"Where do you want to go today?":
1. Introduction
2. Types
of sites
A. Institutional
Information Sites
B. Showcase
Sites
C. Thematic
Sites
D. Finding
Aids
E. Primary
Sources
3. Finding
Aids
A. Libraries
1. Governmental
2. University
B. Archives
1. Governmental
2. University
C. Thematic
Guides
4. Primary
Sources
A. Textual
sources
B. Data
Sources
C. Audio-visual
Sources
5. Conclusion
In some wild flights of fancy, one sometimes
dreams of a completely digital universe, in which all the world's books and
archives have been made machine-readable and are accessible from the comfort of
one's home or office. Ultimate access for everyone! We all know it's not going
to happen, if only because knowledge production in our times is outpacing our
ability for knowledge management. So I will not play the visionary. Instead, I
want to present a brief overview of research resources accessible today in
electronic form for historians and other scholars interested in the past. I
would argue that the main categories of research resources available today are
likely to remain the major categories of research resources available within the
foreseeable future. In some cases, such as in libraries, the electronic
revolution has already happened. In others, such as in archives, it is well
underway and will not likely grow by leaps and bounds in the next few
years.
The revolution is also well underway among
students as well. On Monday, 25 January, the New
York Times reported on a survey of U.S.
college freshmen, 83% of whom used the Internet for research or homework.(1)
I would hazard a guess that they are more proficient in the use of the Internet
than their instructors. We had better catch up!
This paper intends to help in the catching up. My
focus is on research resources. Most of these can be used for teaching as well,
and some, such as the 'teaching with documents' site of the NARA(2)
in the US, are explicitly designed with that goal in mind, but I have not
specifically ystematically searched for sites designed mainly for educational
purposes.
I start with a categorization of Web sites
available for historical research and then go on to describe some types in more
detail. The examples I offer are not the product of a systematic search of the
Web; rather, they are culled from the accumulation of bookmarks in my Web
browsers as I have encountered interesting sites over the last few years; in
some cases, preparing this paper has led me to explore sites which I had not
been aware of before. I would be glad to learn of categories or important
examples I've missed.
There are no set conventions for classifying sites and for finding information about scholarly resources on the Net. For this purpose, search engines such as AltaVista(3) or directories such as Yahoo!(4) And Excite(5) are of some help, but are not always efficient guides. These general-purpose electronic finding aids are not designed with the needs of the scholar in mind. One should of course consult them, and one will occasionally find surprises, but an astute researcher(6) would also look at scholarly sites, such as those of professional associations(7) or university departments(8), for 'value-added' lists of sites of interest to the scholar.
The following categorization of Web sites is
presented in ascending order of interest to the historian. It is very much an ad
hoc scheme, and some sites may fall
into more than one category.
A. Institutional Information Sites
The simplest kinds of Web sites of interest to
the historian are those which only provide institutional information about the
organization which created the site: mission statement, target clientele,
location, address, hours of opening, contact persons, etc. Many History
department Web sites fall in this category. They are useful for finding a
colleague's e-mail or postal address, and can sometimes lead to an individual
historian's page, which may indicate his teaching and research interests. The
National Archives of Canada site also falls in this category, at least for the
moment.
Some sites created by archives, libraries, or museums as institutional advertisement are also used to showcase some of their more famous holdings in order to draw visitors' attention. Perhaps the best known of these sites is that of the Louvre museum, which, besides institutional information, offers a short visit through the building's major sections, with representations of some of the major works the museum holds. Other institutions also use their Web site to give a glimpse of the breadth of their collections. The McCord Museum, for instance, allows visitors to search a mini-database of their holdings.(9)
The material showcased on these sites is
usually of limited value for the scholar embarking on original research, since
it is usually material already well-known. But these sites may provide leads for
illustrative material or may draw attention to types of holdings with which the
researcher was not familiar; how many scholars, for example, know that the
collection of audiovisual documents preserved by the National Archives of Canada
amounts to more than 270,000 hours of material?
