The Lost Digital History

Earlier this week I mentioned the great plethora of resources available to me online in my area of research. It got me thinking of the huge amount of history which is currently stored online.

I read this article a few weeks ago but was able to find it again by searching online, Legal delays have blown a hole in UK's digital heritage (The Guardian, 4th October 2009). It is UK specific as it concerns the failure to implement the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 which would have forced the British Library to record and store digital material.

The article suggests that six years of digital history has been (potentially) lost as the government has not enforced the 2003 act giving the British Library (and others, including Trinity College Dublin) the ability to store digital material in the same way that these libraries currently store books and journal articles etc.

"At least 26 other countries, including France, Germany, Canada, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand and Norway, now have similar laws in force."

Digital history is becoming more important as more of our resources originate online, and thus its beneficial to a historian to see this 2003 Act enforced and copied internationally.

An abundance of information

My thesis topic (NATO Expansion under President Clinton) is relatively modern, focusing mostly on the last half of the 1990s; so far the biggest difference between my thesis research and my dissertation research last year (on the US opposition to Salvador Allende in Chile) has been the volume of data available online.

I remember having one excellent book, "The Pinochet File" by a NSA archivist, Peter Kornbluh. The book compiled a significant amount of pertinent US documents which had been declassified in 1998 by President Clinton under pressure from Secretary of State, Madeline Albright.

The book was by no means perfect, firstly I can't tell you how many times I wished I had the ability to "Ctrl+f" (to search the text) it is only when you are used to using online texts do you realise how inadequate the index in most books are! Also as the book was a compilation of documents Kornbluh had to decide what documents to include. Although it is 590 pages long there was a limit to the amount of material he could include.

So far my MA thesis research has been mostly online, I decided to familiarise myself with the history of NATO in the 1990s by reading almost every article connected to the organisation in the period. Thanks to still being free to use, I didn't have to pay to access the New York Times archive (although from 2011 you will have to subscribe) or The Times, The Guardian, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

I can access the newspapers archive, and simply search for key terms such as "Nato" and there in front of me is everything I need from that website. It is so easy to find sources for my research this year that a new problem has emerged - deciding what resources are of value.

The abundance of information online presents a bigger problem for historians in the future - how are we protecting our digital history for the future. This is something I have read a little bit about today in the newspaper, and I will blog on it once I have done some reading on the issue.

Evernote: Only useful for some.

Evernote is a software/service which allows users to compile notes, photos, graphs etc. into one program. I explained it to my Mother as being a tool which allowed you to digitalise everything (which was a slight exaggeration). I gave the example of recording family history (which is something that interests her so I knew she would continue to listen...) currently genealogy software is rather versatile, you can do more than just input names and dates, you can upload photographs and Birth Certificates for example.

Evernote is somewhat similar I argued (but easier to use and useful for more than just genealogy). You can set up your iPhone or Blackberry onto the Evernote website and could take a picture of a piece of text (I gave the example of a wedding invite - genealogy remember...) and have that stored onto your Evernote account. The wedding invitation is of little use to you once you have been to the wedding, however if you are some obsessed family historian it is easy to see that the document could be of some significance (it gives the date and location of the wedding). However you don't want to have the document taking up physical space (multiply the invitation by thousands of other small relatively insignificant documents that a family historian might want to record) also the invitation is likely to be misplaced unless stored in a very organised way. This wedding invitation could then be tagged which is where the great benefit of Evernote comes in - by tagging the image perhaps under a heading of "Jill & John's Wedding" all documents, notes and images related the the wedding are able to be found under the one tag. Imagine several years later being able to click on the tag and being provided the great corpus of sources connected to the wedding.

My Mother argued that it seemed quite time consuming to catalogue the documents and callous to then dispose of documents deemed previous important enough to record! Though the potential of it was seen.




To summarise, Evernote has several benefits:

* Versatile - you can digitally store everything (documents, images, notes etc.)
* Tagging - it allows you to group a collection of items.
* It's online - you can access it anywhere.
* Easy to use - you will have a better bibliography as you will record everything you use!

Though for me it has some downsides:

* Can be time consuming - is it not easier to have a physical folder?
* Antiquated? - How long will it be until Google create a better version of Evernote?
* Needs an iPhone or equivalent to be of maximum use.


I can't see myself using it for my thesis because I don't think it suits my area of study. As my period is the 1990s where almost all of my resources are either embargoed or online (some difference) I can use other programs to bookmark newspaper articles or journals for me. If I was able to access an archive and see primary material, and if I was able to use a camera phone my use for Evernote would increase.