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The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web
Roy Rosenzweig
On August 24, 1965, Theodor Nelson presented a
paper to the Association for Computing Machinery national conference in
which he introduced the word "hypertext" to refer to "a body of written
or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it
could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper." Nelson,
who had started musing about this sort of associative thinking and
linking as a Harvard University graduate student in 1960, viewed
"hypertext" as an integral part of an imagined globally interconnected
library and publishing system that would "grow indefinitely, gradually
including more and more of the world's written knowledge" and "have
every feature a novelist or absent-minded professor could want, holding
everything he wanted in just the complicated way he wanted it held, and
handling notes and manuscripts in as subtle and complex ways as he
wanted them handled."1 |
1 |
Two years later,
while working at the publisher Harcourt Brace, Nelson—an inveterate
coiner of terms whose own Web page lists sixteen words or phrases that
he claims to have introduced into general use—started to describe his
global library as "Xanadu." "For forty years," Nelson wrote recently,
"Project Xanadu has had as its purpose to build a deep-reach electronic
literary system for worldwide use and a differently-organized general
system of data management."2 |
2 |
Nelson's grand vision
of a universal library and publishing system has come in for its share
of derision. In 1995, the Wired magazine writer Gary Wolf
devoted twenty thousand words to detailing what he called "The Curse of
Xanadu." "Nelson's Xanadu project," he wrote, "was supposed to be the
universal, democratic hypertext library. . . . Instead, it sucked
Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into what became the
longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing—a 30-year
saga. . . . [an] amazing epic tragedy. . . . [and] an actual symptom of
madness." Nelson responded angrily to Wolf's profile, but he has also
hinted that he views Xanadu as an impossible dream. He took the word
from the imaginary home of Kubla Khan in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
uncompleted poem of the same name; Orson Welles (one of Nelson's
heroes) used the same word for Citizen Kane's extravagant, uncompleted
mansion.3 |
3 |
And yet, just five
years after Wolf's obituary for Xanadu, the dream of a universal
hypertextual library seems less like the narcotic imaginings of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge or the fantasies of Ted Nelson than a description of a
multibillion-dollar industry called the World Wide Web.4
Even those of us whose professional calling requires us to think
soberly about the distant past need now to consider whether such a
contemporary development will reshape the ways we research, teach, and
write history. Can professional historians look forward to a future in
which they can access all the documentary evidence of the past with the
click of a mouse? How far have we already come toward reaching that
dream? |
4 |
Not far enough yet.
Even Nelson's 1965 paper on hypertext—quite relevant to anyone
interested in the Web, which has hypertext as its most basic
protocol—is not yet online. And any reader of this journal could come
up with long lists of crucial historical sources only in physical
libraries and archives. Still, a startling number of primary and
secondary sources important to American historians have suddenly
appeared online in the less-than-a-decade history of the World Wide
Web. Indeed, so rapid has been the growth of the "history Web," as we
will call that virtual world within a virtual world, that it cannot be
readily surveyed within a single article. Such topics as how digital
history might alter classroom teaching, historical writing, or modes of
scholarly discourse, while mentioned here, deserve separate, extended
treatment. Instead, I focus on some of the general trends in the growth
of the history Web over the past five years, especially its emergence
as an extraordinarily rich online archive of primary and secondary
sources, a Xanadu, in Nelson's words. What sources are now online? What
is the range and quality of this virtual archive? Even more important, who has put them there and who can use them? |
5 |
Asking such questions
inevitably leads us to wonder about the past, present, and future of
one of the Internet's most celebrated qualities—its open and public
character. As the history Web has grown, it has also become more
complex. Many of the most important resources are now "hidden" from
view in databases not readily accessible by such Web search engines as
Google and AltaVista.5 In addition, while many of the creators and owners of Web content still come from what could be broadly called the public
sector—whether grass-roots enthusiasts, grant-funded university-based
projects, or government agencies such as the Library of Congress—private
corporations (giant information conglomerates selling their wares to
libraries, entertainment corporations trying to turn the Web into an
advertiser-supported medium, and Internet startups with a range of
business plans) are coming to control some of the most valuable real
estate on the history Web. Such private control raises questions about
what history we will see on our computer screens and who will be able
to see it. If the road ahead leads to Xanadu.com rather than
Xanadu.edu, what will the future of the past look like? |
6 |
One, Two, Many History Webs: Surface and Deep, Public and Private
|
Rapidity of change is a new technology cliché.
"The Internet's pace of adoption," observes a United States Department
of Commerce report, "eclipses all other technologies that preceded it.
Radio was in existence thirty-eight years before fifty million people
tuned in; TV took thirteen years to reach that benchmark. . . . Once it
was opened to the general public, the Internet crossed that line in
four years." In just the past five years, the percentage of the United
States population online has more than tripled from 14 to 44 percent.
The "Web Characterization Project" of theOCLC
(Online Computer Library Center, Inc.) reported 7.1 million unique Web
sites in October 2000, a 50 percent increase over the previous year's
total and almost a fivefold increase since just 1997. Over that time,
the Web has almost entirely displaced other media—especiallyCD-ROM
s—for presenting digital content. Conventional search engines such as
Google currently index more than 1.3 billion Web pages. Peter Lyman and
Hal R. Varian estimate that in 2000 the World Wide Web consisted of
about twenty-one terabytes (a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes) of staticHTML
(hypertext markup language) pages and was growing at a rate of 100
percent annually. But increasingly Web "pages" only come into existence
as the result of specialized database searches, and those Web-based
databases do not turn up in standard Web searches. BrightPlanet
Corporation, whose Lexibot software indexes some of the searchable
databases not readily accessible by conventional search engines, claims
that this "invisible" or "deep" Web (in contrast to the "surface" Web
found by the search engines) contains nearly 550 billion individual
pages.6 |
7 |
How much has the
history Web changed? No time machine can take us back to the Web of
1995 or 1996 and run comparative searches with today. One imperfect
benchmark comes from searches that my colleague Michael O'Malley and I
did in the fall of 1996 while writing an article on the history Web for
this journal. Running the same searches in the same search engine
(AltaVista) returns more than ten times as many "hits" today as four
years ago—thereby greatly outpacing the overall growth of the Web and
even "Moore's law," which predicts that computing power will double
every eighteen months. We had 64 hits on William Graham Sumner, 300 on
Eugene Debs, and 700 on Emma Goldman in 1996; the comparable figures
for November 2000 were 716, 2,971, and 8,805.7 |
8 |
The quality of those
"hits" improved as well. Four years ago, those looking for Debs on the
Web might find some basic biographical information about the socialist
leader, but the most interesting insights were how Debs fits into
contemporary American life—how different groups (from the Democratic
Socialists of America to the National Child Rights Alliance) and
individuals (from local activists to Ralph Nader) made use of Debs's
past in late-twentieth-century America. Now, however, the Web contains
not only up-to-date biographical and historical treatments but also a
gallery of images, state-by-state figures on Debs's presidential votes,
guides to archival collections, and a substantial body of primary
sources—at least a dozen different speeches or articles by Debs and
another half dozen contemporary accounts of him. |
9 |
Such raw Web searches
do not, however, capture the fullness of the history Web since they do
not generally measure the deep Web. For historians, the most notable of
such databases are the more than ninety collections gathered under American Memory, the online resource compiled by the Library of Congress's National Digital Library Program (NDLP). Four years ago, American Memory
had some staggering archival riches, but now the collection has grown
at least fivefold and includes more than five million items—ranging
from 1,305 pieces of African American sheet music to 2,100 early
baseball cards. Visitors can examine 117,000FSA/OWI
(Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information) photographs,
422 early motion pictures and sound recordings of the Edison Companies,
and 176,000 pages of George Washington's correspondence, letter books,
and other papers. Library staff will soon place online another thirty
collections, including such eagerly awaited resources as the thousands
of ex-slave narratives of the Federal Writers' Project.8 |
10 |
Whereas four or five
years ago history materials on the Web were most useful for teaching,
the depth of such collections as American Memory means that
historians can now do serious scholarly research in online collections.
With more than 200,000 photographs now available in American Memory, anyone studying the history of American photography would need to visit the NDLP.
Moreover, the digital format makes possible modes of research that are
possible in other media but much more difficult. Take, for example, the
old, but still much debated, question of George Washington's religious
attitudes. Using the online version of the Washington papers, the
historian Peter R. Henriques showed not only that Washington never
referred to "Jesus" or "Christ" in his personal correspondence but also
that his references to death were invariably "gloomy and pessimistic"
with no evidence of "Christian images of judgment, redemption through
the sacrifice of Christ, and eternal life for the faithful."9 |
11 |
Washington's dark thoughts on death are filed away in the deep Web of such databases as the vast American Memory collection not accessible by conventional Web-wide search engines; Henriques's thoughts on Washington (published in print in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography but online through Bell & Howell's ProQuest Direct and EBSCO's World History FullTEXT),
however, reside in a vast terrain that even BrightPlanet does not fully
measure—what we will call the private Web. These are the growing number
of online resources only available to paying customers.OCLC
's data indicate that the growth of the public Web is slowing at the
same time that private, restricted Web sites have gone from 12 to 20
percent of the total Web.10
Whereas the surface and deep Webs, which together we will call the
public Web, contain enormous numbers of primary documents, the private
Web abounds in the secondary sources crucial to historical work. |
12 |
For example, most historians know about JSTOR
(Journal Storage: The Scholarly Journal Archive), which includes, in
its five-million-page database of 117 academic journals, the full text
of fifteen different history journals, most of them running from their
inception up to 1995. Many of the nonhistory journals, for example,
sociology, economic, and political science journals from the early part
of the twentieth century, constitute primary sources of great interest
to American historians. SearchingJSTOR
for Eugene Debs in history journals yields 81 articles, but expanding
to other journals gives us another 61 articles, including such
significant contemporary sources as John Spargo's "The Influence of
Karl Marx on Contemporary Socialism" in the 1910 American Journal of Sociology. The word search capabilities of JSTOR
also facilitate a kind of intellectual history that cannot be done as
easily in print sources. Say you want to trace the changing reputation
of Charles Beard in the historical profession; the 191 articles inJSTOR
that mention Beard provide an invaluable starting point. Historians of
language are already having a field day playing with such massive
databases. The librarian and lexicographer Fred Shapiro, for example,
has uncovered uses of such phrases as "double standard" (1912), "Native
American" (for American Indian, 1931), and "solar energy" (1914) that
predate citations in the Oxford English Dictionary by decades.11 |
13 |
jstor lacks the
scholarship of the past five or six years, but online databases from
Johns Hopkins University Press's Project Muse and the History
Cooperative increasingly provide that as well. Although the History
Cooperative,JSTOR, and Muse all
restrict access to subscribers, they have emerged under nonprofit
auspices. But increasingly important online collections of historical
data are in the hands of commercial vendors such as Bell & Howell
and the Thomson Corporation, which have vast archives of scholarly
publications and primary sources, and Corbis, with its unparalleled
archive of historical images. These are the exemplars of the private
history Web—a growing realm both under corporate control and accessible
only to paying customers.12 |
14 |
Everyone a Web Historian: Grass-Roots History Online
|
Despite the growing significance of the private
history Web, the greatest energy over the past decade has actually been
in the public Web—public in the sense of both its open access and its
control by individuals, nonprofits, or government agencies. Indeed, an
astonishing grass-roots movement has fueled its enormous growth. Over
the past five years, academic historians, history teachers, and history
enthusiasts have created thousands of history Web sites. No one has