Of somewhat greater interest are thematic sites. These gather in one place primary and secondary sources on a given topic. They may be produced by competent historians, competent amateurs, or incompetent historians and incompetent amateurs. They can usually be found by the general search engines. Examples include the Virtual Museum of New France,(10) the Adhémar site of the Canadian Centre for Architecture,(11) which gives access to a collection of maps and land titles for 17th and 18th century Montréal, the site on the Patriotes of Lower Canada,(12) or the site on Québec history textbooks put together by Paul Aubin.(13) Other thematic sites of interest to Canadian historians include an American site on what they call the French and Indian War.(14)
Some thematic sites, such as the Who Killed William Robinson? site(15) by Ruth Sandwell and John Lutz, of the University of Victoria, have an avowed pedagogical bent. So do the sites(16) created under the auspices of Industry Canada's SchoolNet Digital Collections program, which now number in excess of one hundred. These sites are prepared by community groups, students, or professional organizations, such as the Archives of the City of Montréal.(17) The Digital Collections tend to be on fairly narrow topics and offer a limited amount of material, useful for teaching purposes more than for large-scale research.
Elsewhere, probably the best known thematic site is Ed Ayers' Valley of the Shadow site,(18) which documents the pre-Civil War and Civil War history of two neighbouring communities, one on each side of the Mason-Dixon line. The site contains newspapers, public records, church records, military records, and private papers and diaries from the two communities. This site allows visitors to construct their own itinerary through the history of these two communities. The Center for History and the new Media at George Mason University,(19) in Virginia, offers a list of Web sites that it sponsors, or that are affiliated with it. It also offers links to the 'Best of the History Web' sites, which offers more examples of thematic Web sites.
On the whole, thematic sites are only of
interest inasmuch as the theme they illustrate is of relevance to the historical
research one wants to undertake. Some sites, such as the Valley
of the Shadow site, or the Patriotes
site and the Adhémar
in Québec, allow some original exploration of historical material. Others are
the product of research already conducted and provide only the documents deemed
interesting by the site's authors. While interesting, such sites provide little
opportunity for original research.
Let me define the last two categories of sites before describing them in some detail. One category consists of finding aids, while the other comprises sites which offer primary sources.
Finding aids provide information about books in
libraries and archival collections kept in archival repositories. The two major
types of institutions of interest which are included in this category are
governmental library and archival services, at various levels, and university
library and archives catalogues and finding aids.
Finally, the sites most useful for original
historical research are those which offer collections of original documents in
electronic form. We can group these sites into three categories, according to
the type of documents they make available: text documents, data, and
audio-visual material.
Most scholars are already familiar with
electronic finding aids in libraries, archives, and museums. Catalogues and
finding aids have been produced in electronic form for about thirty years now,
and it has been relatively simple to make these files accessible on the
Internet. For researchers, having access to catalogues and finding aids through
the Internet is a blessing: it allows at once for more systematic research
strategies and for a quicker execution of these strategies. For many years now,
scholars have been able to query not only their own institution's library
catalogue, but also that of institutions with richer library holdings. Searching
library catalogues in this manner can be a very effective complement to using
bibliographical finding aids when one is at the beginning of a research project
and needs to inventory previous work on the topic.
Most library catalogues are available in 'telnet' mode, which allows the user to query the library catalogue much as he or she would in the library itself. Increasingly, though, library catalogues can be consulted on Web sites, with query forms giving the user powerful search tools.
Let me review briefly the library catalogues of
most use to the historian. These can often be located through a university
library's Web page, such as UQAM's.(20)
First are the national and provincial
libraries, such as the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec,(21)
the National Library of Canada,(22)
the Library of Congress,(23)
the British Library,(24)
or the Bibliothèque nationale de France.(25)
Because these are legal deposit libraries, they are invaluable for identifying
new book publications in a given field, as well as for tracing cataloguing
information for older works, as long as one is sure in which country the book
was published. Anyone who has had to trace cataloguing information for copyright
purposes will find these catalogues invaluable. One has to be aware, however,
that these catalogues may not contain works published before library catalogues
became machine-readable; for instance, BN-Opale, the on-line catalogue of the
Bibliothèque nationale de France, only lists books since 1970 and periodicals
since 1960.
