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It contains an argument, though, that I have some nagging doubts about: that, as more sources are digitised, those which remain available only in the archives will be more neglected than they were before.
Even with outside help, experts say, entire swaths of political and cultural history are in danger of being forgotten by new generations of amateur researchers and serious scholars. ...
While the Internet boom has made information more accessible and widespread than ever, that very ubiquity also threatens records and artifacts that do not easily lend themselves to digitization — because of cost, but also because Web surfers and more devoted data hounds simply find it easier to go online than to travel far and wide to see tangible artifacts.
"This is the great problem right now, and it's a scary thing," said the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns."The dots are only connected by a few of us who are willing to go to the places to make those connections."
But only a few of us ever were willing or able to go out there in the first place. Archival research has always been a minority pursuit, given the commitment and resources (including time) that it demands. Is it really the case that that minority will be even smaller in the future because some research can be done without leaving one's desk? Or is digital history creating large numbers of new researchers who, even if what they're doing is limited by what's available online, would never have even contemplated visiting archives or record offices to look at original documents?
I can imagine scenarios in which academics and postgrad students make decisions to restrict research projects (largely) to what they can do at their computer, where they would previously have unwillingly endured research trips. On the other hand, I can imagine how digital sources are likely to open up new possibilities for scholars whose options were previously narrowly circumscribed by their circumstances, lack of material resources, other personal and professional obligations.
I can imagine how the priorities of digitisation projects are likely to reinforce the emphasis of much popular history. At the same time, not all digital sources are records of the Great and Good. Far from it. There are now vast swathes of online sources about ordinary people, records which would previously have been accessible only to the dedicated few.
And, of course, no technology can replace the expertise and assistance of a good archivist.
Andrew D. Todd -
3/14/2007
Ah, the citation of that book should be: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, trans. Barbara Bray, _Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error_, Vintage Books, New York, 1979
What he does is to take the official transcript of a Holy Inquistion proceeding, and "decode" it into a description of daily life in the Middle Ages.
Andrew D. Todd -
3/14/2007
Well, to my way of thinking, describing things _is_ the deluxe treatment, because it implies a) human labor and b) skilled human labor at that. I don't know about you, but I cannot read, or even skim, at ten to twenty pages a minute. I used to be able to photocopy at that rate, even with an old-fashioned photocopier, and from periodicals bound up to telephone-book size (trade magazines in an engineering school library). I went to the trouble of figuring out how to set the copier up to copy two pages in a single exposure, and went into rapid routine, like working on an assembly line. In fact, given that the copier was programed to return to standard settings after twenty seconds or so, I had no alternative but to set a rapid pace, bing, bing, bing.
That, unfortunately, was before a smashed wrist ten years ago, surgery, and persistent arthritis thereafter (sigh!). However, I now have my little electronic camera, and tripod, which more or less puts me back to status quo ante.
At any rate, I found that my reading notes tended to lag behind my photocopying. The supply of materials in situ is of course practically boundless. In each engineering field, there is an American flagship learned society professional journal; a research journal from the same organization; and a proprietary magazine (ie. people wearing their businessman hats instead of their learned professional hats). Likewise, there are British equivalents (*), and whenever there is a significant technological change, new societies, magazines, and journals spring up around the argument about whether to adopt this change. The same goes for jurisdictional disputes. There are something on the order of two million magazine pages potentially relevant to any given research problem, which are readily available in almost any decent university library. I had to go to archival sources to get at the early formative period, when the entire profession could be gathered in a single room, before they were so numerous that they had to publish magazines to keep in touch. Having done so, I had to read something like half of the specialist archive's flagship collection, the collection of oral histories, in order to have enough material to work with. The finding guide was not of very much use, because it was focused around different concepts than the ones I was interested in. The guide was interested in the ways in which people were famous, whereas I was interested in the ways in which they were typical, or representative. For that matter, the interviewers were mostly interested in famousness as well, and the things I was able to use were the things which slipped in despite their efforts to keep the interviews "on track." It was much the same kind of writing/research problem as Le Roi LaDurie's _Montailou_. I suspect that in a traditional reading-room archive, I might have made myself seriously unpopular by requesting unreasonable numbers of documents. As it was, the collection was on a web-server. Effectively, the archive had made the whole collection into a book and republished it.
