Electronic Texts in the Historical Profession:
Perspectives from Across the Scholarly Spectrum

Historians have relied on manuscripts and printed books, journals, newspapers, and other documents at least since the time of Gutenberg. They have used these sources to obtain and analyze information and to disseminate it. In the last forty years, the computer has increasingly integrated itself into the historian's world through scholarly communication online, access to textual, visual, and audio material in electronic form, and processing of quantitative data. ¹

      Scholarly communication has moved from the spoken word and the printed page to the computers in scholars' offices and homes. The advent of e-mail through national telecommunication networks such as the Internet has speeded up and expanded communication between scholars. Much cheaper than long distance phone calls and more convenient than the postal service, e-mail has allowed scholars to exchange their thoughts in one-to-one messages, discipline-defined discussion groups, and electronic newsletters and journals. One-to-one messages are easily exchanged at the convenience of the scholar, crossing continents and time zones within minutes. This has speeded up communication between historians and increased the feasibility of frequent, shorter messages.

      Online history discussion groups have evolved on topics ranging from social history to the U.S. Civil War. The first generation of discussion groups was fairly informal and marginal in terms of scholarly content. ² In late 1992, H-Net, or Humanities on Line, was created. H-Net was established to achieve a variety of objectives, including improving the quality of online discussion groups in history. In its first seven years of existence it started up or affiliated with more than 100 edited scholarly discussion groups in history and the humanities, ranging from American studies and Australian-New Zealand history to the history of the American West and of women. In becoming one of the leading historical Internet resources in the world, it now offers online discussion among scholars, reviews of books and other media, and Web sites with syllabi, bibliographies, and links to other Web sites. ³ The editors are drawn from the international academic community and range from highly respected senior scholars to younger scholars, usually with their Ph.D.'s, eager to engage in the newer technologies in teaching and research. These editors ensure that the discussions sustain a high scholarly level. Thus they are faced with the challenge of shaping a new medium that is less structured than a classroom or conference panel but more structured than the chat lists found across the Internet. This has raised issues of the degree of control they should exercise, in situations ranging from attempts by Holocaust deniers to dominate the Holocaust forum to charges of censorship from those whose postings are rejected or returned for editing by the editors. Compromises must be made between opening up intellectual discussion to an international and interdisciplinary community and ensuring that the openness does not lead to casual chatter and loose historical claims that waste the time of busy scholars. Assisting in the effort to sustain quality and garner resources for each list are editorial boards that include leading scholars from around the world. ⁴

      How have these forms of electronic communication affected historians? In a 1992 article about the impacts of computerization on the historian, librarians Matthew B. Gilmore and Donald O. Case argue that history is an unusually individualized discipline that "militates against extensive use of that technology which is cooperative and generalizable." Thus, they view the expansion of electronic networking as less likely to affect historians than scholars in other disciplines. ⁵

      Others argue that historians will adapt to the greater accessibility offered by electronic communication by increasing their collaborative efforts. ⁶ H-Net's popularity, with more than 60,000 subscribers in ninety countries from around the world, suggests that many historians are now comfortable in communicating in this new medium. ⁷ Because of the tendency of history departments to hire historians from a variety of disciplines, it has been difficult for historians in the same field to concentrate in the same location. As location becomes less of a factor, historians may find themselves influenced at an earlier stage in their work by the work of others, possibly resulting in the convergence in subject areas.

      The Internet also may enhance communication between scholars and students. The ease with which a student can engage in intellectual dialogue with a professor through e-mail allows the student to develop conceptual understanding and writing skills. It contributes to a collegiality among faculty and students that contact in the classroom alone does not allow. ⁸

      Historians have shown a willingness to share and discuss approaches to teaching on the Internet. H-Net includes the H-Teach, H-WorldCiv, H-Survey, H-MMedia, and H-High-S (high school teaching) networks, all for pedagogical discussion. ⁹ Syllabi and course materials are available in increasing abundance on the Internet. Edward Ayers's "Valley of the Shadow: Living the Civil War in Virginia and Pennsylvania" includes his narrative of Civil War life, links to primary papers, and appropriate images. ¹⁰ Architecture, history of art, and urban history courses are making available their materials on the Internet. ¹¹

      Distance learning has arrived in the form of online universities and online courses offered by traditional universities. Hailed by administrators as the salvation of budget-strapped educational institutions, a number of virtual universities have already been created—the Michigan Virtual University, the Kentucky Commonwealth Virtual University, Western Governors University (WGU), and the California Virtual University. ¹²