Likewise, university library catalogues can help in tracing bibliographic information not available in one' s own university library. Information on connection to these catalogues is relatively easy to find on the Web, through universities' main Web pages. Look for example at how to access to the University of Toronto's library catalogue.(26) Outside of Canada, one can reach Harvard's library catalogue, Hollis.(27) Information about Berkeley's catalogue is also available.(28) One can consult the Oxford University catalogue;(29) likewise for Cambridge's.(30)
It would be pointless to prolong this list of
examples of on-line library catalogues. For bibliographic search, they are
invaluable.
Archives, as well as libraries, are increasingly making their finding aids available on-line. For the scholar, being able to identify collections of potential interest and to gauge their size, and eventually to contact the appropriate archivists by e-mail before planning a visit to an archives is of tremendous help in making one's research time more effective.
For research in Canadian archives, a good place
to start is the list of Canadian
Archival Resources on the Internet(31)
at the University of Saskatchewan. Archives can be located alphabetically, by
category (university, provincial, municipal, religious, other),and by region.
This site also provides a link to the Canadian Council of Archives's directory,(32)
which contains information about more than 520 institutions, including general
descriptions of their holdings.
Major government archives have Web-accessible finding aids. The National Archives of Canada will launch ArchiviaNet in April 1999, and a demo version is being presented at this conference. The Archives nationales du Québec's search engine is called Pistard, which was first used in their reference rooms and is now available on the Web. Provincial archives in B.C. and Alberta offer the Interprovincial Archival Union Lists,(33) which can be searched by indexes or keywords. Some Canadian municipal governments also have put some finding aids on the Web. See for instance the Montréal archives site(34).
In the United States, the National Archives and
Records Administration provides an on-line finding aid, called NAIL.(35)
France offers a directory of French archival institutions,(36)
and the Public Record Office in the United Kindgom is beginning to put its
catalogue on-line;(37)
for the moment, it only contains "references to selected policy records of
20th-century
British Government departments."(38)
Many universities also offer on-line access to
their archival holdings. For instance, Mc Gill's archives provide access to its
catalogues of text, photograph, film, and audio collections.(39)
UQAM's archives Web site includes a list of holdings of private collections,
with summary descriptions of their contents.(40)
Memorial's Maritime History Archives offer an on-line catalogue through the Web.(41)
Queen's University offers tn3270 access to its electronic catalogue(42).
Some museums also offer on-line access to their
finding aids, though this seems to be less frequent than for archives. The
Canadian Heritage Information Network provides a country-wide collective
database of museum holdings,(43)
but access is by subscription. It is probably easiest to use in a museum. In
Québec, the Web site for the Société
des musées québécois offers a search
engine to find relevant institutions, which then leads to a brief description of
the museum and, when available, to the museum's Web site.(44)
Finally, some institutions offer thematic
guides on the Web. Examples are the National Library of Canada's Web guides to
the history of labour in Canada(45)
and for the study of political science.(46)
For the historian, one of the most promising
aspects of the Web is access to a growing number of corpora of primary sources.
These primary sources may be classified in three categories: textual sources,
data sources, and audio-visual sources.
