“Digital Archives are a Gift of Wisdom to be used Wisely”, Roy Rosenzweig

The article entitled “Digital Archives are a Gift of Wisdom to be used Wisely” and written by Roy Rosenzweig in 1995 focuses on the main opportunities, but also impediments, that digital archives can bring to historians. In Rosenzweig’s opinion, one of the big advantages of digital archives is that they offer a more direct access to primary sources, wherever you live or go to College, and independently from the size of the library you can access.
Rosenzweig starts by giving a quick overview on the changes that have occurred in the field of digital use and access in the last decades. He mentions a CD-ROM he worked on with other colleagues which, when it appeared in 1993, already felt kind of obsolete because of the arrival of mosaic, the first web-browser which was easy to use and install and opened the access to the web to the public. Maybe the arrival of Mosaic felt like a huge and very innovative change, but in retrospect it is a little hard to think that CD-ROM would have been outdated by the arrival of internet browsers. Those are two different technologies and both have different possible uses. But let us go back to Rosenzweig. What seems to be most amazing to him is the number of digital libraries and databases that have emerged on the web during the last decades, making all kind of primary sources available to a larger amount of people and widening the scope of resources for teachers in different disciplines.
If some people think that using the web might be dangerous because of the false or bad information that can be found, Rosenzweig chooses to take a stand and defends the changes that have taken place on the World Wide Web in the past years. He believes that the “quality of Web-based historical resources is surprisingly good and getting better.” What seems to be of a bigger concern for the author is the question of the access to all those materials; the actual access to documents on the web, and then more the actual intellectual access (knowing what to do with the sources). Before elaborating some more on the question of access, Rosenzweig takes some time to talk about the relatively recent appearance of google and the great research possibilities it has brought as well as its ranking system. He also mentions the kind of “peer-review” that is becoming more frequent and that helps sorting good from bad information.
It is toward the end of his article that Rosenzweig comes to a very interesting and relevant point: the question of the commercialization of the access to primary sources on the web. His concern is whether the digital world will – or will not – reproduce what the “real” world has been living on: the inequality of access to the available resources. In the “real” world, it is embodied by the size of libraries and the capital of the college, which influence the books, journals, or primary sources that they have been able to gather and are still able to acquire. On the web, this inequality of access can be exemplified with the Thomson Corporation and their 18th century collection. They have digitized “every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the 18th century”, but to have access to it, universities have to pay a very impressive fee; a price that not every university can afford. I remember accessing that database when it was still in its beta version, and I must admit that it was a very impressive and useful tool for researchers. As I was working on the 18th century at that time, I was able to find on that website an amazing amount of texts from preachers and intellectuals from England and Switzerland; sermons and different kind of books that I would never have had access to (or with great difficulties) without this online resource. It was a great loss when it left its beta phase and the fee was introduced, because my college did not have the money to subscribe. Therefore, I am not very sure to agree with Rosenzweig when he says that it is impolite to complain about those kind of online database, because the potential they represent is amazing (and he thinks we should maybe consider that aspect more, rather than be upset there is a fee to pay). I just wonder why everything has to be made into a profitable business, even the access to our history. It is rather sad that academic institutions often do not have the necessary funds to undertake such projects, and that those are then grabbed by private institutions/firms whose primary purpose is to generate profit.
And yes, Rosenzweig is right to mention that after the issue of “physical” access, there is still the problem of their actual intellectual access: using and interpreting those documents. However, is it really a new preoccupation? Or is the broader access to primary sources of all kinds making more apparent a problem that had been hiding in the corner for so long: the lack of instruction in reading and using historical sources. Hopefully, changes in the digital world will encourage some needed changes in education.