Research Trip

The internet has completly changed the way scholars research. I have heard stories about the ancien regime researchers who used card catalogs and typewriters to write dissertations. Of course, one typing error meant starting the whole page over. And apparently many ph.d. candidates would store their manuscripts in the ice box/freezer because it was the only thing in the house that was fireproof; they were too poor to buy a safe. And of course conducting research in the archives was a painstaking task of locating information. It was almost easier to go to the stacks and sift through every document until one found what one was looking for.

Today it is different. I can sit here at home and access the online catalogs of thousands of libraries and archives around the world. Many of these institutions have put their collections online. I am planning on going to the Library of Congress (LOC) next week for research. I have just received word from one of the librarians that the Frederick Douglas papers are completly available online. This is an amazing prospect. I can access them from my computer at home. I wonder if this will change the way funding of projects are awarded. Until now people had to write grants for money so that they could afford a trip to the archives. Of course, this usually means that ivy league graduate students get most of the money while the rest of us have to get the scraps. The internet was supposed to bring down the communist regime in China, I wonder if it will also bring down the dominance that elite schools hold over the rest of us.

Of course trips to the archives will still be made. The internet does not make archives obsolete, although, if google gets its way, this may become a reality in the future. Realistically students need to go to the archives because not all the papers are digitalized. Major collections might be posted to the web but minor collections will remain in the stacks in the forseeable future. Still, it seems that access to sources are becoming democratized and this is a good thing because I can't afford to make multiple trips to the LOC.