For her upper-level course about daily life in colonial Peru, Professor Verónica Salles-Reese felt recreating the archival experience was crucial to understanding ancient cultures. She amassed documents and artifacts from her own trips to archives in South America and hoped CNDLS could help her facilitate student work with original texts and images online.

The CNDLS team helped her create a website and a database application for archiving original maps, drawings, and manuscripts from sixteenth and seventeenth century Peru. From this database, the students learned how to decipher handwritten documents and transcribe them into universally legible ones. The process of translation from colonial Spanish to modern Spanish sharpens students' grasp of colonial modes of thought and expression. Ultimately, Salles-Reese found that the archival material available online imparted a more composite picture of Peru.

Through this project, she brought to the classroom what before could only be done in historical archives, offering her students the opportunity to acquire first-hand knowledge through primary sources and interaction with daily life in Peru. As Salles-Reese says, technology has enabled her students to transform "an old writing technology into a twenty-first century one."

Salles-Reese continues to use the online archival project format in her classroom today, allowing students to research cities from the colonial Spanish world and to document all of their findings on individual blogs. In place of more traditional written assignments, students post all research and writing to their blogs. In addition, students are expected to comment and interact with their colleagues' blogs regularly.