managed a definitive count of these Web sites, although Yahoo!'s United
States history directory includes more than 4,500 sites—a fivefold
increase since 1996. My own Center for History and New Media maintains
searchable databases of more "serious" history Web sites and has
indexed more than 2,100 of them.13
Although perhaps one-third of history Web sites have .com addresses
(signifying the "commercial" domain in contrast to .edu, .org, or
.gov), most of those are actually set up by individuals using free
space (albeit festooned with banner and pop-up ads) provided by such
companies asAOL (America OnLine), Geocities (a part of Yahoo!), CompuServe (an AOL
subsidiary), Lycos, or Prodigy. To a surprising degree, then, history
Web sites come from both academics and amateurs who have posted
historical material online primarily as a labor of love—the original
meaning of amateur. |
15 |
Civil War
enthusiasts, not surprisingly, have brought some of the same passion to
presenting history online that they regularly display at Civil War
reenactments. "Some days," observes Choice, the journal of
academic libraries, "it appears that the Internet consists of equal
parts Star Trek, stock market reports, soft-core pornography—and Civil
War sites." And the historians William G. Thomas and Alice E. Carter
have recently filled a two-hundred-page book surveying the Civil War on
the Web, "a guide to the very best sites." Although many of these sites
come from large institutions such as the Library of Congress, the
National Park Service, and the Virginia Center for Digital History
(with which Thomas and Carter have been associated), hundreds of
passionate and dedicated amateurs have created remarkable sites without
any outside financial or institutional support. Thomas R. Fasulo, an
entomologist, has, for example, assembled an immense archive on the
battle of Olustee (the largest Civil War battle in Florida)—more than
forty official reports, fifty firsthand reminiscences in letters,
articles, and books, and detailed coverage of all the units
participating in the battle. The reenactor Scott McKay has developed an
equally massive site on the Tenth Texas Infantry filled with rosters,
casualty lists, ordnance records, battle reports, reminiscences, and
personal letters.14
To be sure, Civil War enthusiasts such as Fasulo and McKay flourished
well before the emergence of the Web, but the Internet has made their
passions visible and accessible to a much wider audience. |
16 |
Genealogists have
similarly found the Web a welcoming arena for engaging in their passion
for the past. The USGenWeb Digital Library has mobilized hundreds of
local volunteers to create online transcriptions of census records,
marriage bonds, wills, and other public documents. The Family History
Library of the Church ofJesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon
Church) has thrown open its massive genealogical databases, including
the Ancestral and Pedigree Resource files (a database of family trees
submitted to the Family History Library) and the International
Genealogy Index (a name index of records collected by church
members)—660 million names in all—the fruits of more than a century of
Mormon genealogical work.15 |
17 |
Family historians
have visited such sites in amazing numbers; the Mormon Church's site
attracts 129,000 visitors per day, an annual rate of close to 50
million. Online resources have drawn tens of thousands more Americans
into the already popular practice of tracing family roots—the most
common form of historical research in the United States. Significantly,
the Internet's greatest impact may lie in connecting people in common
pursuit of their roots, allowing them to share information on common
ancestors or to help out fellow genealogists by investigating a local
lead. The Mormons alone sponsor 137,000 collaborative e-mail lists to
facilitate research exchanges. While the Web has served largely as a
publishing and archiving medium for already committed Civil War
enthusiasts, it has brought new participants to genealogy by making the
sources for family history more readily available. Print authors have
even noticed the popularity of Web-based genealogical research; at
least a dozen published guides—including Genealogy Online for Dummies—offer advice to enthusiasts.16 |
18 |
The breadth of this
grass-roots effort becomes clear when we look at who has posted a
random selection of historical documents online. I pulled Diane
Ravitch's anthology The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation
off my shelf and found online fifteen of the twenty documents (many of
them far from mainstream) in her chapter "The Progressive Age."
Teachers constituted the largest group of people who have made these
documents publicly available—a communications professor at the
University of Arkansas posting Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "Solitude of
Self," a community college instructor in Ohio providing the Niagara
Movement Declaration of Principles, a Hartsdale, New York, high school
teacher digitizing M. Carey Thomas's "Higher Education for Women."17
But many others had little or no academic connection. A black organizer
includes W. E. B. Du Bois's "Talented Tenth" essay on his Web site (Mr. Kenyada's Neighborhood)
because he believes that Du Bois's vision "of our potential capacity to
solve problems internally" provides the basis for a new
"community-based activism." A German purchasing agent puts Joe Hill's
"The Preacher and the Slave" on his History in Song Web pages
that preserve songs from an American studies course he took at Johannes
Gutenberg University a quarter of a century ago. The General Board of
Discipleship of the United Methodist Church publishes "Lift Every Voice
and Sing," by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, with the
suggestion that congregations "sing this hymn in worship on a Sunday in
February [2000], and celebrate its one hundredth anniversary." The
amateur poet Kevin Taylor's Web site includes Alice Duer Miller's
pro-suffrage verse "Evolution" because "its message is as important and
clear today as it has always been," and Miller "is also the author of The White Cliffs—one
of my favorite books." The Web takes Carl Becker's vision of "everyman
a historian" one step further—every person has become an archivist or a
publisher of historical documents.18 |
19 |
Many of these
grass-roots efforts are quite modest, poorly designed Web sites
proffering one or two favorite documents with little historical
context. But others have grown into massive archives. In early 1995 the
graduate student Jim Zwick began posting a few documents on
anti-imperialism, the subject of his Syracuse University dissertation,
on the Web. Like most historians, Zwick had assembled his own personal
archive; he realized that the materials gathered for scholarly research
could be made public through the World Wide Web. Five years ago, Zwick
was one of the Web history pioneers; now his efforts have expanded well
beyond anti-imperialism into such topics as political cartoons and
world's fairs and expositions and thousands of historical documents
personally digitized by Zwick. The volume of material and the number of
users have multiplied more than fivefold. Although Zwick's Web site
(now called BoondocksNet.com) remains a one-person operation, its
increasing scale has forced him to take ads and sell books in order to
support the growing hosting and software costs. Zwick has blazed a path
that many future graduate students may (and I think should) follow. Why
not take the least visible and most private part of the scholar's
work—assembling a body of primary documents—and make it public?19 |
20 |
The most massive
grass-roots Web history effort linked to scholars is, of course, H-Net:
Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine. Well known to historians for
the more than a hundred specialized discussion lists that it sponsors,
H-Net also has a major Web presence, which includes searchable archives
of the list discussions. HNet has not been heavily involved in posting
historical documents, but its archives are now themselves a significant
primary source for the thinking of professional historians, as well as
an eclectic reference source to important books and teaching tools. Its
most profound impact, however, has been on modes of scholarly
communication; since its lists include 60,000 subscribers in ninety
countries, it has become an essential way for historians to find out
about conferences, grants, jobs, and teaching resources. To some
degree, it has also accelerated the pace of scholarly discourse. In
1998, for example, subscribers to H-Amstdy, a part of H-Net,
extensively debated Janice Radway's presidential address to the
American Studies Association before it had been published in American Quarterly.
Hundreds of volunteer list editors keep H-Net going, although the
energy of Executive Director Mark Kornbluh, who has been very
successful in obtaining government grants and university support, has
also been vital to its maintenance and growth. As a result, H-Net
remains a free scholarly resource that is also open to interested
participants from outside the academy.20 |
21 |
The greatest strength
of the grass-roots history Web—its diversity and its links to
nonprofessionals—is sometimes its greatest weakness. While academically
trained historians such as Zwick and the H-Net community have joined in
the bottom-up effort, its overall amateur and eclectic quality
obviously poses problems for those committed to professional standards.
William Thomas, for example, pronounces Civil War history on the Web
"anemic" as well as "healthy." Few sites, he notes, "advance new ideas
about the history of the period"; most ignore the scholarly trend
toward social history and focus relentlessly on generals and battles.
Still worse, "many web sites broadcast old prejudices, ancient
theories, and long-disproved arguments about the Civil War," especially
the view that the war was fought over tariffs rather than slavery. One
site argues, "conditions in northern factories were as bad or worse
than those for a majority of slaves" and rejects as "simplistic" the
idea that "the Civil War was fought over slavery."21 |
22 |
Even amateur sites
that stick to presenting primary sources rather than historical
interpretations do not always meet professional standards. Reenactors
digitizing battle reports or labor organizers posting Joe Hill songs
generally do not fuss about proofreading and copy editing. Nor are
nonprofessionals inclined to worry about definitive editions, editing,
or careful contextualization. There are at least sixteen different
online versions of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's well-known speech "Solitude
of Self"; they provide conflicting dates on which she gave the speech
and different bodies to whom she presented it. Paragraphing and
punctuation vary widely, and some excerpt or even edit the speech
without indicating the intervention. Only one provides a link to the
Library of Congress, which has online a facsimile of a printed pamphlet
version of the speech.22 |
23 |
Some documents found
on the Web are, in fact, not "real" documents at all. At least three
Web pages promise the "voice" of Eugene Debs, but the recording is
actually that of Len Spencer, who recorded one of Debs's speeches
around 1905.23
More than two dozen different Web sites offer versions of what they
call the "Willie Lynch speech of 1712," in which a British slave owner
from the West Indies allegedly advises Virginia slave owners to control
slaves through a strategy of divide and rule. Sometimes the sites add
an introduction supposedly written by Frederick Douglass; others
falsely describe Lynch as the source of the word "lynching." Despite
the sites' repeated assurances about the speech's "authenticity,"
internal evidence readily betrays its twentieth-century origins. The
language incorporates modern syntax, and the content focuses on
current-day divisions such as skin color, age, and gender rather than
ethnic and national divisions much more important in the early
eighteenth century.24 |
24 |
To be sure, a careful
search of the Web also turns up evidence of the dubious origins of the
Lynch speech. Still, those sites that take the speech entirely at face
value overwhelm the Web sources that dispute it. Anyone who simply
searched for "Willie Lynch" on the Web would be more than ten times as
likely to find evidence of the speech's "authenticity" than information
that casts doubt. But the Web is unique in the way it offers entry into
the world of information and misinformation in which most people
operate and allows us to consider the significance and spread of such
urban legends as the Willie Lynch speech, which are orally transmitted
at such events as the 1995 Million Man March or the 2001 inaugural
protests. The Web itself cannot be blamed for misinformation or
misrepresentation; the Lynch speech, in fact, appeared in print as
early as 1970. The Web increases our access to documents and
information, both spurious and authentic. For both better and worse,
the virtual archive of the Web distinguishes itself from traditional
libraries and archives by its indiscriminating inclusion of the
best—and worst—that has been known and said.25 |
25 |
Despite the abundant
misinformation available online, the Internet is—somewhat
paradoxically—a superb source for basic factual research, especially
when used by those who are careful to determine source quality. My own
rendering of the Willie Lynch story comes entirely from research in
online sources. Although I have a substantial reference library at
home, I now do most of my historical "fact checking" on the Web. I can
find correct spellings, birth dates, battle deaths, and election
results in online sources more quickly and more accurately than in most
standard reference works. The key caveat, of course, is "careful to
determine source quality," but most professional historians—and
probably most advanced history students or most sophisticated general
readers—possess this skill. |
26 |
Deepening the Public History Web: Universities, Foundations, and the Government
|
While the largest number of Web sites with
historical documents and content have emerged out of this eclectic,
grass-roots effort, the largest volume of historical
documentation exists within the deep Web of online databases and the
private Web of materials open only to those who pay. Both efforts share
some basic similarities—massive scale and use of databases to organize
the materials. But only paying customers can visit the private Web. |
27 |
Surprisingly,
enormous amounts of free online historical material have appeared in
the past five years, and much more will appear in the next decade.
