Primary sources on the web: digital archival collections

Citation

Latham, B. (2008), "Primary sources on the web: digital archival collections", Reference Reviews, Vol. 22 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/rr.2008.09922aag.001

Primary sources on the web: digital archival collections

The internet’s information landscape does not immediately come to mind as the best place to look for primary sources, but with the growing proliferation of digital libraries as an extension of the archival collections of the brick and mortar institutions they represent, this mindset bears revision. When an academic and, to a lesser extent, public institution considers offering elements of its collection to the world at large through the medium of the web, it is most often the archival collections, collections chock-full of rare primary sources, which top the queue. The reasoning behind this is simple: there is less danger of copyright infringement, archival collections are perceived as higher in research value than other collections because they often contain unique materials (translation: more easily justifiable when begging for funding), and it can facilitate preservation of fragile originals by providing a surrogate that cannot be damaged by every clumsy undergraduate with dirty hands. One only has to remember Mr Bean’s visit to the Rare Book Room to wonder why every item from every archival collection on the face of the planet is not digitized.

Digitized archival collections are particularly valuable as specialized reference resources, and in their simplest form, have been around for over a decade. As the technology improves, so does access to these collections, and the way in which the end user can manipulate what they find – in most cases making them easier to use than the original physical collections. The online digital collections of today are a far cry from the embryonic attempts of a decade past, so much so that it almost beggars comparison. For instance, Documenting the American South (DocSouth) (http://docsouth.unc.edu) (RR 2005/329) began in 1994 as a small, experimental project to digitize (in the form of encoded texts only) a few often-consulted slave narratives held by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library. This has grown into what is today a digital publishing initiative with thousands of primary sources in the form of text, images, audio files, and more. Thirteen years on, DocSouth is now driven from the back end by DiMeMa’s ContentDM digital collection management software, and the interface, searching capabilities, and breadth and quality of resources retrieved have improved drastically: the realization of the ultimate potential of one institution’s archival collection.

Projects such as DocSouth and the phenomenal American Memory collection from the US Library of Congress (http://memory.loc.gov) blazed a trail, and other institutions followed suit by beginning digitization projects on their own archival collections. This is now spreading through almost every stratum of the library world – the smallest colleges and the largest consortia are getting into the archival digitization game, and government agencies such as the US Institute of Museum and Library Services are promoting the effort by awarding large grants to fund digitization and digital preservation projects. Though the collections of US institutions seem to be the most widely publicized, the trend is an international one. One of the web’s larger collections is contained in the Gallica web site (http://www.bnf.fr), the digital library of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale. Gallica is a digital archive containing many rare or out-of-print texts, manuscripts, newspapers, musical scores, and graphic materials. As of last count, Gallica contained over 90,000 digitized texts, and almost as many images. Like DocSouth and American Memory, Gallica provides a variety of search options and access points, as well as themed collections to facilitate browsing. As Gallica mentions in its charter, one of the primary responsibilities it shares with these other online archival collections is to focus on thematically arranged bodies of knowledge which centre on cultural heritage. Though most of these archival collections have this shared scope, the way in which they provide access and present primary sources varies widely, as illustrated by another online archival collection of primary sources: EuroDocs.

EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History (http://eudocs.lib.byu.edu) is, unlike the other resources mentioned above, a portal, and is also a different animal in that it is presented in wiki format. Like all wikis, this has the distinct advantage shared by any collaborative effort: it mines the knowledge of the collective. Of course, at the same time, it also shares the distinct disadvantage of the wiki, which is that anyone with access can create and edit the content so, as EuroDocs is careful to point out, no guarantee of accuracy is implied or assumed. EuroDocs links to outside web sites, most of which are archival collections of primary historical documents focusing on Western Europe (e.g., Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Scanning Project; http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/library/psas/index.cfm). EuroDocs organizes its information into the broad categories of Prehistoric and Ancient Europe, Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and Europe as a Supranational Region, as well as collections by country. This arrangement makes for painless browsing, which is helpful given that the search tool is the standard out-of-the-box feature provided by MediaWiki, the same free software developed for Wikipedia.

Perhaps one of the most exciting collaborative efforts to appear recently in the area of digital primary sources is Footnote (www.footnote.com). Named by PC Magazine as one of its “Top 100 undiscovered websites” for 2007, Footnote serves as a portal to millions of images of original documents, such as the cheque used by the US Treasury to pay for the Alaska Purchase. Footnote is a subscription-based web site that features searchable original documents provided by Footnote’s users, so its value is immense in that everyone from individual history buffs to societies without the resources to digitize their own collections can make their unique, individual sources available to millions. Users simply upload the images and then use Footnote’s software tools to create metadata and make them searchable. Footnote has also developed tools that allow its users to comment on and enhance the sources they find by providing annotations, and “spotlights” and “story pages” which allow for themed presentation of research on certain topics with accompanying source images. Footnote also provides assistance, in the way of a content acquisition team, for those, such as historical societies, who might have a batch collection of source images to make available. In addition, Footnote launched a project in early 2007 to collaborate with the US National Archives (www.archives.gov) to digitize selected historic documents and materials and make them available through the site. Footnote’s subscription prices for individual accounts are reasonable ($59.95 annually), and though a subscription service, searching of the indexes and access to some of the featured collections (e.g. US milestone documents, papers of the Continental Congress, etc.) are free.

These resources represent the tip of the iceberg as far as online primary sources are concerned, and the trend for digitizing unique archival collections in order to make them available to the world at large continues to build momentum. Driven by user demand, the web will be seeing still more digitization projects focusing on primary sources that meet specific research, educational, and cultural enrichment needs.

Bethany LathamInternet Editor, Reference Reviews, and Assistant Professor and Electronic Resources/Documents Librarian, Jacksonville State University, Jacksonville, AL, USA