Clio Wired (History 696)

As an aside… Interesting that we read about copyrights as Print@Google (100,000 books) finally falls in place!

Back in the 1950s and 60s, a librarian from California created a bibliography of American fiction, spanning the years 1851-1875. It includes not only the “biggies”—Twain and Stowe, for example—but lesser-known (or just plain forgotten) authors as well.

Using his model as a guide, researchers at Indiana University decided to digitize the works included in his book—a monumental (and ongoing) task indeed. They have provided both scanned copies of the originals and electronically produced versions of the text—a project that undoubtedly took many man hours. Their providing both, however, allows the viewer to see how the original text looks, while having the option to read those pages that might have been obscured by the passage of time.

This web site offers a wealth of possibilities for research projects. Let’s say I wanted to do a study on fictional portrayals of Andrew Jackson and his legacy after his death in 1845. I can click on the homepage’s search button and type his name—a search that yields 94 records relatively quickly. It would take a prodigious amount of work to go through a print-based archive in order to locate this information, as some of these titles are quite obscure. Also, as Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig point out, there are many primary sources that are too fragile to be examined. This site allows researchers access to these needed materials. Finally, the potential need to find a one-sentence reference on page 350 of a 1,000-page novel could be quite daunting. The handy search function allows me to find as few or as many references as I need.

The overall look of the site is rather plain—a lot of white space, no frills. However, the simplicity of the site belies the amount of information it contains. Although the audience for this site might be limited to graduate students and researchers, it is an extremely valuable tool—and it is well worth the cost to digitize these books. All this being said, I think I would have liked more browsing functions. At this time, I can only browse on the first letter of the author’s last name. I cannot, for example, browse through women authors, who wrote between 1850 and 1860. Allowing works and authors to be examined by genre and gender, respectively, would be a useful tool for this project. Perhaps a female perspective on Jackson’s legacy might be different in 1852 than it would be during Reconstruction. I think the overall layout of the page on which search results appear is great—it allows the reader to look at the pages on which the term(s) appear, while providing the option of looking at each work section-by-section.

Overall, I think this site is fantastic. It provides scholars with a useful tool not readily available in the print world. Although some work is still needed, the site authors are well on their way to creating an invaluable tool for researchers.