These sites have primarily benefited from government or foundation
funding or, in many cases, both. The most important project, the
Library of Congress's National Digital Library, has spent about $60
million to put more than 5 million historical items online between 1995
and 2000—with three-quarters of the funding coming from private
donations. Ameritech, the former Bell telephone company for the Midwest
(now owned bySBC Communications),
worked with the Library of Congress to provide $2 million for more than
twenty digitization projects at libraries across the country.26
The heavy corporate funding naturally raises the specter of probusiness
bias in what gets digitized. The AT&T Foundation, for example, has
supported the digitizing of the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers.
The Reuters America Foundation was probably more likely to support the
digitizing of the George Washington Papers than the records of the
National Child Labor Committee. Nevertheless, Ameritech has, for
example, funded the Chicago Historical Society's efforts to bring its
collection of Haymarket affair materials to the Web. |
28 |
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
has also supported many important projects, particularly favoring those
with an educational mission and focus on particular topics. The
well-known Valley of the Shadow Project at the University of Virginia
brings together a stunning archive of documents about two nearby
counties (Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania)
on opposite sides during the Civil War era. Already a major Web
destination in 1996, its collection of letters, diaries, newspapers,
censuses, and photographs has multiplied tenfold in just the past four
years. The Valley of the Shadow is remarkable not just for its
depth and sophistication but also because it has no physical
counterpart. Edward L. Ayers, William G. Thomas, and their
collaborators have literally created an archive that did not previously
exist by hunting down and digitizing documents found in both public
repositories and private hands.27 |
29 |
The New Deal Network (NDN), another NEH-funded
project, has similarly created a new, virtual archive, with more than
20,000 photographs, political cartoons, and texts (speeches, letters,
and other documents) gathered from multiple sources. Sponsored by the
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and led by Tom Thurston, the New Deal Network lacks the comprehensiveness of the Valley of the Shadow, but it offers a remarkable resource for anyone teaching about the 1930s and 1940s. History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, the product of my own Center for History and New Media and the American Social History Project and funded by NEH
and the Kellogg Foundation, has digitized hundreds of first-person
historical documents and contextualized them for use in high school and
college classrooms.28 |
30 |
In contrast to the "invented archives" represented by the Valley, NDN, and History Matters, Documenting the American South
opens up an existing archive—the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill's unparalleled southern collections—to remote students and
scholars. Funded by various grants (fromNEH, Ameritech, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services), Documenting the American South
organizes thousands of documents (largely texts) around such specific
topics as "Southern Literature," "First-Person Narratives," "Slave
Narratives," "The Southern Homefront, 1861–1865," and "The Church in
the Southern Black Community."29 |
31 |
The National Science Foundation (NSF), with a budget thirty times that of NEH,
has emerged as an important funder for "digital libraries" as a result
of its interest in computing issues rather than in the quality of the
content being provided. Whatever the motives,NSF
has financed some projects of enormous interest to historians. Michigan
State University's National Gallery of the Spoken Word (NGSW)
is developing techniques for automatically searching large volumes of
spoken materials, including, for example, thousands of hours of nightly
TV news broadcasts. Historians may not care about the underlying computer science, but if the NGSW
succeeds in creating a "fully searchable digitized database of
historical voice recordings that span the 20th century," they will make
extensive use of it in their teaching and research.30 |
32 |
Whereas NEH funding has largely supported the creation of digital projects for use in the classroom and NSF
has concentrated on the intersection of computing and humanities
problems, the Mellon Foundation has focused on library-related issues,
especially preservation and storage. It has provided substantial
funding to the Cornell and University of Michigan libraries to preserve
and then make available a major library of printed materials published
between 1850 and 1877 under the rubric of the "Making of America" (MOA).
The University of Michigan portion of the collection alone will soon
encompass more than 9,600 monographs, 50,000 journal articles, and 3
million pages—a significant portion of the library's imprints from
those years.31 |
33 |
Like scholars using NDLP, those using MOA
can find information previously available in theory but not necessarily
in practice. Steven M. Gelber, who was researching the origins of
hobbies, notes that he turned up "a treasure trove of data in a matter
of a couple of days" that would have taken months to find through
traditional research. He callsMOA
"the most exciting thing I have seen in research since I first
discovered Xerox machines in 1967 and realized I did not have to take
notes anymore." This "is what I assumed the future of libraries would
be but to be quite honest, I never believed I would live to see so much
of the past put online in such an accessible form."32 |
34 |
Despite the enormous value of the MOA
and similar projects, some cautions are in order. Some object that such
efforts are a form of burning down the village to save it, since most
of the books will ultimately be discarded—both because they are cut up
to be scanned and because the storage space is valuable. The novelist
Nicholson Baker, for example, has sharply criticized earlier newspaper
microfilming projects that have led to the similar destruction of paper
copies of the newspapers. As the result of Library of Congress
microfilming efforts, for example, libraries across the country dumped
their hard copies in the belief that there was now a standard,
comprehensive microfilmed version of newspapers that could be
reproduced, ordered, and consulted. But Baker argues that the anomalies
and holes (missing issues, pages, etc.) in the Library of Congress
collection have now become permanent holes in some newspaper records
because of the ensuing destruction of holdings in other libraries.33
Baker and others also note the value of marginalia and other markings
that get lost with the disappearance of paper copies as well as the
difficulties of fully reproducing images such as nineteenth-century
engravings in digital form. Librarians, on the other hand, argue that
books and newspapers printed on acidic paper were crumbling and that
microfilming or digitizing offers the only practical alternative and
the only way to supply "the most content to the most people in a
cost-effective manner." While some scholars will bemoan the loss of
tangible, historical evidence in the transition from paper to digital
images (just as they mourn the disappearance of the card catalog), many
others will benefit from their ability much more readily to access the
volumes in theMOA collection, many
of which are not in a standard university library, and even more the
possibility of searching them by words in the text rather than just by
title.34 |
35 |
Indeed, the
incredible ease of using these newly digitized works may actually pose
a problem for future historical work. TheMOA
collection largely draws from books from Michigan's remote storage that
had rarely been borrowed in more than thirty years. Yet the same
"obscure" books are now searched more than 500,000 times a month. Will
digitization create a new historical research canon in which historians
resort much more regularly to works that can be found and searched
easily online rather than sought out in more remote repositories? Years
ago, the New York Times ran an advertisement with the tagline
"If it is not in the New York Times Index, maybe it didn't happen."
Could we arrive at a future in which, if it is not on the Web, maybe it
didn't happen? |
36 |
Such concerns aside,
these grass-roots, government, and nonprofit efforts have begun to
deliver, as Gelber observes, "what people have been talking about for
ten years—a genuine electronic library, or at least an electronic
archive." Historians will spend years examining these digital sources
and will not readily exhaust their possibilities. Although the Founding
Fathers may be better covered in these resources than labor or feminist
militants are, the Web in fact now offers material stretching across
the broad range of topics that interest contemporary historians. The
always precarious state of the public sphere in contemporary America
poses one crucial peril for the continued expansion of this burgeoning
free archive. For example, the budget ofNEH, the most important funder of humanities work, has declined (in real terms) by about two-thirds in the past twenty years. 35 And in the past several years, it has had to fight for its survival. NEH
may now face further threats with a Republican president and Congress
who traditionally have not been sympathetic to the public sector. |
37 |
Despite the great success of American Memory,
which receives 18 million page views per month and has brought primary
sources into K–12 classrooms across the country, the Library of
Congress seems to be shifting away from its focus on putting its
historical collections online. A report by the National Research
Council in the summer of 2000 criticized the library for, in effect,
paying too much attention to historical sources and not enough to
recently created "born digital" materials such as Web sites and
electronic journals and books. James O'Donnell, vice provost for
Information Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania who
chaired the committee producing the report, told the New York Times:
"Digitizing your analog material is less urgent. . . . [I]f you don't
do it this year, it'll still be there in five years, and you could do
it then. Digital information that you're losing is probably lost
forever."36 If the Library of Congress turns away from the massive digitizing efforts of the past five years, American Memory may turn out to be a forgotten memory from the late twentieth century. |
38 |
Moreover, most of the
government or foundation funding has been significantly enhanced by
university support (another part of the endangered public sector) and
by substantial infusions of sweat equity from digital pioneers. When
the creation of online archives becomes routine, will that university
and volunteer support remain available? In other words, is there a
stable basis for the continued funding of public sector efforts to
create a public, free historical archive? |
39 |
The continuing
erosion of the "public domain" further threatens the public Web.
Copyrighted material previously entered this intangible realm of
unrestricted use after a twenty-eight-year term renewable once, or a
maximum of fifty-six years. In 1976, the copyright law narrowed the
public domain by lengthening most existing copyrights to seventy-five
years. As a result, the only large bodies of materials for the years
after 1923 (the year after which copyright covers most work) are
government documents such as theWPA (Works Progress Administration) life histories or the FSA
photographs. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which
extended copyrights for an additional twenty years (in part due to the
aggressive lobbying of the Disney Corporation, whose Mickey Mouse was
scurrying toward the public domain) means that the copyright line will
remain frozen at 1923 until 2018. Thus, Web surfers can easily read F.
Scott Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) but not The Great Gatsby
(1925), which will not find its way online until 2020. The 1998
copyright extension delivered the single greatest blow to the creation
of a free, public historical archive; yet historians were barely at the
table when that act passed, crowded out by the high-priced suits from
the big media conglomerates. Copyright restrictions are one reason for
the persistence of fading digital formats such asCD-ROM. The two United States history CD-ROMs on which I have worked contain copyrighted materials for which we could purchase permission to use in the CD-ROM but not on the Web. 37 |
40 |
Selling the Past Online: Information Conglomerates and Internet Startups on the Private History Web
|
For historians, copyright protection has
redlined not only much twentieth-century history but also most
secondary literature out of the public Web. But because the problem
involves rights and money, one solution similarly involves rights and
money: companies that provide copyright digital content, charge for it,
and then compensate rights holders out of their revenues. That said,
the particular models for selling digital content vary widely as the
corporations in the emerging "information business" scramble to evolve
the most profitable business model. |
41 |
The most common
approach involves high-priced library-based subscriptions to digital
content. Individual library subscriptions, which allow the library to
provide the materials to all its patrons, generally cost thousands of
dollars. The Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA),
which purchases electronic databases for the state's thirty-nine public
college and university libraries (a consortium arrangement increasingly
common in this environment), currently spends more than $4 million per
year for electronic subscriptions, and individual libraries in the
consortium are spending thousands, if not millions, more.38 Annual subscriptions to periodical databases such as ProQuest Direct and Expanded Academic ASAP (EAA) typically run around $30,000 to $50,000 for colleges and universities. |
42 |
Other vendors sell
digital content on an item-by-item basis—"by the drink"—instead of by
subscription. Northern Light, which modestly aspires (in the words of
its chief executive officer) "to index and classify all human knowledge
to a unified consistent standard and make it available to everyone in
the world in a single integrated search," offers more than 700
full-text publications (including a number of history journals) on a
per-article basis. You can, for example, get Howard Zinn's article in
the Progressive on "Eugene V. Debs and the Idea of Socialism"
delivered instantly to your Web browser for $2.95. Contentville, which
has more of the feel of a magazine (it was founded by Steven Brill, who
made his millions with such publications as American Lawyer),
offers a smaller selection of articles at similar prices as well as
primary source documents such as speeches and legal documents.
Prominent academic experts such as Sean Wilentz and Karal Ann Marling
recommend the best books on "American Politics since 1787" and "Popular
Culture," and contributing editors share their favorite Web sites.39 |
43 |
The vast image
library controlled by Corbis, the company owned by the Microsoft
founder Bill Gates, offers up the most massive historical database
available on the pay-per-drink basis. Corbis has swallowed up many of
the world's largest image collections, including the Bettmann Archive
and the French photo firm Sygma, and has licensing arrangements with
leading photographers and repositories around the globe (from the
National Gallery in London to the State Hermitage Museum in St.