      WGU is an example of the unusual organization of many of these institutions, free from the constraints of physical location. It is not an individual institution but a consortium of universities in eighteen Western U.S. states and the U.S. territory of Guam, established by the governors of these states in 1995. WGU and its affiliate institutions include more than two dozen undergraduate-level history courses. These courses are taught by faculty associated with campus-based institutions such as Oklahoma State University and Brigham Young University. Ranging in price from $240 to more than $10,000, the courses are markedly different from traditional university courses in a number of ways. Many of the courses are independent, done by students on their own, involving minimal to moderate interaction with the professor and other students. Furthermore, courses are open-ended: Students may start the classes at any time and have up to a year take the exams to prove a competency in the course, with a certain number of competencies leading to degree. Paid consultants grade the exams, so it appears that the primary role of the class professor is to put together the materials for the course. ¹³

      This model is not the only one for online education. Professor E. L. ("Skip") Knox has offered Internet history courses on the Renaissance, Western Civilization, and the Crusades since 1995. He requires intensive and structured online group discussion among the students and asks them to read the lectures that he makes publicly available on the Web. He engages in detailed discussion with the students individually and in a group, alerting students who are falling behind or performing substandard work and working out a solution. He grades all assignments and provides detailed feedback to students, thus offering as much or more attention than is provided in on-campus courses. Knox is a staunch defender of this form of online education and argues that it is superior to the traditional, campus-based courses he used to teach. ¹⁴

      Opposition to distance education has been fierce, directed at the philosophical and economic claims made on its behalf. Many argue that a liberal education calls for interpersonal interaction, and virtual universities deny this opportunity to students. On-campus instructors have a strong intellectual and personal stake in in-person teaching and are angered at directives to adopt new strategies that have been developed without their involvement. Along with those concerned with accreditation of universities, they say that a great deal of experimentation and evaluation is needed to compare the advantages and disadvantages of campus-based and online education. The harshest critics, such as historian David Noble, argue that distance education is but one more manifestation of the corporatization of higher education, a phenomenon that has prioritized economies of scale and profits over the dissemination of high-quality education to the nation's students. ¹⁵

      Teaching is not the only area in which the Internet has affected the history profession, however. Historians are also increasingly using the Internet for scholarly communication and research. Their efforts include electronic periodicals, article preprints, archival information, and primary documents. The catalyst for this online publishing is the development of the World Wide Web, a major improvement over earlier means of offering information online. ¹⁶ The Web has revolutionized the Internet by allowing the average scholar to obtain these documents with ease and view them on screens in familiar fonts that imitate the appearance of books. Its appeal is enhanced by its ability to incorporate text, images (stationery and moving), and audio material. ¹⁷

      Taking advantage of this improved technology, scholarly associations are using the Internet for their newsletters and journals. The American Historical Association (AHA), the Organization of American Historians, and many other associations have created Web sites. The AHA has put portions of its Perspectives newsletter online, as have the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) and American Society for Legal History (ASLH). ¹⁸ The Chinese Urban History Association's Wall and Market and the Chinese Environmental History Newsletter are sent directly to subscribers, the former for a small charge and the latter free of charge. These newsletters include scholarly articles as well as news, in many cases approaching the standards of historical journals. ¹⁹

      The typical Web site of a scholarly organization or academic department is similar in content to a newsletter in its provision of a wide assortment of professional information. With the advent of the Web, it is easy and cheap to distribute information in smaller increments. ²⁰

      The movement of historical journals to the Internet has been accelerating in recent years. More and more of the established U.S. and European historical journals, such as the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History, are available on the Web. This change occurred only after an initial wariness based on a variety of objections to the electronic environment: poor readability and portability, a reduction in the quality of content, the loss of archival copies, violation of copyright, and a decreasing ability to cover costs. Readability and portability have been considered to be inferior in electronic editions, perhaps because of the state of the technology and the novelty of the new medium. Quality can be lessened by the ease of distribution, which may dissolve the determination to carefully channel and screen the content on the Internet. According to Sara Bearss of the Conference of Historical Journals, "Issues of quality control remain a paramount concern. Many of the print editors are troubled by the demand for speed in electronic formats. Will editing for content, copy editing, and careful checking of citations and facts be squeezed out by the impetus for speed and immediacy?"

      Some also express fear about the loss of a "canonical" copy of journals, either because of the technological obsolescence of the electronic medium on which they are stored or the ease with which electronic texts can be changed. As various versions of the journal appear online over the years, who will maintain the original version, where will it be stored, and how will its publishers authenticate it?

