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In 1990 the World Wide Web was just an idea—or, more specifically, a proposal entitled “InformationManagement”
Putting the historical record online opens it to people who rarely have had such access it before. For example,the Library of Congress allows high-school students into its reading rooms only under special circumstances, but any student mayenter its American Memory site
Digital collections also allow for juxtapositions of works that are held in disparate physicalcollections. For example, the William Blake Archive
This remarkable connectivity has brought scholars into broader communication with nonscholarly audiences, aswell. Humanists and social scientists now routinely hear from students and members of the general public who have found theire-mail addresses and have questions. Scholars who have created Web sites based on their work are often pleasantly surprised that theirwork has found entirely new audiences—or, rather, that new audiences have found that work. Nonacademic users of the Universityof North Carolina’s archival Web site Documenting the American South
speak eloquently of feeling “privileged to have access to these primary sources, as if they hadentered an inner sanctum where they did not fully belong,” reports former university librarian Joe Hewitt.Still, access is far from universal. Those who use freely accessible resources will find materials publishedbefore World War I more plentiful than newer materials, owing to copyright limitations. Scholars and members of the public who arenot affiliated with research universities will find that access to a significant number of resources is by subscription only, and thatsubscription is priced at a level that only institutions can afford. One independent scholar of history and respondent to asurvey on use of digital resources (conducted in the course of the Commission’s work by the Center for History and New Media), speaksfor many when she says:
I am an independent scholar [and] so do nothave the kind of access to facilities that academics do. A research associateship at the Five College Women's Studies Research Centerallows me the access via Mount Holyoke College, [but] only duringthe term of the association. So yes, there are problems for those of us not attached to a subscribing institution.
In addition to digitizing materials, projects to collect and preserve born-digital content are criticallyimportant. In 1994, for example, film director Steven Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, with a mission tovideotape and preserve the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses. Today the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s VisualHistory Archive
at the University of Southern California has collected more than fifty-twothousand eyewitness testimonies in fifty-six countries and thirty-two languages, all of which are extensively indexed so thatsophisticated searching in the archive can be easily conducted by anyone via the Internet. In 1996 The Internet Archive was founded with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians,and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.
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