Petersburg). It also represents another example of the trend toward
massive concentration in the digital environment. Increasingly, the
world's images are coming under the control of just two giant
Seattle-based firms—Corbis and Getty Images, owned by the oil heir Mark
Getty. Both aspire to be, as a Corbis ad says, "your single source for
an array of diverse images"—"The Place for Pictures Online," in its
trademarked phrase. More than two million of Corbis's 65 million images
are digitized and available through a fast search engine. Anyone who
has done photo research for a book or article will appreciate the
ability to sit at home and browse through this incredible
collection—seventeen superb photos of Eugene Debs, for example. You can
look for free, but using the images (emblazoned with "corbis.com" in
the online version and protected with digital watermarks) comes with a
price tag that escalates as you move up from a digital image for your
personal Web page ($3), to a glossy print for your wall (starting at
$16.95), to an image that you can publish in a book (generally $100 or
more).40 |
44 |
Corbis's charges
reflect copyrighted images in many cases, but in others they rest on
the company's ownership of an image published widely in the
pre-copyright era and available for free if you can get a copy from a
less fee-hungry source such as the Library of Congress. You can pay
Corbis $3.00 for a digital image of Walker Evans's photo of the
"Interior of a Depression-Era Cabin" or download a higher quality
version of the same image in American Memory for free. American Memory
also provides a fuller identification and contextualization of the
photo, since its goals are educational and scholarly rather than just
pecuniary. Similarly, you can purchase Eugene Debs's 1918 Canton, Ohio,
speech, which helped land him in prison for sedition, from Contentville
for $1.95 or you can pick it up for free on at least four different Web
sites. |
45 |
Costs aside, these
online databases are already revolutionizing the way historians do
their research. Most familiar to historians are the massive
bibliographic databases such as America: History and Life and the Arts
and Humanities Citation Index. Once upon a time (that is, five or six
years ago), historians searched through annual bound volumes to develop
bibliographies. Now they typically do these searches quickly and at
their own convenience. After assembling a bibliography, historians used
to search for and copy articles. But now they can find the full text of
a surprisingly wide selection of secondary works online. |
46 |
The major online
sources for full-text journals—Bell & Howell's ProQuest Direct, the
Thomson Corporation's Expanded AcademicASAP (EAA), and EBSCO—offer thousands of journals, including dozens of major historical journals, generally from 1989 to the present. 41
Despite some gaps such as most state historical society publications,
these databases contain a large percentage of the journal literature of
the 1990s that historians would need to consult. Two other nonprofit,
but still gated, resources—Project Muse and the History
Cooperative—fill in some important gaps in what ProQuest andEAA offer. For still older sources, JSTOR
(also available only through hefty library installation charges as well
as an annual maintenance fee) provides comprehensive coverage, albeit
for a smaller set of journals. |
47 |
As yet, historical
monographs cannot be found in cyberspace as readily as journals can.
But perhaps not for long. Questia Media, Inc., backed by $130 million
in venture capital, has created an online liberal arts library of
50,000 scholarly books, which they hope will increase to a quarter
million volumes by 2003—what they call the "world's largest
digitization project." Taking an approach different from that of
ProQuest andEAA, Questia intends to
sell subscriptions for $19.95 per month to "time-crunched" students,
who they believe (in the face of some reasonable skepticism) will pay
for access to materials that will help write their papers more quickly.
At least in history classes, the investment may not pay off: although
Questia has more than 9,000 history titles, not a single one of the ten
history monographs that United States historians, in a Journal of American History
survey, listed as "most admired" can be found on the online library's
shelves. Its competitors, NetLibrary (with more than $100 million in
venture capital and 25,000 books already online) and Ebrary.com, have
still other business models. NetLibrary sells libraries electronic
copies of books that can only be accessed by one person at a time; if
someone has "checked out" the book, then no one else can "take it out."
It markets its 25,000 books in different groupings ranging from the
618-title "business school collection" at an average price of $40 per
volume to 126 volumes on "Countries, Cultures, and Peoples of the
World" to 214 volumes of "Cliffs Notes" (the actual literary works are
generally thrown in free since they are in NetLibrary's collection of
4,000 public domain books). Ebrary, by contrast, allows users to browse
books without charge but requires payment for printing or copying a
portion of a book.42 |
48 |
Not all pay services
offer copyrighted content. Some serve public domain content but charge
in an effort to recoup their digitizing costs. One of the pioneers in
this has been HarpWeek, a personal project of John Adler, a retired
businessman with an interest in nineteenth-century American history.
While most digitizing projects rely on "keyword" searching of the full
text, Adler has employed dozens of indexers to read every word in Harper's Weekly
and examine every illustration and cartoon to create a human index of
the full run of the magazine from 1857 to 1912. That labor-intensive
indexing means, for example, that HarpWeek offers better image
searching than many other online sources since the brute power of
keyword searching brings much greater rewards in historical texts than
in images. Adler has created an extraordinary research resource for
nineteenth-century historians, although an expensive one—the first
twenty years, now available, retail for close to $35,000.43 |
49 |
We can glimpse the outlines of a still more remarkable project—the full text of the New York Times
for the years 1851 to 1923. The "Universal Library" at Carnegie Mellon
University (with aspirations similar to Nelson's Xanadu project and
support from Seagate Technology) is scanning the entire public domain
era of the Times, which it will make available for free online reading. At the same time, it is using optical character recognition to turn the Times
into searchable text, although the quality of the result remains
uncertain at the moment. The Universal Library plans to offer free
views of the page images but to charge for access to the searchable
text—perhaps $40 for lifetime subscriptions. At the moment, the vision
is more exciting than the implementation—you can't search yet, and the
scanned microfilm provided for 1860–1866 includes a number of
unreadable pages.44 |
50 |
The plan of the
university-based Universal Library to charge subscriptions suggests a
type of history Web site that sits uneasily between the "public" and
"private" categories that we have been using. LikeJSTOR
and Project Muse—both of them nonprofit ventures that have received
substantial support from the Mellon Foundation—it is "public," rather
than private, in its ownership, control, and eschewing of profit. Yet,
it is (or will be) "private" in its restriction of full access to those
who pay. Despite their foundation funding, groups such asJSTOR
and Project Muse argue—quite reasonably—that they need income to
sustain their operation, to add new journal articles, and to maintain
the service. Thus, they charge substantial subscription fees to
libraries. Unfortunately, when nonprofits enter the private Web, they
not only restrict access but also incur substantial costs;JSTOR
and Project Muse spend a considerable part of their income not to
create or post content, but to market their services and keep out
unauthorized users. Michael Jensen, who helped develop Muse, estimates
that "over half of the costs of the online journals project was
attributable to systems for preventing access to the articles."45 |
51 |
Moreover, even where
publication, preservation, or distribution is turned over to a
nonprofit such asJSTOR or Project
Muse, scholarly authors and journals are still giving up control over
presentation and access to a separate entity. The History Cooperative—a
partnership of the University of Illinois Press, National Academy
Press, the Organization of American Historians, and the American
Historical Association—has pioneered the alternative idea of a
"cooperative" in which scholars and scholarly organizations will retain
a say over these questions.46
Historians from these professional societies and their journals felt
that this arrangement would allow them, for example, to offer to make
their electronic journals as widely available as possible. Hence, while
the electronic Journal of American History and American Historical Review will only be available to subscribers, there is no additional
subscription charge to individuals or libraries for access. Having a
say in a cooperative also makes it easier to experiment with one of the
key questions facing scholars—will digital environments allow us to
present our scholarship in new—and better—ways?47
In the end, the measure of success of scholarly and nonprofit societies
is how they improve scholarship and society, not how much revenue they
generate. |
52 |
Some argue that,
given these larger social and scholarly goals, scholars should move
toward total, free access to the fruits of scholarship, which is, after
all, mostly publicly funded in the first place. In 1991 Paul H.
Ginsparg, a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, created arXiv.org e-Print archive,
which has become an open repository of more than 150,000 "preprints"
(non–peer reviewed research papers) in physics, math, and related
fields. "E-print" archives in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience,
and computer science similarly offer electronic preprints on a free
access basis. The Open Archives Initiative advocates expanding these
efforts so that they will be "interoperable" (for example, allowing
easy searching across multiple archives); include peer-reviewed work;
and ultimately form the basis of a "transformed scholarly communication
model." The computer scientist Stevan Harnad, one of the most
aggressive promoters of such open systems, envisions a future in which
"the entire refereed literature will be available to every researcher
everywhere at any time for free, and forever."48
Thus far, scientists have dominated such open scholarly archive
experiments. It remains a question whether they are easily transferable
to the humanities, which lack the same preprint traditions and where
speed of publication is much less important. Moreover, the
extraordinarily high prices of commercially published science journals
have further driven these efforts. No one worries about putting
commercial science publishers out of business. But the losers in the
demise of the scholarly history journals will be university presses and
scholarly societies. |
53 |
If scholarly
societies such as the Organization of American Historians are to
survive in a world where all scholarly information is free, they will
need to come up with alternative revenue models to support their
operations. One promising approach to resolving the contradiction
between free public access and continued revenue to support scholarly
editing and publication has been pioneered by the Open Book project at
the National Academy Press (NAP), which has been led by Michael Jensen, who has also been a key figure in Project Muse and the History Cooperative. NAP,
the publishing arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has put its
entire front list and much of its backlist online for free in a page
image format. Ironically, giving this material away has actually
increasedNAP 's sales because people
now order books that they have browsed online but want to own in a
hardcopy. Moreover, the book itself—indexed by Web search
engines—becomes its best advertisement. Jensen, thus, argues that "free
browsing, easy access, and researcher-friendly publication first, and
sale second" is "much more in keeping with the role of a noncommercial
publisher" and its mission of doing "the most good for society as
possible within the constraints of our money."49 |
54 |
Who Owns the Past Online? Access and Control on the Private History Web
|
These massive projects, whether public or
private, will surely transform historical research and ultimately
writing. Those who received their Ph.D.'s before 1990 will probably
spend the rest of their careers regaling graduate students with tales
of how "in my day, we spent hours turning microfilm readers looking for
relevant newspaper articles." Given the enormous gift that commercial
digitization is bestowing on the historical profession, it seems a bit
churlish to look this particular gift horse in the mouth. |
55 |
Churlish, but surely
necessary. Once we get over our excitement about the digital riches on
our screens or the new modes of research being opened up, we need to
think about the price tag. To be sure, in most of the emerging models,
libraries rather than individual researchers are paying that fee.
Still, that money is not appearing magically; it is draining other
parts of library budgets. One part of the budget that is being sucked
dry is that for purchasing real, not virtual, library books, especially
scholarly books. To be sure, the main villains in the current crisis in
scholarly publishing are the commercial vendors who charge rapacious
prices for science, technology, and medicine journals. Libraries that
pay $16,344 annually to subscribe to Reed Elsevier's Brain Research
cannot afford as many history monographs as they once purchased—a fact
that both scholars and university presses are painfully confronting.
But electronic resources are also squeezing library budgets—they now
consume 10 percent of library materials budgets, compared to only 25
percent for monographs.50 |
56 |
The digital library
fees also generally flow into the hands of publishers and especially
commercial aggregators rather than authors. Freelance writers have sued
newspapers and magazines for including their work without permission
(or compensation) in databases marketed by Lexis-Nexis (Reed Elsevier)
and Bell & Howell. And book publishers have been slow to decide
what portion of e-book revenues they are going to share with authors.51 |
57 |
In addition, the
appearance of these gated databases poses a particular problem for
independent scholars not affiliated with academic institutions. If they
happen to live near a major public library, they can often access the
databases within the walls of that library. But they do not have the
convenience available to most university-based historians of using
these resources from their own homes.52
The same problem faces those affiliated with smaller institutions that
cannot afford the hefty subscription fees. Some scholars, however, now
have enhanced access to resources; in Virginia,VIVA
's statewide subscriptions give historians at community colleges and
underfunded traditionally black colleges access to the same electronic
resources as faculty at the well-endowed University of Virginia.