(*) Also French, German, and Russian, of course, but there is the language barrier.
When you are talking about audio-visual materials, which are designed to be fed into a machine, the case is even clearer, of course. With a bit of judicious tweaking, you can arrange so that the machine operates unattended for long periods of time, or that a single operator superintends a whole bank of such machines.
Megan McShea -
3/13/2007
What's technologically possible isn't always practically possible.
AV collections requiring playback are often put at the back of the queue because of real or perceived difficulties and resource issues. That is my experience.
I agree with you there are many affordable and relatively easy ways to make AV collections more accessible, but I was trying to make a different point.
I'm just using AV as an analogy. The article suggests that collections which are not digitized are doomed to obscurity. We all know that's not necessarily true. But format obsolescence is real issue with a track record, and we may be able to learn something from experience.
I would suggest that what we learn is how important it is to describe what's in our holdings as best we can, whether it gets the deluxe treatment or not.
I worry that in the rush to digitize, we pay too much attention to the stuff we're re-formatting in the rush to try to fulfill unreasonable expectations that everything be digitized.
Commercial outfits can live off their bestsellers and wow you with numbers, but the real juice of a public repository is in precisely the opposite stuff - the myriad non-bestsellers.
Andrew D. Todd -
3/13/2007
I think you are taking an unduly despondent view of the situation about preservation of old formats. In the technical community, some of us have been looking at related issues, especially in connection with the politics of copy protection. What it comes down to is that you don't necessarily need the right kind of projector, or whatever. You can use off-the-shelf cameras in clever ways, and use computers to synthesize their output into usable form.
Just to take an example, certain experimental evidence communicated to me by the electrical engineer Ed Nisley (Dr. Dobbs' Journal columnist, old IBM'er) indicates that it may be possible to use an electronic camera or flatbed scanner to read old phonograph records. The work is in a very preliminary state, and neither of us had time to pursue it, so we passed it on to a certain Computer Science department which has developed an interesting in applied optics, where they have energetic undergraduates looking for research projects. It might prove useful for records which are in an extremely poor state of preservation, and very brittle. Once you have your apparatus in place, set up and automated to the extent which is customary in hard science experiments, it would probably be possible to process records about as fast as you could fetch them from the stacks, take them out of their packaging, etc.
Megan McShea -
3/13/2007
The article reminds me of issues we've seen with audiovisual materials in archives.
When video came around, its relative ease of access reduced the hassle-factor for researchers and archivists such that video collections were better described, more used, and better known over time. There was also an assumption among some that anything worthwhile would be transferred to video, which smells somewhat like the current assumption that anything worthwhile will be digitized.
Film collections, or collections in obsolete video or audio formats, languish as we speak simply because little or no institutional knowledge may be present to simply pick up a reel and get at what it contains. Add to that a lack of playback equipment, fears over copyright, an overwhelming backlog, and a tidal wave of new accessions and your film collections are dead in the water.
For archives, there will always be collections - film and paper and everything else - that never make it in the queue. That's just the nature of the beast.
Un-digitized materials will be less accessible, and therefore more rarely accessed, and therefore will be less well-known. What is not re-formatted will surely suffer in some way from the lack of attention.
It's sort of a simple point, but I think it was brought out well in the article.
