When Summers was a student at the University of Michigan School of Information, he needed to do a project for the Internet Public Library. He had worked on redefining reference categories, but was not fulfilled by the project because the public did not get to see anything.

From his experience working at the Government Documents Center he was familiar with Grace York's government documents Web site. He thought he might do something similar for the Presidents. Many other Presidential Web sites contain just links to other sites or only internal content - usually about a single President. Summers wanted to create a site that had both annotated links and content.

Summers collected his information about the Presidents mostly on the Web. His process was to pick a few search engines and run the same searches on them for each President. He says he used a few books for resources but did not do a lot of non-Web researching. Summers created the site during a summer semester, spending close to 250 hours on it. Two and a half years later, he still maintains the site and is in the process of doing an update right now.

Summers has received a lot of feedback from the site. Visitors can e-mail him at potus@ipl.org. Most people who write either give Summers kudos for the site or have a question. Two common questions are, "Who was the other President who was impeached?" - Andrew Johnson - and, "Who was the first President?" It was not George Washington. The first person to serve with the title of "President of the United States" was John Hanson. He was President under the Articles of Confederation in 1783. It was not until 1789 that the U.S. Constitution was ratified and George Washington became President.

Maintaining a Web site takes a lot of time, but Summers says that is the nature of the Web. There is always new stuff, and it does not always last. He periodically goes through the site and checks on all the links. This typically takes 20-30 hours. At the same time, Summers looks for new things on the Web. He is trying to create some tools to help build the site more quickly, like something with a database back engine.

As time has passed, Summers has found that the search for new information has gotten easier. He says he has a better idea of what he is looking for, and so gets more focused search results. However, he is looking for anything on the subject of U.S. Presidents, so it takes a lot of time.

When evaluating other Web sites for their reliability, he found that history buffs tended to be accurate in their facts. There can be a lot of controversy about an issue - like JFK's assassination - but there are two sides to every story. Summers is careful to present such sites as an opinion - like one about John Quincy Adams and how his religious nature affected his presidency.

Over the past few years, there have been lulls in Summers' fascination with the Presidents, but he finds that it always comes back.

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