Nevertheless, signs of an academic digital divide loom not only between
institutions but also within them. For example, law school students and
faculty generally have access to the complete Lexis-Nexis database
(with considerable resources for historians), which is generally closed
to other parts of the university. Of course, scholars affiliated with
more affluent institutions (and parts of institutions) have always had
advantages over their colleagues, and independent scholars have always
faced barriers to access. |
58 |
A more worrisome
prospect has to do with the emerging economic structure of the
information industry. Previously, publishing was a relatively
decentralized and small-scale business with many different publishers,
large and small. But online information providers, like many other "new
economy" businesses, benefit from a powerful combination of economies
of scale and "network effects." In the information business, the fixed
costs (for example, software development) are the most important costs;
once they are covered, it is not much more expensive to sell to 3,000
libraries than to 30. And "network effects"—the benefits of using a
system increases as more people use it since, among other things, they
will be familiar with its interface—mean that the biggest players will
tend to get bigger. Whereas the factory-based economy favored
oligopolies, the information economy is more likely to result in
monopolies.53 |
59 |
Not surprisingly,
then, the online vending of electronic data has already become
concentrated into a very small number of hands. Four gigantic
corporations—Reed Elsevier,EBSCO,
Bell & Howell, and Thomson—are especially prominent in the
provision of electronic content to libraries. Reed Elsevier, which
focuses particularly on science journals, is less significant for
historians (although it does sell Lexis-Nexis, the online data service
vital to anyone writing on the recent past). The privately heldEBSCO,
which has $1.4 billion in annual sales, produces nearly 60 proprietary
reference databases and full-text versions of more than 2,000
publications. Bell & Howell is a billion-dollar corporation, which
acquiredUMI (formerly University
Microfilms International) in 1985 and Chadwyck-Healey (a leading
provider of humanities and social science reference and research
publications) in 1999. Its databases include over 20,000 periodical
titles, 7,000 newspaper titles, 1.5 million dissertations, 390,000
out-of-print books, 550 research collections, and over 15 million
proprietary abstracts. These resources constitute an archive that
includes more than 5.5 billion pages of information—all of which is
being converted into digital form (though not necessarily searchable
text) under the "Digital Vault Initiative," which the company says will
create "the world's largest digital archival collection of printed
works." ("World's largest" is a popular claim in cyberspace.)
Ultimately, Bell & Howell will offer online the full runs of at
least fifty periodicals such as the New York Times, Time, and the Wall Street Journal.
(Astonishingly enough, given the scale of the effort involved, Bell
& Howell intends to create its own searchable edition of the New York Times, and its version will come up to the present rather than stop in 1923.)54 The microfilm era in research, which Bell & Howell's UMI launched in 1938, will soon come to an end. |
60 |
Bell & Howell's
even larger rival is the Canadian Thomson Corporation, a "global
e-information and solutions company" with close to $6 billion in annual
revenues. Thomson's Gale Group sells thousands of full-text
publications (including history journals) to libraries under the
"InfoTrac" brand, which includesEAA. It also has extensive reference holdings, including works that historians regularly use (for example, from Macmillan Reference USA
and Charles Scribner's Sons). More recently, it has bundled its various
products as well as some licensed from other vendors into what it calls
its "History Resource Center," billed as "the most comprehensive
collection of historical information ever gathered into one source."
Designed primarily for undergraduates and to be purchased by college or
university libraries, it includes primary documents (from an archive
accumulated by Primary Source Media, another Thomson subsidiary),
encyclopedia articles, full-text periodicals and journals, maps,
photographs and illustrations, overview summaries, a timeline, a
bibliography, and annotated links to online special collections. These
resources do not come cheap. Prices vary considerably depending on
particular arrangements, but an annual license for two simultaneous
users can run close to $12,000. |
61 |
Bell & Howell and
Thomson are involved in a dense web of connections withother online
ventures. Thomson, for example, holds the largest stake in WebCT.com,
which provides widely used software for placing courses online but
bills itself more broadly as an "e-learning hub." WebCT has developed
discipline-specific online communities with forums and other resources,
including one in history. Part of the reason for Thomson's "strategic
investment" is presumably to encourage the selling of custom course
materials created by Thomson to students in courses managed through
WebCT. Bell & Howell is also eyeing the lucrative textbook (or
"courseware") market and has recently launched XanEdu, which repackages
the materials that it sells to college libraries as ProQuest and sells
them to students as electronic course packs and a subscription-based
($49.90 per year) "elibrary for college students, with targeted content
and course-driven pre-selected searches" in such fields as history. For
the K–12 and public library markets, Bell & Howell further
repackages some of the same resources through BigChalk.com.55
Bell & Howell and Thomson, thus, aspire to dominate not only
university-based library reference publishing but also textbook
publishing and education at all levels. In the new electronic
environment, such previously separate enterprises potentially merge
together into information "portals" or what XanEdu calls "the ultimate
learning destination." Like Ted Nelson from whom they may have borrowed
their new corporate moniker, the folks at Bell & Howell dream big,
promising that XanEdu will be a "utopia for the mind." |
62 |
Advertising offers
another road to a corporate-owned past. Some believe that the Web will
emerge as the primary advertising venue of the future, replacing
television and glossy magazines. In that scenario, "free" information
would be served up in the same fashion as television offers "free"
entertainment. Entrepreneurs and large corporations have launched
dozens of Web sites aimed at making money off the provision of
historical or educational information and services through advertising
or marketing. Some, such as the HistoryChannel.com or Discovery.com,
are spin-offs of existing print or cable operations. For example, The
HistoryNet.com (billed as "where history lives on the Web") is the
online companion to fourteen popular history (mostly military history)
magazines, including Civil War Times, Wild West, and Aviation History.
In addition to back articles from the magazines, it offers a daily
quiz, "This Day in History," recommended Web sites (limited in
coverage), online forums (not very active in the fall of 2000), and
lists of history-related events and exhibitions—all accompanied by
flashing banner ads. |
63 |
Still other
history-related sites are startups created directly for the Web.
About.com (formerly the Mining Company), for instance, dubs itself the
"Human Internet" and provides human "guides" to more than 700 different
subjects, including "Women's History," "Twentieth-Century History," and
10 additional historical subjects. The guides, who generally have an
undergraduate history degree, usually offer brief annotated links to
Web-based materials, short essays of their own (often with some
connection to current events), and online forums. The forums—most of
them not especially active—include a homework help feature to which
students post queries. (Judging from the answers, I doubt everyone will
get an A.) |
64 |
Many other Web
start-ups have shared About.com's interest in tapping the education
"market"—an expansive realm including teachers and students at multiple
levels. During the Internet stock fever that raged through most of 1999
and early 2000, education dot-coms sprouted overnight as dreams ofIPO
(initial public offering) millions danced in the heads of entrepreneurs
and venture capitalists. Typical were eCollege, a distance education
company that raised $55 million in an initial public offering in
December 1999, and Lightspan, a provider of "curriculum-based
educational software and Internet products," including, it promises,
lesson plans and source documents in history and other fields.56 Lightspan went public at $11.625 per share in mid-February of 2000 and the stock more than doubled less than a month later. |
65 |
So far the reality of
the sponsored history and education sites has not matched the
glittering promises, whether of immense profits or of illuminating
content. Generally speaking, the nonprofit sites offer considerably
better content. For example, 774 popular history articles available at
The HistoryNet.com pale beside the thousands of scholarly articles
offered atJSTOR. The richest materials at About.com are those from such sites as American Memory and the New Deal Network, which are presented framed beneath About.com's banner ads. H-Net and History Matters
provide considerably more active discussion forums than does The
HistoryNet or About.com. The History Channel's list of best history Web
sites lists the site of the Eighteenth Louisiana Infantry Regiment but
not Valley of the Shadow or the Library of Congress's
collection of Civil War photographs—presumably because you must sign a
partnership agreement with the History Channel and post its banner ad
to get listed. One must view skeptically The HistoryNet's claims that
it is "the Internet's largest and most content-rich history site" or
About.com's boast that "our Guides know their subjects as well as
anyone."57 |
66 |
Stock prices have been even more inflated than content claims, as the spring 2000 NASDAQ
(National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) crash
brutally revealed. About.com lost almost three-quarters of its stock
value between March and April 2000; eCollege stock plunged 85 percent,
and Lightspan plummeted to just above one dollar a share. "There are a
lot more companies in the e-learning space than the education industry
needs," acknowledged eCollege's chief executive officer, Oakleigh
Thorne. Companies with real rather than virtual sources of revenue also
began to wonder whether there really was a pot of gold at the end of
the Internet rainbow. In November 2000, the privately held Discovery
Communications dropped plans to spin off its Web unit and also dropped
most of its Web workers—laying off 40 percent of the regular staff and
150 contract workers. "We cannot achieve near-term profitability from
the Internet as a stand-alone business," explained the company
president, Michela English. Part of the problem was that none of these
sites was ever profitable; they simply lived off venture capital,IPO
money, or the largess of wealthy corporate parents. Equally problematic
was the drop in Internet advertising rates that accompanied the dive in
Internet stocks and the realization by advertisers that few Web surfers
(about 0.4 percent) were clicking on banner ads.58
The fall in rates was part of a vicious cycle in which dropping stock
prices soured advertisers on the Internet and then caused problems for
start-ups, which—in a kind of Ponzi scheme—had artificially raised
rates in the first place with their own advertising. |
67 |
The collapse of
dot-com stock prices and Internet advertising rates suggests that the
future of commercially sponsored history on the Web may not be as rosy
as some once believed. The history business has had its share of
successes in the "real" world—from American Heritage magazine
to the History Channel, from the History Book Club to heritage
tourism—but it has never been a major American industry.59 The past remains a realm in which nonprofits, volunteers, and enthusiasts dominate. |
68 |
Still, as Susan
Smulyan reminds us in her history of the commercialization of American
broadcasting, broadcasters and advertisers, as well as listeners,
viewed the viability of radio advertising with considerable skepticism.
Some day Web advertising may be as "natural" and profitable as
television commercials. The drop in Internet advertising rates, moreover, has not halted the continuing rise in the overall volume of Internet advertising.60
And the bursting of the dot-com stock bubble has not slowed the growth
in Internet use or even the increasing importance of the Web as a
commercial venue. Whether or not history will turn out to go better
with Coke (ads), the selling of digital information (probably largely
to libraries rather than individuals) will grow in importance and will
be increasingly dominated by a small number of giant corporations.