Mark Dimunation of Special Collections at Library of Congress delivered an interesting keynote at an Research Libraries Group forum last year. He touched on these issues from the repository perspective pretty eloquently. You can listen to his address here: http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=20968
Andrew D. Todd -
3/12/2007
You seem to be assuming that a digitized source is something you find on a website, and that materials have or have not been digitized without any action on your part. However, I think we're getting towards the point where, unless you are talking about an enormously rich collection such as the National Archives, your travel money buys more in the form of paying a work-study student to scan things for you than it does in airline tickets to physically get you there, not to mention hotel bills. Besides, it keeps the money in the family. I gather that a lot of small archives have effectively switched over from encouraging people to visit to setting up a regular and profitable scan-for-hire arrangement. That way, they build up their digital collection at the same time, at no cost to themselves. My guess is that, with a good enough camera, the break-even point might be as much as a couple of thousand pages, depending on where you had to go. What it comes down to is that a camera takes a picture in a hundredth to a thousandth of a second. If you have the right kind of set-up, it can take pictures as fast as you can turn the pages. If you were even going to look at a page, there is no real additional cost in making a copy, and if you are making a copy anyway, there is no need to read the page first. The archive can almost certainly rig up a better and more efficient camera set-up with apparatus in situ than you can do with something you have to carry around in your pocket.
Of course, there are these hyper-political places where they really want to use the documents as a lever to supervise your research and writing, but that is something different. My field is History of Technology, and the people involved (engineers) take digitization much more for granted. The circumstances under which they fail to digitize archival papers are approximately the circumstances under which they would deliberately withhold access anyway. I pulled down a collection of about 15 megabytes of transcripts of oral history interviews, recorded over twenty years (~7500 pages), from one repository, and wrote about two chapters out of it. This is a somewhat different proposition than Googling for stuff.
A related point I should add: digitization does not necessarily mean transcribing things, and making them machine searchable. That is much more expensive, naturally. This collection I worked from _had_ been converted to byte characters. I'm inclined to think that some of the interviewees, at least the industrial executives among them, probably provided the money to pay for the transcribing. However, a lot of the other sets of data I encountered were collections of photographs (that is, bitmaps) of pages.
Maarja Krusten -
3/11/2007
Quite right, from the managerial viewpoint it really comes down to balancing wants versus needs. Obviously, statutory mandates represent needs -- you have to be responsive to them. For everything else, you balance researchers' wants versus needs. Then you decide how to allocate your staff and money. It can't all go towards declassification, or FOIA processing, or special projects, or initial processing, or digitization, or exhibits, or preservation, or establishing an electronic research archvies, or simply staffing the research room. Every area probably could use many more resources than you can provide; all will be shorted, one way or another.
Online research can be wonderful if your project is very tightly focused and you are certain you can get everything you need on the web. Of course, I wouldn't discount the "aha" factor in doing research. You know, the situation where you're looking through documents and suddenly realize that person "A" was involved behind the scenes in a policy matter that initially appeared only to involve persons "X" and "Y."
If you physically are in a research room, you can ask for the finding aid for the records series or collection that best captured A's activities. Or follow a trail of cross references. You may find what the missing pieced to the puzzle in A's files or you might just find another clue along the audit trail. But you can keep on digging, knowing that with time and patience, you can reach everything that is open.
You may not get all the answers, if you visit a Presidential Library soon after it opens. NARA's Presidential Records Act-administered libraries are facing a huge backlog and have almost no ability to do systematic processing. Almost all the effort goes towards answering FOIA requests.
Benjamin Hufbauer noted in in commentary in the New York Times on January 20th that
"according to the Office of Presidential Libraries, it will take up to 100 years for the papers and records at the recent presidential libraries to be processed, primarily because of an explosion in the number of records created by the executive branch. The Roosevelt Library has 17 million pages of documents, while the Clinton Library has more than 76 million, but the number of archivists has not kept pace."
I worked with researchers at NARA between 1987 and 1990, when only a tiny percentage of Nixon's materials were open. I didn't pull much research room duty as my primary job was working with unreleased materials, getting them ready for possible disclosure. Of course, for anyone in such a position, ethics prevent you from saying anything, at all, about the contents of still-closed materials to any outsider.
As an Archives manager, how do you allocate your limited resources then? You have to live with the fact that you won't please everyone and that someone is going to complain, no matter what you do.
As inconvenient as it is to visit an archives, at least you have a chance of looking through everything that has been opened, to date, and catching even the unexpected "aha" stuff. Here in the U.S., there's an ongoing debate as to whether it is better to continue with the system of far flung NARA-administered Presidential Libraries or to have one centralized repository for Presidential Records within NARA.
