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The Harvard Diggins Library's "E. A. Burbank Timeline" has been awarded three Outstanding Website awards from the Web Marketing Association's WebAwards competition in the Arts, Family, and Non-Profit categories. The WebAwards competition has been held annually since 1997. Previous "Outstanding" winners include AARP, Colonial Williamsburg, Disney Online, Sandia Laboratories, and Sports Illustrated. Comments made by the judges include: "Great usability experience!!" and "The ideas on the site are intriguing...". The site scored a "perfect 10" for innovation and a "9" for design (average scores were 6.4 and 7.3 respectively).

The timeline depicts the life of Harvard, Illinois' own Elbridge Ayer "E. A." Burbank (1858-1949). Burbank was a professionally trained portrait artist who studied at the Chicago Institute of Design and twice traveled to Munich, Germany for advanced studies. He was commissioned by his wealthy uncle in 1897 to obtain a portrait of the notorious Apache Geronimo - who had consistently refused to sit for his portrait to be made. Burbank traveled to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma Territory, and succeeded in making friends with Geronimo. They maintained their friendship over many years - and Burbank painted his portrait seven times. Burbank decided his life's calling was to paint and sketch Native Americans. He traveled more than fifty thousand miles by train, stage coach, wagon, horseback, and on foot - to capture the images of more than 1,500 Native Americans from more than 125 tribes. His works are held by the Harvard Diggins Library, the Rockford Art Museum, the Newberry Library, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Butler Institute of American Art, both Harvard and Yale Universities, and the Smithsonian - among others. Burbank spent a great deal of time at the Hubbell Trading Post on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona - which is now a National Historic Site where many of his works are on display. He was married twice but had no children and died a few months after being struck by a San Francisco cable car at the age of ninety. His ashes were interred for a time in San Francisco and then Rockford, IL, and he is presently interred in the Ayer Mausoleum in Harvard's Mount Auburn cemetery.

The timeline was conceived, designed, developed, and maintained by Harvard resident Mark Sadler and consists of more than a thousand pages of information and images. Mark has visited the Art Institute of Chicago, the Newberry Library, the Hubbell Trading Post, both Harvard and Yale Universities, the Boston Art Museum, the Phoenix Art Museum, and Mission San Diego while researching Burbank's life. Not a single dollar of the library's funds has been spent in researching, developing, or maintaining the website. Mark is currently working with the Newberry Library as a volunteer to digitize a thousand pages of Burbank's letters to his Uncle Edward Ayer and is in the process of applying for a research fellowship to study Burbank artifacts at the Southwest Museum and Autry National Center in Los Angeles.

The newest addition to the Burbank Timeline is a GoogleEarth^TM tour of Burbank's travels targeted to 4^th and 5^th grade students. Students can "fly over the earth" following Burbank's 50,000 mile journey while viewing some of his portraits of Native Americans, reading clips of his letters, and viewing places like the train station in Jamestown, CA (which burned down before 1920), and his mother-in-law's childhood home in Wales. The tour takes place over high-resolution satellite images of the Earth. You can locate information about the "tour" in the timeline's "What's New" section.

In related news: Harvard resident Margaret Kistler previously donated a significant collection of Burbank's original pencil sketch art to the Harvard Diggins Library - which is on permanent display in the library's public meeting room. The library is pleased to announce Mrs. Kistler has made a new addition to the pencil sketch collection, "Train Station and Nevill Hotel, Jamestown, California", circa 1906. Information concerning the addition is available in the "What's new" section of the timeline.

If you would like to make a donation to the library's Burbank art purchase fund, or would like to provide funding for additional research, please contact the library director - Harriet Roll at (815) 943-4671.

For more information see:

• www.webaward.org