A number of research centres have put together
impressive collections of textual corpora, either from manuscripts or from
published works. In most instances, these corpora pertain to famous authors or
historical figures, which justifies the effort expended in putting these
documents into electronic form. For example, French-language publications
available at the Electronic Text Center of the University of Virginia include
works by Voltaire, Descartes, Corneille, Racine, Stendhal, and Zola.(47)
The Center's 40,000 humanities texts represent twelve languages. One of the
earliest text archives, at Oxford,(48)
has taken a lead in implementing the SGML standard for electronic text
structuring. It holds 2,500 literary texts, corpora, or reference works, in 25
languages, ranging from Aeschylus and Jane Austen to Yeats [it has no authors
whose name begins with Z!]. It provides full-text search of its holdings. The
University of Chicago houses the American and French Research project on the Trésors
de la langue française, a joint effort
with the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.(49)
It holds 2000 texts from the 13th
to the 20th
century. It offers a sophisticated search engine to locate texts by author or
period or keywords; it allows search for co-occurrences of words or phrases. One
of its major corpora is the Encyclopédie.
Its French texts include Old and Middle French texts, and pamphlets and
periodicals from the 1848 revolution. ARTFL also holds documents in languages
other than French: for instance, a collection of Medieval Italian texts,
including Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The UQAM library Web site offers a
French-language description of the ARTFL project.(50)
Another source of canonical literature is the Marxists Internet Archive, a collaborative effort which brings together electronic versions of Marxist texts and links to other sites containing such documents.(51) Recent accessions include vol. III of Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution as well as vol. 2 of his Military Writings.
In the United States, the Library of Congress has made available a good part of the George Washington Papers (147,000 images).(52) This is part of its American Memory series of 43 collections, which cover constitutional history, technological history (Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel Morse), and social history, particularly the Great Depression in literature and photographs. For the sports-minded, the Library of Congress site offers a collection of 2100 early baseball cards, available in high resolution uncompressed TIFF format for the patient Web surfer. The Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress presents "Inside an American Factory: Films of the Westinghouse Works, 1904."(53) The 21 films are actually viewable on the Web, but since they are many megabytes in length, they are best 'screened' from a high-speed connection, since a typical 28.8 baud modem will download about 10 megabytes an hour. New techniques may help here. Quicktime formats appear to be more compact than MPEG files. This problem will be reduced somewhat by the use of the RealMedia format, albeit with a loss of quality.
For students, the U.S. National Archives and
Records Administration presents the Digital Classroom,(54)
with archival materials from its holdings linked to lesson plans correlated to
the U.S. National History Standards.
In Canada, the National Library is putting a number of texts on the Web. The full text of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences,[the Massey Commission], including selected letters and briefs submitted to the Commission, is available. For an instant insight into how Canada and Québec have changed over the last fifty years, have a look at the Fédération des Sociétés Saint-Jean Baptiste brief(55) and compare it with the Société Saint-Jean Baptiste de Montréal's current political outlook!(56) The National Library also has a collection of formally published Canadian online books and journals.(57) The collection includes the Debates of the House of Commons, 1994-1997. This collection, as well as the others, can be searched by keyword, but I've had some difficulty with the search engine.(58)
This overview is far from exhaustive. For a
glimpse at other available textual material collections, consult the University
of Waterloo library's guide to electronic texts and books.(59)
Princeton University Library also offers a list of electronic text centres.(60)
If you are interested in classic literary texts, there is a good chance that
there is an electronic edition of it somewhere, which can usually be searched by
keyword.