With only a small percentage of documents at most repositories available on the Web, you can't count on all the bits and pieces being a click away, so, in addition to the peer review issues noted above, you simply cannot be certain what aha moments you have missed. Of course, the dynamic nature of web content and the problem of broken links can be a problem for anyone who wants to check something. In writing about Nixon and Haldeman recently, I found that links to the SSA website that I had used for years, and which the Miller Center also cited, now are gone. I can't even retrieve a cached version of some of the digitized Nixon materials, as I could a year ago. And an article from the American Spectator that was on the Nixon Library site for years, no longer is available there. I can now only pull it up in subscription databases, such as Nexis, which I fortunately can access.
Ralph E. Luker -
3/11/2007
I say that, having just recently benefitted enormously from digitized sources. I conducted a _massive_ traditional search for primary documents on my subject. I thought that there was nothing still to be found -- or, if there were something still out there, the needles in the haystack were just beyond reasonable reach. When I explored digitized newspapers, however, I turned up 400 newspaper articles on my subject that I'd never seen before -- even a few from newspapers that I'd tediously scanned in hundreds of rolls of microfilm on microfilm readers. Digitized newspapers highlighted my subject's name _every_ time it appeared and I had missed a few of those times. It clearly does have the potential to revolutionize newspaper research -- potential, because it's limited, of course, to those newspapers that have already been and will soon be digitized. My recollection is that Alan Allport had a bad experience with reading the digitized _Scotsman_ because the microfilm, on which the digital images is based, was illegible.
Sharon Howard -
3/11/2007
David, that's a really good point. When it comes to planning research trips, it makes a world of difference to be able to search archives' catalogues online. What's available, of course, can be extremely variable and sometimes frustrating. (Which I think brings us back to something Maarja was saying in one of the other threads...)
Sharon Howard -
3/11/2007
Now that I have more firsthand experience of the problems, I think Ralph is right about the likely limits. And I think he has a very good point about the peer review issues, too. Individual articles entirely based on digital sources are just about conceivable, but the day when that would be possible for an entire PhD or serious book-length project is a very long way off, I think.
Maarja Krusten -
3/11/2007
PS Even the smartest should read "Not even." Sorry, am away from my computer and I'm tapping this out on my Sidekick.
Depending on what you mean by longterm, I think you're overly optimistic about the extent of digitization. Peer review will limit and even prevent the publication of research that relies exclusively on digitized material and fails to pursue crucial undigitized documents.
Jonathan Dresner -
3/11/2007
I also think that this is a medium-term problem: in the short run, yes, there are a lot of undigitized materials of great historical value. In the long run, it will be easier and cheaper and the vast majority of valuable historical materials will be digitally cataloged and available to researchers in some digital form. In the medium term though, there will be some compression of travel budgets, and some neglect of undigitised materials, especially as the digitally competent generation of historians becomes the senior class of the profession.
Maarja Krusten -
3/11/2007
I agree that dissemination of finding aids is very important. It has been 17 years since I worked as an archivist with Richard Nixon's then mostly unreleased tapes and files, As to the meat, none of the archivists I knew took a position on the relative value of items that had been opened for research. Even the smartest historian-archivist -- and I knew plenty -- ever presumed to read any researcher's mind. We shared our finding aids and gave background briefings on the Nixon White House, of course. We never took a position on theories researchers shared with us but just gave them finding aids from which to request materials.
I second the thanks to Sharon Howard!
David J Merkowitz -
3/11/2007
I actually think that getting finding aids and catalogs on-line and searchable is far more valuable for the average historian (professional and amateur) than getting the documents on-line. If we know what they have, then we can go look at it rather than wasting time following empty leads.
Also this mitigates against the unfortunate tendency of archivists to think literally about their materials and proclaim no value when there is in fact quite a lot of meat.
On this issue, I think that archives would behoove themselves to take advantage of those of us in the archives who would love to have digital copies of the materials, either via camera or scanner. Something as simple as using copier machines that save digital copies would expedite digitalization.