Indeed, we may get a combination of fee-based and advertiser-supported
systems. Reed Elsevier's Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe charges
substantial subscription fees to libraries but still includes flashing
banner ads. (A researcher who is "feeling lucky" can, for example,
click a banner and put down some money—perhaps his or her latest
research grant—on CybersportsCasino.com's blackjack table.) |
69 |
To raise an alarm
about the capitalist character of the information and publishing
business makes little sense since publishing has always been a
business. But it has not traditionally been dominated by a few giant
corporations. In the fall of 2000 when Reed Elsevier and Thomson
jointly purchased the publisher Harcourt (where Ted Nelson thought up
the term Xanadu four decades ago) for $4.4 billion in cash and the
assumption of $1.2 billion of debt, the New York Times observed
that the price was below what had been expected. "The main reason for
the low price," it explained, "is that consolidation in the educational
and professional publishing businesses—Harcourt's core—has progressed
so far that there are almost no bidders left. Each of Harcourt's main
businesses is dominated by just three or four companies, like
McGraw-Hill or Pearson. Almost all potential bidders faced antitrust
problems or had balance sheets full from recent acquisitions."61
In a world in which libraries can only buy from one or two vendors,
those vendors can easily dictate prices and content. And in a world in
which there are only a few publishers, they can also dictate terms to
authors as well. |
70 |
The
advertiser-sponsored online world also seems to be heading down the
same path of media consolidation augured by the merger ofAOL with Time-Warner, Inc. Consider, for example, the history of Civil War Times
magazine, whose humble origins go back to the 1940s when LeRoy Smith
used his army poker winnings to start some history tourism businesses
in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In 1962, during the Civil War centennial,
he and the newspaperman Robert H. Fowler started Civil War Times;
later they gradually added some other related history publications to
what they called Historical Times, Inc. In 1986, Cowles Media purchased
Historical Times, Inc., and added still more history magazines, which
became part of "Cowles Enthusiast Media" and the basis of The
HistoryNet.com, which appeared on the Web in 1996. Two years later, the
McClatchy newspaper chain acquired Cowles and then sold off Cowles
Enthusiast Media to Primedia—formerly known as K-III Communications, a
conglomerate of specialty magazines (for example, National Hog Farmer and Lowrider Bicycle)
pulled together by the leveraged buyout specialists Kohlberg Kravis
Roberts back in the go-go 1980s. In fall 2000, Primedia announced plans
to purchase About.com for more than half a billion dollars—thereby not
only consolidating old media (magazines) and new (Web) but also
bringing together under one corporate umbrella two of the main
advertiser-sponsored history sites on the Web. A few months later, it
purchased half ownership of Brill Media Holdings, the company behind
Contentville.com.62 |
71 |
Ironically, despite
the trend toward online consolidation, one of the greatest frustrations
of the historical Xanadu as it exists at the dawn of the new millennium
is its myriad divisions. To find what the Internet offers on Eugene V.
Debs requires at least a dozen different searches—through a general
search engine such as Google; the scholarly article archives atJSTOR, ProQuest, EAA, EBSCO,
the History Cooperative, and Project Muse; reference works at the
History Resource Center; the popular history writings at The
HistoryNet.com; articles and sources at Contentville; the primary
sources at American Memory; and the image archive at
Corbis.com. The capitalist market in information and the limitations of
Web search engines have fostered both consolidation and competition.
Neither trend is wholly friendly to researchers. |
72 |
Perhaps
paradoxically, then, the Web seems to be fostering two contradictory
developments. On the one hand, the resources required to publish on the
Web are so modest that we have seen an amazing grass-roots publishing
effort over the past five years. Yet, on the other hand, the capacity
to mount a serious Web-based publishing or information business may be
quite limited indeed. Even the Web start-ups such as Questia and
NetLibrary are backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in venture
capital. To be sure, the nonprofit world also has its giants such asNDLP,
but their continuation rests on the shaky base of public sector
funding. And Internet-based economies of scale are pushing growing
consolidation on a global basis. Will the public history Web survive
the onslaught of these mega operations? Will "authority" and
"authenticity" reside with the corporate purveyors of the past? And
will corporate vendors find scholarly fastidiousness about accuracy and
contextualization as appealing as archivists and academics do? |
73 |
Bell & Howell president James P. Roemer presents his company—notes Forbes
magazine—"as the guardian of truth in an Internet free-for-all."
"There's no guarantee that what you're getting on the Internet is
correct or the information you want," he says. The company spokesman
Ben Mondloch puts the significance of its Digital Vault Initiative in
even broader terms. "We're the only company that could do this," he
told a reporter for Wired News. "We've become the de facto nation's archive."63 |
74 |
The notion of a
privatized and corporatized "national archive" occupies the other end
of the continuum from the free and open Xanadu envisioned by Ted
Nelson. For a humorous and harrowing glimpse of what that might look
like, turn to Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash, in which everything is privately owned, from the FOQNEs
(Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities) known as Burbclaves,
where people live, to the highways run by the competing Fairlanes Inc.
and Cruiseways Inc., to the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates, which has a
monopoly on worship services. The book's protagonist, Hiro Protagonist,
is a freelance stringer for theCIC, the Central Intelligence Corporation of Langley, Virginia. The CIC's "database" was, Stephenson writes, |
75 |
formerly
the Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people
are not entirely clear on what the word "congress" means. And even the
word "library" is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books,
mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and
magazines. Then all of the information got converted into
machine-readable form, which is to say, ones and zeroes. And as the
number of media grew, the material became more up to date, and the
methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated,
it approached the point where there was no substantive difference
between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart
anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering.64
|
|
It is all too easy in
the era of cyberspace to get carried away with extravagant visions of
the future—whether the utopian dreams of Ted Nelson or the dystopian
vision of Snow Crash. History tells us that change comes much
more slowly and unevenly than most visionaries would like. Still, what
is remarkable is how much the practice of researching, teaching, and
presenting the past has changed in the short five years since the Web
and Internet entered the lives of historians. We have many reasons to
celebrate the enormous advances—the vast archive of primary and
secondary sources now accessible on our computer screens and available
to us as researchers, to our students, and to anyone concerned about
the past. But while we celebrate what has been gained, we should be
vigilant about what might be lost if the grass-roots energy and the
cooperative spirit of enthusiastic amateurs, enterprising librarians,
and archivists pursuing personal historical passions and public
understanding of the past are squashed by the advance of a corporate
juggernaut chasing private profit. |
76 |
Nevertheless, the
power and wealth of the corporate forces should not lead us to assume
that we are headed inevitably toward Stephenson'sCIC. William Y. Arms, the editor of D-Lib Magazine,
which focuses on digital libraries, has recently argued that "open
access" may, in the end, turn out to dominate the future of
information. He observes that whereas ten years ago the percentage of
information used in professional work that "was available openly,
without payment" was probably 1 percent or less, today most people
would say that 5 to 80 percent is available with open access. I can
often find historical information more quickly on the public Web (and
am thus more likely to use it) than by searching the gated private Web
databases that my university provides to me. My library, for example,
pays a thousand dollars a year to get the online version of Books in Print
from the Thomson Corporation, but Amazon.com provides much of the same
information for free. Increased computer power, moreover, means that it
is increasingly easy to find that information on the vast stretches of
the Internet. For Arms, "automated digital libraries combined with open
access information on the Internet offer to provide the Model T Ford of
information," basic transportation for all.65 |
77 |
Historians have a
great stake in shaping the roads and cars that will populate the future
information superhighways. We need to put our energies into maintaining
and enlarging the astonishingly rich public historical Web that has
emerged in the past five years. For some, that should mean joining in
eclectic but widespread grass-roots efforts to put the past
online—whether that involves posting a few documents online for your
students or raising funds for more ambitious projects to create free
public archives. Just as "open source" code has been the banner of
academic computer scientists, "open sources" should be the slogan of
academic and popular historians. Academics and enthusiasts created the
Web; we should not quickly or quietly cede it to giant corporations.
For all of us, shaping the digital future requires a range of political
actions—fighting against efforts to slash the budgets of public
agencies such asNEH and the Library
of Congress that are funding important digital projects; resisting
efforts further to narrow the "public domain"; and joining with
librarians who have been often alone in raising red flags about the
growing power of the information conglomerates.66
We may also need to reexamine our own contradictory position as both
rights holders and consumers of copyright content. Perhaps we should
even insist that the intellectual property we create (often with
considerable public funding) should be freely available to all. Unless
we act, the digital Xanadu, as Nelson fantasized, may turn out to have
everything an "absent-minded professor could want" but only at and for
a heavy price.67 |
78 |
Notes
Roy Rosenzweig is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor
of History and director of the Center for History and New Media at
George Mason University.
Thanks to Steve Brier, Josh Brown, Mary Jane
Gormley, Deborah Kaplan, Gary Kornblith, Joanne Meyerowitz, Michael
O'Malley, Kelly Schrum, John Summers, Tom Thurston, and members of the JAH editorial staff for helpful comments on this article.
Readers may contact
Rosenzweig at <rrosenzw@gmu.edu>.
1
T. H. Nelson, "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing,
and the Indeterminate," Proceedings of the 20th acm National
Conference (1965), 84–100. Nelson's ideas about hypertext
were heavily influenced by Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (1945);
for a reprint of the article and discussions of its influence,
see James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn, ed., From Memex to Hypertext:
Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine (Boston, 1991). Even
earlier, in 1938, H. G. Wells talked of creating a "World Encyclopedia"
with a true "planetary memory for all mankind": quoted in Michael
Lesk, "How Much Information Is There in the World?," unpublished
paper, 1997 <http://www.lesk.com/mlesk/ksg97/ksg.html>.
(Unless otherwise noted, the Web references in this article were
rechecked online on May 5, 2001.)
2
Theodor Holm Nelson, "Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More than
Ever: Parallel Documents, Deep Links to Content, Deep Versioning,
and Deep Re-Use," ACM Computing Surveys, 31 (Dec. 1999)
<http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.html>;
see also Ted Nelson, "Who I Am: Designer, Generalist, Contrarian
Theodor Holm Nelson, 1937–" <http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/TN/WhoIAm.html>;
and Theodor Holm Nelson, "Opening Hypertext: A Memoir," in Literacy
Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers,
ed. Myron C. Tuman (Pittsburgh, 1992), 43–57.
3
Gary Wolf, "The Curse of Xanadu," Wired, 3 (June1995)
<http://www.wirednews.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html>;
Theodor Holm Nelson, "Errors in 'The Curse of Xanadu,' by
Gary Wolf," in Andrew Pam, Xanadu Australia <http://www.xanadu.com.au/ararat>.
4 For a history of the development of the Internet, see John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime (Woodstock, 2000), 229–63.
5
For detailed information on Web search engines, see the materials
at Search Engine Watch <http://www.searchenginewatch.com/>.
Search Engine Watch and other commentators currently rate
Google the best overall Web search tool.
6
U.S. Department of Commerce, The Emerging Digital Economy
(Washington, 1998), quoted in Stephen Segaller, Nerds 2.01:
A Brief History of the Internet (New York, 1998), 14. "Sizing
Up the Web," New York Times, Dec. 11, 2000, p. C4. All
New York Times articles cited here are available online
(generally for a per-article fee of $2.50) at The New York
Times on the Web <http://www.nytimes.com> and (for a library subscription fee) through Lexis-Nexis
Academic Universe <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe>;
where a page number is cited, the article was first consulted
in the print version of the Times; where a specific url
(uniform resource locator) is cited, the article is available
online for free. Office of Research, oclc (Online Computer Library
Center, Inc.), "Web Statistics," in Web Characterization Project
<http://wcp.oclc.org/>.
Google <http://www.google.com>.
Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian, "How Much Information?," Journal
of Electronic Publishing, 6 (Dec. 2000) <http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/06-02/lyman.html>.
BrightPlanet, "The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value," in BrightPlanet.com,
Complete Planet <http://www.completeplanet.com/Tutorials/DeepWeb/index.asp>;
Lisa Guernsey, "Mining the 'Deep Web' with Specialized Drills,"
New York Times, Jan. 25, 2001.
7
The Internet Archive <http://www.archive.org>
intends "to permanently preserve a record of public material"
on the Internet. At the present time, however, use of their archive
requires programming skills, and I did not receive a response
to the request to use the archive that I submitted in October
2000. For a discussion of the need to archive the Web (and a complaint
about lack of response from the Internet Archive), see
Richard Wiggins, "The Unnoticed Presidential Transition: Whither
Whitehouse.gov?," First Monday, 6 (Jan. 8, 2001) <http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_1/wiggins/index.html>.