Scholarly journals are also being transferred to electronic format, notably in the JSTOR project, initiated by the Mellon Foundation, which is financed by institutional and individual membership. The first hundred years (1892-1993) of the William and Mary Quarterly, for instance, are available in that format, and the early years can be searched in the demonstration database available free of charge. The text is presented in facsimile format. Look for instance at the Meade Family History, vol. 13, no 2 (oct. 1904), p. 79, for an interesting contemporary depiction of Governor Murray.(61)
A second major category of historical sources available on the Internet for research is numerical data. The conservation of numerical data is an ancient practice by electronic standards; in the early days of mainframe computers, numbers were much more easily stored than other forms of information. The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research(62) at the University of Michigan began in the 1960s to archive social science data, often historical in nature. Its collections are available by subscription and offer what ICPSR calls "the world's largest archive of computer-based research and instructional data for the social sciences."(63) The University of Minnesota's Integrated Public Use Microdata Series [IPUMS] contains 25 national individual-level samples from 13 U.S. censuses from 1850 to 1990.(64)
Some of the data resources available in
electronic form have restricted access, while others are open to all. In Canada,
for instance, some basic statistics are available on the Statistics Canada Web
site.(65)
Likewise, the Bureau de la Statistique du Québec offers recent economic
indicators for the province.(66)
But a great deal of valuable research material is available under restricted
access for qualified scholars. The CANSIM database of Statistics Canada is
accessible to students and faculty of universities which subscribe to it. It
contains at last count 722,074 chronological series of economic, social, and
cultural indicators, though most of the series go back to the 1960s or 1946 at
best. The Data Centre at the Carleton University Library holds machine-readable
files of responses to Gallup polls from the early 1950s onward, as well as data
from Canada's General Social Surveys.(67)
Queen's University's Centre for the Study of Public Opinion holds data from
Decima, Environics, and CROP surveys from the late 1970s on.(68)
The York Institute for Social Research, established in the 1960s, maintains a
data archive with data on "major national election studies, quality of life
surveys, studies of attitudes toward education, health, housing,
multiculturalism, recreation and other
social policy questions."(69)
The Canadian Association of Public Data Users (CAPDU), which is mainly comprised
of data archivists in Canadian university library and archives, maintains a
discussion list(70)
and has repeatedly lobbied for the creation of a Canada Union List of
Machine-Readable Data, a project first put forward in the early 1970s.
In the same manner, large-scale social science
research projects, such as the Programme de recherche en démographie historique
at the Université de Montréal, and IREP, the Inter-university Research Centre
on Population,(71)
both of which have over the years gathered massive data sets on the Québec
population, can make their data available to qualified researchers, subject to
strict ethics and confidentiality rules.
The last type of sources available for
historical research on the Internet pertain are audio-visual materials. Other
papers in this session have made obvious the richness of material available in
this form. I've already alluded to film material at the Library of Congress. Let
me just mention a few Canadian sites of interest. The Manitoba Museum of Man and
Nature hosts the digital collection of the Hudson's Bay Company.(72)
The collection contains iconographic material from Inuit, aboriginal, and metis
cultures as well as artifacts related to the fur trade, to exploration and
navigation, as well as fine art. The British Columbia Archives have a collection
of 44,500 items with available on-line images, including photographic
collections and selected works by Emily Carr.(73)
The Bibliothèque nationale du Québec offers 360,000 pages of books and musical
partitions, 12,000 pages of artists's works, 26,000 images and maps, and 1,500
sound recordings.(74)
The Archives nationales du Québec Web site has a small collection of
audio-visual documents from their Trois-Rivières branch, which you will find
through the 'Archives en vue' button. You can hear the voice of Maurice
Duplessis in 1955 extolling the merits of Québec agriculture as a rampart
against social disruption.(75)
Browsing through these sites will make it very
obvious that the Web is for the moment better suited to still images than for
sound or moving pictures, which are contained in much larger files. It will be
some time before bandwidth is large enough to handle video files quickly, though
progress is constantly being made with compression techniques. Telephone and
cable companies are beginning to offer high-speed connections to Internet, but
it remains to be seen what effect the proliferation of such connections will
have on Internet traffic flow.
In conclusion, I hope this brief tour of Internet resources available for historical research will have given you a taste for exploration. The Internet is still far from making research in archives and in libraries obsolete, but it can make such research much more productive. Internet-based primary sources, whether they be textual, numerical, or audio-visual, can also provide a rich set of teaching opportunities. But as for any other type of information support, Internet resources have to be used in a critical fashion, assessing authenticity and accuracy before proceeding to analysis.
1. See the message by Richard Jensen on H-MMEDIA, 25 January 1999, citing the article. H-Net archives are available at http://www.h-net.msu.edu/ .