Now I understand that quality isn't always ideal and that you would end up with a very hit and miss digitalization as the materials would come from a persons research interest rather than any of the logics that have been mentioned so far.
Now one of the drawbacks is that the scholars wouldn't want the whole world to see what they saw in the archives before it turns into something valuable. So digitalization shouldn't necessarily mean that it is immediately published to the web.
Just my two sense worth. I'm glad Sharon commented on this, because it was an interesting article overall.
Andrew D. Todd -
3/11/2007
I don't know specifically about Adobe's product, but people have been talking around the issue for a good twenty years. Stewart Brand wrote a seminal article "Digital Retouching: the End of Photography as Evidence of Anything,," on the subject in Whole Earth Review, back in 1985. There are things you can do, like looking for discontinuities of grain, but the forger can fake those too. Basically, the situation is much like literary forgery. If someone is willing to do enough work, you can only catch him through his own mistaken assumptions, as the state of knowledge changes over the years. Particularly, if the forger has managed to get into the archives, like John Payne Collier, the situation can be-- messy. There's a good section on the Victorian forgers-- people like Collier and T. J. Wise-- in Richard D. Altick's _The Scholar Adventurers_ (1960). The detective story writer Michael Innes has an interesting disquisition on the subject in his novel _The Long Farewell_. All the same commentaries apply to photography. You do need to worry about what an art historian would call provenience, and a police detective would call "chain of custody."
In a typical legal case, it might come down to saying that the street punk convicted of Grievous Bodily Harm on the strength of picture taken by a surveillance camera is simply not worth the kind of work necessary to create a forgery-- to anyone.
Of course, "did mean to imply in my earlier comment that declassification is discretionary," should read "did not mean to imply." My fault for not proofreading, I'm multitasking here.
Maarja Krusten -
3/11/2007
Yes, it is labor intensive! At least with 18th century documents, you don't have go through the painstaking prior review for privacy, national security, etc., that government archivists have to do with more modern records, before they can be considering for digitization.
I did mean to imply in my earlier comment that declassification is discretionary, rather that the number of people assigned to do the work is up to NARA. See
for a good article which explains accurately why declassification does not always mean quick and timely access. I can say "accurately" as the article describes the NARA division in which my late sister was a senior archivist. She trained some of the NARA officials and staff quoted in the piece.
Andrew, thanks for the interesting technical note. I was at a party yesterday where someone told me of new photo software which recognizes and alerts you to the fact that a photo has been altered. Have you heard anything about that? I believe it is a Photoshop product.
Photos that are born digital of course can go through alterations. There always is an issue with "version control" with digital records, documentary or audiovisual. I think NARA would say that it wants the raw camera material, as shot originally, as being the equivalent to the original negative, rather than just altered images produced from it.
Metadata capture also is an issue. It may be hard to believe, but in 1993, when George H. W. Bush left office, U.S. Archivist Don W. Wilson signed an agreement with the White House, allowing White House emails to be treated as the President's rather than government property. It took a court case (Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President) to unravel all the issues and mandate preservation and government control of certain White House email messages.
Automation can cause headaches even for commercial companaies. H. R. Haldeman's diary, issued in greater length than in the concurrent reloease in book form on CD by Sony in 1994, largely is inaccessible now. I can run and access material on my Haldeman diaries CD on my old computer which runs on Windows 98SE. I can't run it on my notebook with Windows XP. I think this is a driver rather than an operating system issue. If you go to the splash screen, you see that Sony put in some of Haldeman's home movies. I think the program on the CD searches for a driver associated with Quicktime 1.1.1 and not finding it on modern computers, freezes, locking you out of the data.
No such issues with 18th century documents, but they present other challenges!
