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.
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