2. http://www.nara.gov/education/teaching/fdr/infamy.html
3. http://www.altavista.com. For Canadian sites, visit http://www.altavista.ca.
6. See the discussion of search strategies in Jim Carroll and Rick Broadhead, 1998 Canadian Internet Directory & Research Guide (Scarborough, Ont., Prentice-Hall, 1997), 1-87.
7. See for example the Canadian Historical Association Web site at http://www.yorku.ca/research/cha/cha-shc.html, which has links to other professional associations of historians under its 'Resources' heading.
8. See the sites of Université Laval (http://www.fl.ulaval.ca/hst/), UQAM (http://www.unites.uqam.ca/~dhist/index.htm), University of Victoria (http://web.uvic.ca/history/) as examples. The University of Toronto History Department Web site (http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/history/ also offers useful information, though a good deal of it has not been updated recently.
9. http://www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/
10. http://www.mvnf.muse.digital.ca/
12. http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/k14664/pat1.htm
13. http://www.bibl.ulaval.ca/ress/manscol/
14. I have excluded from mention sites which promote CD-ROM products, such as the Klondyke Gold site (http://www.klondike.com/klondike/disc_kg.html) and the Fortress of Louisbourg site (http://www.chatsubo.com/fitzgerald/).
15. http://web.uvic.ca/history-robinson/
16. http://www.schoolnet.ca/collections/E/
17. http://www.ville.montreal.qc.ca/archives/seriez/index.htm
18. http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/
20. http://www.unites.uqam.ca/bib
21. http://www2.biblinat.gouv.qc.ca/
26. http://prod.library.utoronto.ca/resources/utcat.html
28. http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/
31. http://www.usask.ca/archives/menu.html
32. http://www.cdncouncilarchives.ca/dir.html
33. http://www.CdnCouncilArchives.ca/icaul.html
34. http://www.ville.montreal.qc.ca/archives/archives.htm
35. http://www.nara.gov/nara/nail.html
36. http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/doc/index.html
38. http://www.pro.gov.uk/finding/catalogue/default.htm
39. http://www.archives.mcgill.ca/
40. http://www.unites.uqam.ca/archives/
41. http://www.mun.ca/mha/online.html
44. http://www.unites.uqam.ca/musees_quebecois/
45. http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/services/elabhis.htm
46. http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/services/escience.htm
47. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/
49. http://humanities.uchicago.edu/ARTFL/ARTFL.html
50. http://www.unites.uqam.ca/bib/bases/ARTFL/presentation.html
51. http://www.marxists.Org/index.htm
52. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html
53. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/papr/west/westhome.html
54. http://www.nara.gov/education/classrm.html
55. http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/massey/memoires/ebrif405.htm
56. http://www.cam.org/~ssjb/index.html
57. http://collection.nlc-bnc.ca/e-coll-e/index-e.htm
58. I looked for "October crisis" and retrieved documents which did not contain the phrase. Some of the French-language documents have had their accented characters miscoded.
59. http://library.uwaterloo.ca/etc/sources.html
60. http://infoshare1.Princeton.EDU:2003/digital_collections/
61. I found this by searching for 'Quebec' or Québec' or 'Montréal' or 'Montreal' in the text.
62. http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/index.html
63. http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ICPSR/About/description.html
64. http://www.hist.umn.edu/~ipums98/home.html
66. http://www.bsq.gouv.qc.ca/
67. http://www.carleton.ca/~ssdata/
68. The URL for the Centre, as given on the Queen's Web site, (http://www.queensu.ca/vpr/res/centres.html), is not working....
69. http://www.isr.yorku.ca/isr/index.asp
70. capdu@majordomo.srv.ualberta.ca
71. http://www.uqac.uquebec.ca/irep/
72. http://www.schoolnet.ca/collections/hbc/hbcen.htm
73. http://www.bcarchives.gov.bc.ca/index.htm