Michael O'Malley and Roy Rosenzweig, "Brave New World or Blind
Alley? American History on the World Wide Web," Journal of
American History, 84 (June 1997), 138.
8
See "Collections Currently in Progress," in Library of Congress,
American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital
Library <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amfuture.html>.
See, more generally, Committee on an Information Technology Strategy
for the Library of Congress of National Research Council, LC21:
A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress (Washington,
2000) <http://books.nap.edu/books/0309071445/html/index.html>.
As of December 2000, the NDLP had 5,772,967 items online, but
some American Memory materials are available as a result
of the Ameritech Program and others as a result of cooperative
agreements with other institutions. NDLP Reference Team to Roy
Rosenzweig, e-mails, Feb. 15, 2001 (in Rosenzweig's possession).
9 Peter R.
Henriques, "The Final Struggle between George Washington and the Grim
King: Washington's Attitude toward Death and an Afterlife," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 107 (Winter 1999), 75, 95–96. Henriques discussed his methodology with Rosenzweig on November 6, 2000.
10
OCLC, "Web Statistics"; Peter B. Hirtle, "Free and Fee: Future
Information Discovery and Access D-Lib Magazine, 7 (Jan.2001),
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january01/01editorial.html>
11
Kevin M. Guthrie, "Revitalizing Older Published Literature: Preliminary
Lessons from the Use of JSTOR," paper presented at the conference
"Economics and Usage of Digital Library Collections,"
Ann Arbor, March 23–24, 2000 <http://www.jstor.org/about/preliminarylessons.html>.
See also "Editor's Interview: Developing a Digital Preservation
Strategy for JSTOR, an interview with Kevin Guthrie," RLG
DigiNews, 4 (no. 4, 2000) <http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews4-4.html#feature1>.
John Spargo, "The Influence of Karl Marx on Contemporary
Socialism," American Journal of Sociology, 16 (July
1910), 21–40. Fred Shapiro's discoveries are discussed in
Ethan Bronner, "You Can Look It Up, Hopefully," New
York Times, Jan. 10, 1999 <http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/011099language-database-review.html>.
12
Barbara Quint, "Gale Group's InfoTrac OneFile Creates Web-Based
Periodical Collection for Libraries," Information Today NewsBreaks,
Oct. 16, 2000 <http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/breaks.htm>.
13
See <http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Humanities/History/>.
14
Choice quoted in William G. Thomas and Alice E. Carter,
The Civil War on the Web: A Guide to the Very Best Sites
(Wilmington, 2000), xiii; Library of Congress, American Memory
<http://memory.loc.gov/>.
15
"Facts and Statistics Family Search, Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints <http://www.familysearch.com/Eng/Home/News/frameset_news.asp?PAGE=home_facts.asp>.
16 Ibid. April Leigh Helm and Matthew L. Helm, Genealogy Online for Dummies (New York, 1999).
17
Diane Ravitch, ed., The American Reader: Words That Moved a
Nation (New York, 1990); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "The Solitude
of Self," in American Public Address, 1644–1935, University
of Arkansas Supplement to Communication 4353, Bernadette Mink
http://comp.uark.edu/~brmink/stanton.html; "Niagara Movement Declaration
of Principles, 1905" in American History Class Enhancement
Pages, Thomas Martin <http://www.sinclair.edu/classenhancements/his101e-tm/civilrt1.htm>;
M. Carey Thomas, "Higher Education for Women," in Mrs. Pojer's
History Classes' Home Page, Susan M. Pojer <http://www.historyteacher.net/USProjects/DBQs2000/APUSH-DBQ-40.htm>.
The last two sites were accessed in October 2000 but were no longer
available in May 2001. In the first instance, the material moved
to a gated WebCT server.
18
W. E. Burghart Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth," in Mr. Kenyada's
Neighborhood, Richard Kenyada <http://www.kenyada.com/talented.htm>.
Joe Hill, "The Preacher and the Slave," in History in Song,
Manfred J. Helfert <http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/parton/2/pie.html>.
Dean B. McIntyre, "'Lift Every Voice'—100 Years Old," in
General Board of Discipleship, United Methodist Church
<http://www.gbod.org/worship/default.asp?act=reader&item_id=1786>.
Alice Duer Miller, "Evolution," in poet ch'I, Kevin Taylor
<http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Bistro/8066/index2.htm>.
Carl Becker, "Everyman His Own Historian," American Historical
Review, 37 (Jan. 1932), 221–36.
19
BoondocksNet.com <http://www.BoondocksNet.com>;
Jim Zwick to Rosenzweig, e-mails, Nov. 1, 27, 2000 (in Rosenzweig's
possession). Some scholars will face copyright and archival restrictions
in placing their research materials online but a surprisingly
large percentage of materials that historians use—books,
magazines, and newspapers from before 1923 and government documents,
for example—are in the public domain.
20
"What Is H-Net?," in H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences
OnLine, MATRIX: :The Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social
Sciences OnLine, Michigan State University <http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/about/>.
21
Thomas and Carter, Civil War on the Web, xvi–xix;
Golden Ink, About North Georgia <http://ngeorgia.com>,
quoted ibid., xix.
22
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Solitude of self: address delivered
by Mrs. Stanton before the Committee of the Judiciary of the United
States Congress, Monday, January 18, 1892 (Washington, 1915),
in Rare and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress,
Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman
Suffrage Association Collection, 1848–1921 <http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/naw/nawshom.html>.
23
Voice of America, The Century in Sound: An American's Perspective
<http://www.voa.gov/century/century.html>;
"Socialist Eugene V. Debs speaks during the presidential campaign
of 1904," in Eyewitness: History through the Eyes of Those
Who Lived It, Ibis Communications, Inc. <http://www.ibiscom.com/vodebs.htm>;
"Eugene V. Debs," in Pluralism and Unity, David Bailey,
David Halsted, and Michigan State University <http://www.expo98.msu.edu/sounds/debs.html>. The voice is correctly
identified as that of an actor in Department of History, University
at Albany, State University of New York, U.S. Labor and Industrial
History World Wide Web Audio Archive <http://www.albany.edu/history/LaborAudio/>.
For discussion of the provenance of the Debs speech, see Roy
Rosenzweig and Stephen Brier, Who Built America? From the Centennial
Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914 (cd-rom) (New
York, 1993), 352.
24
See, for example, "The Willie Lynch Speech of 1712," in Shepp's
Place, Will Shepperson <http://www.eden.rutgers.edu/~wshepp3/lynch.html>;
and Willie Lynch, "How to Control the Black Man for At Least 300
Years," in KohlBlackTimes.com <http://www.kohlblacktimes.com/willie.htm>.
The best online commentary on the Lynch speech is Anne Cleëster
Taylor, "The Slave Consultant's Narrative: The Life of an Urban
Myth?," in African Missouri, Anne Cleëster Taylor
<http://www.umsl.edu/~libweb/blackstudies/narrate.htm>.
See also Mike Adams, "In Search of Willie Lynch," Baltimore
Sun, Feb. 22, 1998, p. 1 (available online in Lexis-Nexis
Academic Universe). Of course, many real documents make points
similar to those in the Lynch speech.
25 For a discussion of the inclusiveness of virtual libraries, see James J. O'Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 29–43.
26
Kendra Mayfield, "Library of Congress Goes Digital Wired News,
Jan.19, 2001 <http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,41166,00.html>.
For list of sponsors, see "A Unique Public-Private Partnership
Supporting the National Digital Library," in American
Memory, Library of Congress <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/sponsors.html>.
See "Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library
Competition," ibid. <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award/index.html>.
27
For an astute discussion of Valley of the Shadow <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow/>.
28
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and Institute for Learning
Technologies, New Deal Network <http://newdeal.feri.org/>;
Center for History and New Media and American Social History Project,
History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web <http://historymatters.gmu.edu>.
History Matters also includes annotated lists of history
Web sites, online assignments, interactive exercises on the historian's
craft, and teaching forums with leading scholars and teachers.
29
University of North Carolina Libraries, Documenting the American
South <http://docsouth.unc.edu/aboutdas.html>.
30
Special Projects Program in the Information and Intelligent Systems
Division of the Directorate for Computer and Information Science
Engineering, National Science Foundation, Digital Libraries
Initiative <http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/>.
31 Wendy Lougee
to Rosenzweig, e-mail, Nov. 3, 2000 (in Rosenzweig's possession);
Maria Bonn, project director for MOA, provided helpful information
on the project in a phone conversation with Rosenzweig, Nov. 9,
2000.
32
Steven Gelber quoted in Nancy Ross-Flanigan, "The Making of America
Michigan Today (Spring 1998) <http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/MT/98/Spr98/mt15s98.html>.
33
"Thoughtful weeding of reformatted material is a necessary element
of an overall collection management program in the nation's major
research libraries": University of Michigan Digital Library Production
Service, "Principles and Considerations for University of Michigan
Library Subject Specialists" (Feb. 2000) <http://www.umdl.umich.edu/policies/digitpolicyfinal.html>.
Nicholson Baker, "Deadline: The Author's Desperate Bid to Save
America's Past," New Yorker, July 24, 2000, pp. 42–61.
See also Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault
on Paper (New York, 2001).
34
Association of Research Libraries, "Talking Points in Response
to Nicholson Baker's Article in the 24 July New Yorker" <http://www.arl.org/scomm/baker.html>.
See also Barbara Quint, "Don't Burn Books! Burn Librarians!! A
Review of Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault
on Paper," Searcher 9.6 (June 2001) <http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/jun01/voice.htm>.
Thanks to Josh Brown for his help with this issue. Searching by
the word is only possible where the text has been converted into
codes that the computer understands as letters and words. The
term "digitizing" can refer confusingly both to scanning an image
of a page of text and to converting those images of letters into
codes that the computer can understand as letters. It is relatively
easy to scan thousands of pages of text as images; it is much
harder to get that into machine-readable form. That requires either
retyping or an OCR (optical character recognition) system. MOA
uses an automated OCR system, which gives very good but not perfect
results.
35
Gelber quoted in Ross-Flanigan, "Making of America." Association
of Research Libraries, "Summary of Fiscal Year 1999 Appropriation
Request for the National Endowment for the Humanities," in Association
of Research Libraries <http://www.arl.org/info/letters/FY1999.html>;
Stanley N. Katz, "Rethinking the Humanities Endowment," Chronicle
of Higher Education, Jan. 5, 2001, pp. B5–10. All Chronicle
articles cited here are available online to subscribers at <http://chronicle.com/weekly/sitesearch.htm>;
where a page number is cited, the article was first consulted
in the print version of the Chronicle.
36 LC21; James O'Donnell quoted in Katie Hafner, "Saving the Nation's Digital Legacy," New York Times, July 27, 2000, p. G1. See also Mayfield, "Library of Congress Goes Digital."
37
Daren Fonda, "Copyright's Crusader," Boston Globe Magazine,
Aug. 29, 1999, quoted in Dennis S. Karjala, Opposing Copyright
Extension <http://www.public.asu.edu/~dkarjala/commentary/Fonda8-29-99.html>.
See, for example, NCC Washington Update, March 27, 1998
<http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~ncc/ncc98/ncc9811mar27.html>.
Rosenzweig and Brier, Who Built America? From the Centennial
of 1876 to the Great War of 1914 (cd-rom); Roy Rosenzweig
et al., Who Built America? From the Great War of 1914 to the
Dawn of the Atomic Age in 1946 (CD-ROM) (New York, 2000).
38
Kathy Perry, director of VIVA, provided information to Rosenzweig
in several conversations during December 2000 and January 2001.
39
Contentville <http://www.contentville.com/>.