Andrew D. Todd -
3/11/2007
There is a device called a "Field Camera," an electronic camera which works on the same principle as insect vision, and which records something approximating a hologram. That means that you no longer have to worry about focus when you are taking pictures-- you can fix the focus after the fact, in an editing program, the same as exposure. This is important when one is taking a picture of an object, such as a bound book, which cannot easily be made to lie flat. A field camera offers good prospects of rapidly producing images of printed books good enough for optical character recognition (OCR) to work reliably. Field Cameras, by virtue of their design, can be made very small and cheap, and yet have optical performance comparable to the finest conventional cameras. A ten-dollar field camera, only slightly bigger than a postage stamp, might have performance comparable to a specialized conventional camera weighing a thousand pounds and costing fifty thousand dollars. Think of the sorts of cameras which Google is building and using for the Google Print project, and imagine every little kid having one. With such a camera, it would be no great difficulty to copy a book in several minutes. At present, Field Cameras are still at the level of research projects, but they could be in mass production in a couple of years. The Field Camera is attractive to chipmakers because it allows them to increase their share of the value-added in a camera, at the expense of the lensmakers.
Very probably, field cameras might be useful to speed up the actual photography of documents. To take advantage of this, you might have to change your way of thinking about how you republish documents. One print habit that you need to get away from is the idea that the first published version has to be a perfect version. In electronic media, it is permissible for the first version to be massively flawed, so long as it is labeled accordingly, and so long as you have a regular system for cataloging improvements. There should be a regular system, whereby readers can report probable flaws. The twentieth or thirtieth version might eventually reach the standard of traditional published "papers" projects. There is an old engineer's saying that "the perfect is the enemy of the good," and I think this applies to putting archives online.
The field camera has applications not only to archives, but also to libraries. Google Print, like University Microfilms before it, tends to require special lending privileges from the libraries it collaborates with. They need to have a few thousand volumes checked out at once, including things like serials which normally do not circulate, all of them away on visits to their special cameras. That means Google Print has to have official sanction, and lives in the slow world of lawyers, lobbyists, and whatnot. Imagine a totally acephalous network of independent copyists, like the scriptorium monks of the middle ages, deciding to do the same job, only to do it right, and thumbing their collective noses at all laws.
There is a category of books which are so rare that the big national libraries have the positive advantage of owning the only surviving copy. These are the kinds of books which the national library will have put on its website in any case. However, there is a vast middle ground of books which are more common. Such a title will be owned by hundreds of private individuals and by small obscure libraries with no pretension to serious scholarship (eg. secondary school libraries), which have generally inherited the belongings of such private individuals. These individuals and libraries are conventionally out of the game because they don't have enough distinctive material to be worth traveling to, securing an introduction, etc. For this category, the great strength of the big libraries is that they have large collections of related materials. Ideas can be pursued along the shelf. However, if the resources of the very small libraries could somehow be pooled, the result would be a world-class library. Very well, I think such a pooling will happen on the internet. Once books are reduced to files, their bulk is trivial compared to that of music and movies.
The tendency in internet file trading seems to be towards using "offshore banking islands," islands in the Caribbean or the South Pacific which make their livings by systematically flouting the tax and regulatory laws of larger countries. Such micronations are very likely going to be willing to support and even subsidize file trading as a source of "noise" to cloak more lucrative activities such as banking, offshore "mailbox" corporations, and internet gambling. The local copyright law will be for a moderate term, say ten years. The National Library, run out of the local high school (*), will file away and redistribute copies of any book or record which anyone sends them, on a no-questions-asked basis, and it will use all the newest privacy technologies to thwart law enforcement in the large countries. The only way to do anything about this kind of activity is to send in the Marines, and somehow I don't think very many Americans would be enthused about American troops dying to protect the profits of Disney.
(*) The most advanced educational institution a small population can support.
The result of all this is that the established great libraries will lose much of their pre-eminence.
Sharon Howard -
3/11/2007
Maarja, absolutely. I've been working for the last six months or so in a university institute that's largely devoted to digitising primary sources and I've been learnng just how labour intensive and expensive it is to do it properly, at every stage. We're working on a vast body of 18th-century manuscript material at the moment and with some particularly difficult documents may ultimately have to make some hard choices about what we can and can't afford to exclude.
K Woestman -
3/11/2007
For those of us who teach in rural areas and/or at institutions with smaller libraries, the digitization of historical sources has not only greatly expanded the possibilities for both students and researchers but also allowed more efficient travel because of finding aids and indices made available online.
