Clio Wired (History 696)

It was two years ago when I was interning at the Smithsonian in the Costume Collection, specifically turn-of-the-century haute couture gowns that had been donated to the museum. My job was to identify the wearer of the gowns (about 12 women in total) and to find as much information about that woman as possible. Not an easy task. The second part of my project was to try to figure out if the “Grand Tour” was common knowledge and if it was, how it was reported.

ProQuest was immensely helpful for both of these projects. The New York Times has an obit index that has the date, page, etc. so you can use the microfilm to find the entry. For other things, such as wedding announcements or “the social pages,” there is no such index so it’s a matter of scrolling through reams and reams of microfilm. With ProQuest, I was able to enter the search term (or terms, more on this later) and within 30 seconds, have a list of hits that lead to high-quality images of full-text articles with original photos/captions on the screen.

I did this project in 20003 when ProQuest was not as developed as it is now (big surprise), but the interface is pretty much the same. The best part for me was the search feature of being able to add as many “and”/ “or” lines (“add a row”) to search by multiple name variations simultaneously. This is similar to going through the microfilm in that I could be looking for multiple names, but obviously, a searchable database is far easier. Other helpful features (that mimic going through the microfilm) are the ability to select specific date ranges and specific (or all) databases to keep the number of hits manageable.

A major area of improvement is to somehow highlight in the text where search term can be found. The articles are refined images of the original text, not transcribed. Control F does not work so it is necessary to read the entire article (ranging from one paragraph to several pages depending on how it was entered). Even so, it is much more efficient to read a few pages than rolls of microfilm.

Would my project have been possible without ProQuest? Yes. But would it have been possible to answer these two questions in detail in three months for a novice researcher? No. Obviously, I had to use other sources and forms of searching not databased (National Archives), but my “ah-ha!” moments (and my own realization of the uses of digitization in history) were mostly from the ProQuest results.

While I may not have been a microfilm pro from the experience, I became an efficient ProQuest user and at the end of the day, had a greater outcome. So by the measure of time, ease, and outcome, ProQuest (and other like digital archives) is a good example to demonstrate the great potential of digitization, despite all the other challenges digitization presents for scholarship.