site by approximately 2,500 people per week. In the weeks immediately after the exhibition opened in October and November these numbers were closer to 600,000 and 10,000 per week respectively.

The benefits of this work to the Historical Society have been manifest. First, our technical capacity has been vastly increased by our association with our very generous colleagues at Northwestern. We are in a much better position now than we were a year ago to continue an ongoing program of online exhibitions. Second, we have demonstrated to our Board of Trustees, staff, and members the power and capacities of these technologies in a fashion that would have otherwise been impossible. Third, we have created a permanent and internationally available electronic resource that was both less expensive and more comprehensive than a museum exhibition of the same materials would have been. Fourth, the exhibition has been sufficiently recognized (with articles in Newsweek and the Chronicle of Higher Education as well in other print publications and on radio and television) that it has attracted other support for our electronic projects that will soon result in the creation of an even richer series of web-based materials on vital aspects of American and Chicago History. Finally, while we cannot be certain, we believe that the online exhibit has increased our attendance by drawing attention to us in a new and dramatic way.

The exhibition, "The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory", incorporates several unique technological innovations that deserve mention. It uses Shockwave to create an unusual 360 degree view of Chicago in 1858. Drawn from 11 photos taken from the top of the Cook County Courthouse in 1858, this novel application actually permits a view of Chicago that is only possible on the World Wide Web and cannot be duplicated in "real" space. The exhibition also includes "streaming" electronic piano music scanned directly to the computer from sheet music published in the immediate aftermath of the fire, a newsreel that can be viewed using Quicktime technology, and three-dimensional pictures of the post-Fire Chicago that can were created from stereographs in the Historical Society's collections and can viewed using "3-D glasses." Some of these technologies require high connection speeds, large memories on local machines, or other hardware that not all users will possess, but the site is structured to permit users to bypass sections that require more computer firepower than they may have available.

Although the amount of money contributed to CHS by the NEH grant to H-Net was relatively small, its consequences were large. It allowed us to engage a senior humanist in the project's design and execution, it brought (as a result) a huge number of new (if electronic) visitors to the Society, it leveraged important private support to allow us to continue this important work, and it disseminated a wonderful and literally priceless archive not only beyond our walls but all over the world.