A good point is made that students, like other humans, often gravitate toward the path of least resistant. (For example, it's usually easy to catch them cheating off the internet since most don't even scroll past the first page of results on the search engine for their topic.)
Therefore, it's our job as teachers, instructors, and professors to teach students how to discern good sources from less reliable and/or appropriate sources. Even before the internet, I'm not confident that most students spent an adequate amount of time in libraries or archives since, just like now, they often left their work until the last minute.
Those students and individuals who are conscientious will want guidance as to what types of sources that are availalbe to them - whether in print or online - are reliable and most appropriate according to the experts. The internet also makes it much more posssible for those with this expertise to share it beyond the limited bounds of printed journal articles not available to everyone.
Interesting article, Dr. Howard, thanks posting about it.
Firt, a personal note. James J. Hastings of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), who was quoted in the article, was my boss at NARA’s Nixon Project between 1979 (when he was named director) and 1988. He was popular with his subordinate staff, for good reasons, and I'm glad that he has done (deservedly) well at the Archives in recent years.
Now the bad news. For federal agencies such as NARA, lack of money is a huge constraint. For example, NARA even was hard pressed to find the money to clean up parts of its main building in Washington after flooding during the spring of 2006. It recently faced such a budget shortfall, it had to cut back on research room hours on the weekend. Personnel costs consume large portions of its budget, as with every civil agency. NARA receives a little extra in appropriations at times, as it will for the start up of the new George W. Bush Presidential Library, but generally operates with very tight budgets.
In the field of research in which I'm most interested in, the history of the U.S. federal government, I have to take that into account that NARA and the Library of Congress are nowhere near having large portions of their collections available on line and are unlikely to have good resources in the future. (Consider this sobering but realistic message at http://shrinkster.com/mro
well worth reading in full to get a sense of how tight budgets likely will be in the future.)
Funding for cultural agencies will remain tight for the near future and managers will have to decide how best to allocate scarce resources. Agencies such as NARA also face some mandates, as with its work on the John F. Kennedy assassination records and the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group. Even with discretionary assignments, is it better to assign more staff and money to the process of declassifying and making more records available or digitizing the ones that already are open? The two are not mutually exclusive but every dollar that NARA’s managers decide to or are directed by mandate to spend in one area means money taken away from another. These are our tax dollars at work. Asked to do something, just as in the private sector, federal managers sometimes simply have to respond, "OK, what is it then that we won't do?"
Students need to be made aware of this and other considerations that affect their ability to do research online. The digitization process is very labor intensive. At home or in the office, how many of us have had the time to go back and feed our old handwritten or typewritten research note cards and xerox copies of documents through a scanner to produce digitized copies? Since there is little or no need to do that for projects we have completed, most of us haven’t. But just think of what it would involve in terms of time and labor for our own tiny research collections.
Also, a researcher cannot know every organization’s selection criteria for digitizing documents; what relevant information for their projects resides undigitized in an archives (which typically has inventory control in its finding aids perhaps down to the folder but rarely to the item level); why some material has not yet been digitized and when it may be. As the article points out, the physical condition of some original documents makes them more difficult to digitize than others. And let's face it, no outsider can know if there were good internal controls over the selection process in digitization. What led some documents to be digitized and others passed over?
Private-public partnerships can be useful, but conflicts may arise between professional staff and donors. This is more likely in the field of exhibits and educational research than other areas. (See http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/opinion/16666075.htm ). Even quasi-governmental entities, such as the Smithsonian, an independent trust instrumentality of
the United States, have seen their share of controversy when private donors and professional staff view issues differently. See http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/21/60minutes/main569542.shtml
Alan Allport -
3/11/2007
I agree; I think it's a silly argument. In my own case, my plans for archival dissertation research were severely circumscribed by practical problems, but I was able to rely (via ILL) on a large amount of material that had been made newly available on microfilm. The alternative wasn't a long research trip abroad; the alternative was no dissertation at all, or at least not one on the subject I wanted to study.