40
Corbis and Getty "have been gobbling up smaller agencies around
the world": Gordon Black, "Corbis Courts Online Consumers,"
Seattle Times, Nov. 16, 1999, p. D6. See also Kristi Heim,
"Digital Image Is Everything as Gates, Getty Vie for Control
of 'Net Art," Denver Post, March 5, 2000, p. I-03
(both available online through Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe).
Corbis Corporation, Corbis—The Place for Pictures Online
<http://www.corbis.com>.
41 EBSCO's full-text
holdings in history do not appear to be as deep as those from
ProQuest and EAA. For example, EBSCO does not offer such standards
as Journal of Women's History, Journal of Negro History,
and Journal of Southern History, which are in EAA.
42
On the electronic book ventures, see Goldie Blumenstyk, "Digital-Library
Company Plans to Charge Students a Monthly Fee for Access," Chronicle
of Higher Education, Nov. 14, 2000; Andrew R. Albanese, "E-Book
Gold Rush: Welcome to the Electronic Backlist," Lingua Franca,
10 (Sept. 2000) <http://www.linguafranca.com/print/0009/inside-ebook.html>;
Jennifer Darwin, "Storybook Beginning: Questia Founder Follows
Novel Script to Launch Online College Library," Houston Business
Journal, April 7, 2000 <http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/stories/2000/04/10/story2.html>;
Lisa Guernsey, "The Library as the Latest Web Venture," New
York Times, June 15, 2000; LC21, box 1.3; Tom Fowler,
"$90 Million in Funding for Questia," Houston Chronicle,
Aug. 24, 2000, business p. 1 (available online in Lexis-Nexis
Academic Universe); and Kendra Mayfield, "The Quest for E-Knowledge,"
Wired News, Feb. 5, 2001 <http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,41543,00.html>.
For survey, see David Thelen, "The Practice of American History,"
Journal of American History, 81 (Dec. 1994), 953. History
is not particularly well represented in the NetLibrary collection
so far. Some other "e-book" vendors concentrate on particular
fields, for example, information technology (ITKnowledge) and
marketing and finance (Books24x7).
43
See HarpWeek, "Purchase Information," in HarpWeek <http://www.harpweek.com/04Products/products-purchase.htm>.
HarpWeek may also begin levying annual maintenance fees in 2002.
44
Robert Thibadeau to Rosenzweig, e-mails, Nov. 1, 2, 2000 (in Rosenzweig's
possession); The Historical New York Times Project <http://nyt.ulib.org/>.
For unreadable pages, see, for example, Aug. 6, 1860, and Aug.
6, 1863.
45
Michael Jensen, "Mission Possible: Giving It Away While Making
It Pay," paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association
of American University Presses, Austin, Tex., June 22, 1999 <http://www.nap.edu/staff/mjensen/aaup99.html>
(emphasis in original).
46 On the History Cooperative, see Michael Grossberg, "Devising an Online Future for Journals of History," Chronicle of Higher Education, April 21, 2000. William and Mary Quarterly, Western Historical Quarterly, History Teacher, and Law and History Review will soon join the Journal of American History and the American Historical Review in the History Cooperative. (Full disclosure: I was a member of the Journal of American History committee that developed the cooperative project.)
47
For an experiment in hypertext publishing, see the articles in
Roy Rosenzweig, ed., "Hypertext Text Scholarship and American
Studies" <http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq>;
and Roy Rosenzweig, ed., "Forum on Hypertext Scholarship: aq as
Web-Zine: Responses to aq's Experimental Online Issue," American
Quarterly, 51 (June 1999), 237–82 (available online to
subscribers at Project Muse <http://muse.jhu.edu/>).
See also Roy Rosenzweig, "The Riches of Hypertext for Scholarly
Journals," Chronicle of Higher Education, March 17, 2000.
48
"arXiv Monthly Submission Rate Statistics," <http://arXiv.org/show_monthly_submissions>;
Stevan Harnad, "The Future of Scholarly Skywriting,"
in "i in the Sky: Visions of the Information Future,"
ed. A. Scammell, Aslib, Nov. 1999 <http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad99.aslib.html>.
See also Vincent Kiernan, "'Open Archives' Project Promises
Alternative to Costly Journals," Chronicle of Higher Education,
Dec. 3, 1999; Herbert Van de Sompel and Carl Lagoze, "The
Santa Fe Convention of the Open Archives Initiative, D-Lib
Magazine, 6 (Feb. 2000) <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/vandesompel-oai/02vandesompel-oai.html>;
Stevean Harnad, "Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed
Journals," D-Lib Magazine, 5 (Dec. 1999) <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html>.
49 Jensen, "Mission Possible."
50
David D. Kirkpatrick, "Librarians Unite against Cost of Journals,"
New York Times, Dec. 25, 2000, p. C5. Data on library budgets
provided by Mary Case of the Association of Research Libraries
and published in ARL Statistics, 1998–99 (Washington,
2000); ARL Supplementary Statistics, 1998–99 (Washington,
2000). On the crisis in scholarly publishing, see, for example,
Sanford G. Thatcher, "Thinking Systematically about the Crisis
in Scholarly Communication" and other papers presented at the
conference "The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis; or,
How Can I Get Tenure If You Won't Publish My Book?," Washington,
Sept. 11–12, 1997 <http://www.arl.org/scomm/epub/papers/>;
and Roy Rosenzweig, "How Can I Get Tenure If You Won't Publish
My Book?," Organization of American Historians Newsletter,
29 (Nov. 1997), 5.
51 Christopher Stern, "Freelancers Get Day in Court," Washington Post, Nov. 7, 2000, p. E3. David D. Kirkpatrick, "Publisher Set to Split E-Book Revenue," New York Times, Nov. 7, 2000, p. C2.
52
The National Coalition of Independent Scholars (NCIS) successfully
lobbied the Modern Languages Association to pass two resolutions
on access for independent scholars at their December 2000 annual
meeting in Washington, D.C. See Margaret Delacy, "A History of
NCIS" <http://www.ncis.org/history.htm>.
53
On network effects and economies of scale, see Philip E. Agre,
"The Market Logic of Information," paper
presented at Interface 5, Sept. 2000; Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian,
Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy
(Boston, 1998); and Philip E. Agre, "Notes and Recommendations,"
Red Rock Eater Digest, March 3, 1998 <http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/1998/notes.and.recommendation2.html
>.
54
"State Has Eight Firms on Forbes' List of Biggest 500 Private,"
Associated Press State & Local Wire, Nov. 16, 2000 (available
in Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe); "EBSCO Publishing Corporate
Quick Facts," in EBSCO Publishing Homepage <http://www.epnet.com/bground2.html>.
UMI is considering plans to turn the page images into searchable
text, potentially a massive project. Paula J. Hane, "UMI Announces
Digital Vault Initiative," Information Today, Newsbreak,
July 13, 1998 <http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb0713-3.htm>.
For a report that digital facsimiles will be provided, see "Times
Pages to Be Available on Internet," New York Times, Jan.
13, 2001 <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/13/technology/13BELL.html>.
I have heard reports that the pages will ultimately be converted
to searchable form through a combination of OCR and retyping of
headlines and first paragraphs.
55
BigChalk: The Education Network <http://www.bigchalk.com>.
56
On the Internet boom, see Hal R. Varian, "Economic Scene," New
York Times, Feb. 6, 2001, p. C2. Lightspan.com <http://www.lightspan.com/>.
As of January 2001, most of the links to materials in history
said: "We're currently gathering the best educational links for
this topic. Soon, you'll have access to expert-selected Web sites,
encyclopedia articles, learning activities, lesson plans, and
more."
57
The list of best Web sites was not officially launched when I viewed
it on February 6, 2001, but it already contained a long list of
Civil War sites. "The History Channel.Com Network," The
History Channel.com <http://network.historychannel.com/index.asp?page=home>.
Cowles History Group, Inc., "The HistoryNet: Advertiser Information,"
in The HistoryNet <http://www.thehistorynet.com/forms/adinfo.htm>;
"About Us: Our Story," in About.com, About—The
Human Internet <http://ourstory.about.com/index.htm?PM=59_1100_T>.
58
Oakleigh Thorne quoted in Sarah Carr and Goldie Blumenstyk, "The
Bubble Bursts for Education Dot-Coms," Chronicle of Higher
Education, June 30, 2000, pp. A39–40. "Discovery.Com
Workers Get Pink Slips," Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2000,
p. C7. "Online Advertising Rate Card Prices and Ad Dimensions,"
Aug. 14, 2000, in AdRelevance, Jupiter Media Metrix <http://www.adrelevance.com/intelligence/intel_archive.jsp>;
Paul F. Nunes, "Wake-up Call for Internet Firms Overly Dependent
on Ad Revenues," BusinessWorld (Philippines), June 6, 2000
(available in Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe).
59 See, for example, Roy Rosenzweig, "Marketing the Past: American Heritage and Popular History in the United States," in Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public, ed. Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig (Philadelphia, 1986), 21–49.
60
Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American
Broadcasting, 1920–1934 (Washington, 1994); Stuart Elliott,
"Banners' Ineffectiveness Stalls an Up-and-Coming Rival to TV,"
New York Times, Dec. 11, 2000, p. C4; "Dot Coms in the
Driver's Seat," Sept. 5, 2000, in AdRelevance <http://www.adrelevance.com/intelligence/intel_report_000905.pdf>;
"The Failure of New Media," Economist, Aug. 19, 2000.
61
David D. Kirkpatrick, "Media Giants in Joint Deal for Harcourt,"
New York Times, Oct. 28, 2000, p. C1. See also Richard Poynder,
"The Debate Heats Up—Are Reed Elsevier and Thomson Corp.
Monopolists?," Information Today Newsbreaks (30 April
2001) <http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb010430-1.htm>.
62
Brett D. Fromson, "On the Level: Is This a Stock 'Primed' for
an Uptick?," The Street.com, Dec. 5, 2000 <http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/markets/onthelevel/1199748.html>.
(The merger was completed March 1, 2001.) "Primedia's Loss Exceeds
Expectations, Taking Hit from New-Media Businesses," WSJ.Com,
Feb. 2, 2001 <http://public.wsj.com/sn/y/SB981035131440666351.html>,
accessed online Feb. 17, 2001, but not accessible on May 5, 2001.
63
Victoria Murphy, "Unlocking the Vault," Forbes Magazine,
Nov. 13, 2000 <http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/1113/6613228a.html>
(Forbes now requires that you register to access its articles);
Steve Silberman, "Putting History Online," Wired
News, June 26, 1998 <http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,13298,00.html>.
See also Peter Jacso, "With Experience and Content, UMI Is
Poised for Conversion Megaproject," Information Today,
Sept. 8, 1998 <http://www.infotoday.com/it/sep98/jacso.htm>
and the enhanced version <http://www.umi.com/hp/News/Reviews/SiteBuilder.html>;
"Bell & Howell's ProQuest Digital Vault Initiative Leaps
Forward This Spring," press release, March 22, 2000, in Bell
& Howell's ProQuest Information <http://www.proquest.com/division/pr/00/20000322.shtml>.
64 Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York, 1992), 22.
65
Florence Olsen, "'Open Access' is the Wave of the Information
Future, Scholar Says," Chronicle of Higher Education,
Aug. 18, 2000; William Y. Arms, "Automated Digital Libraries:
How Effectively Can Computers Be Used for the Skilled Tasks of
Professional Librarianship?," D-Lib Magazine, 6 (July-August
2000) <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july00/arms/07arms.html>.
66
For a recent effort by librarians and scientists to fight back
against the rapacious prices of commercially owned science journals,
see Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition and
Triangle Research Libraries Network, Declaring Independence:
A Guide to Creating Community-Controlled Science Journals
(Washington, 2001) <http://www.arl.org/sparc/DI/>.
67
Nelson, "A File Structure for the Complex."
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