      Finally, the ease of duplication of electronic text creates concerns about an increase in copyright violations through attempts to obtain online versions without paying the subscription fees. These fees are needed to cover the costs of publishing journals, and in the case of some newsletters they are the major source of income for the associations that publish them. ²¹

      Two major initiatives—Project Muse and JStor—have promoted the publication of scholarly journals online. Project Muse has been putting the Johns Hopkins University Press's prestigious journals on line since 1995, including Reviews in American History and English Literary History. Institutions subscribe, and only those who are part of the institution can access the Internet versions. ²² Whereas Project Muse distributes current issues of these journals, JStor is creating electronic editions of back issues of major historical journals. Included are the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Journal of Modern History, and the William and Mary Quarterly, from their beginnings through 2000. ²³

      A third initiative, the Making of America project at Cornell University and University of Michigan, involves disseminating nineteenth-century journals on the Web. As part of this project, the universities have placed the Atlantic Monthly (1857-1900), Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1889-96), and North American Review (1816-1900) on the Web, along with several dozen other U.S. periodicals of the era. ²⁴

      On the heels of this cautious investigation of the Internet by the mainstream journals, historians and scholars in ancillary disciplines have experimented with electronic journals. The record of this new breed of journal is mixed in terms of survival and reputation.

      Classical and medieval scholars have taken to the Internet with great enthusiasm, establishing the Bryn Mawr Classical Review in 1990 and The Medieval Review in 1993. ²⁵ In 1993, the University of Tasmania launched Electronic Antiquity: Communicating the Classics, explaining,

Distance, above all, is what has motivated us to undertake to produce Electronic Antiquity: Communicating the Classics. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Asia, their distance from the libraries and the universities of the northern hemisphere is, for those of us who live in this region, a major difficulty. Even within these countries size, population and geographical diversity can make simple communication difficult, at times near impossible. Electronic transmission offers us one way of realistically and speedily communicating not just with the rest of the world, but also with one another.

The journal has published semiannually since 1993. ²⁶

      Cromohos, the Cyber Review of Modern Historiography, is an Italian online journal devoted to modern historical culture from the end of the fifteenth century to the present. The journal includes articles in Italian and English and is overseen by editors from two Italian universities and an international editorial board. Since its inception it has attempted to blend the best of the traditional and innovative in its use of the Internet. For example, it has created ELIOHS, an electronic library of the classics of historiography, and a guide to historical resources on the Internet. ²⁷

      The Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History, one of the earliest peer-reviewed electronic journals, was established by two leading professors from the region in 1995 and has published approximately thirty articles and sixty book reviews. ²⁸

      A peer-reviewed publication, the Journal of Southern Religion, has been published by the University of Virginia since 1998 and includes leading scholars in U.S. history among its contributors. ²⁹ Essays in History, a peer-reviewed graduate student journal of the University of Virginia department of history, has been published online since 1991, exclusively so since 1994. ³⁰

      Not all electronic journals have endured, although the older issues remain available on the Web. Chronicon, edited at the University of Dublin and emphasizing Irish history, released two issues in 1997 and 1998 but has been quiescent ever since. ³¹

      Although these periodicals are increasingly professional in their preparation, with some incorporating peer review and respected editorial boards, most are not as prestigious as their older printed counterparts. In part this lack of prestige results from their newness and the fact that only a few have accepted the standard means of ensuring quality in their early stages. The acceptance of electronic journals will depend to a large degree on their willingness to incorporate peer review and rigorous editing in their production. At the same time, it is likely that they will experiment with a variety of innovations, including increasing interaction between authors and readers, distributing articles and reviews continuously rather than in periodic packages, and incorporating hypertext and hypermedia. ³²

      The computer and the Internet offer more than communication between scholars. They also facilitate historical research. Archival materials of most institutions in the United States are now catalogued through the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) First Search service (major institutions) and the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (smaller institutions) Web page. ³³ Furthermore, hundreds of archives and collection libraries have created Web pages that include lists of and finding aids for their collections. The Library of Congress is slowly converting its 1,600 registers of large manuscript collections to electronic form, and the National Archives and Records Administration already has in-depth descriptions of its records on the Internet. ³⁴ Some of the smaller archives and special collections of libraries have fully computerized finding aids, and many more are moving toward this. ³⁵ Bell & Howell Information and Learning (formerly University Microfilms International), a major source of microfilm editions of archival sources, has extensive information on its collections online. ³⁶ In addition to allowing extensive investigation of research resources, these records are valuable sources of historical information. The National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) descriptions of the records of the nation's federal agencies, for example, offer excellent summaries of the statutory history of the agencies and the functions they were established to achieve.

      The most exciting development in the use of the Internet and computers in history is the increasing availability of full-text primary documents, both published and unpublished. Since the late 1950s, several academic projects have taken on the task of converting entire corpora or collections into electronic form. Gateways such as "EuroDocs: Western European Primary Historical Documents" introduce one to the vast number of resources. These cover all eras in European civilization, from the Greek and Roman periods to medieval, Renaissance, and modern Europe, and include images as well as texts. Perseus offers a fascinating scholarly site on Greek and Roman life, and the Thesaurus Linguae Grecae CD-ROM, produced at the University of California of Irvine, consists of "the entire corpus of Greek classical literature from Homer to 600 a.d.," including approximately 3,500 authors and 9,500 literary works. ³⁷

      The Labyrinth and the Internet Medieval Sourcebook are major sites that include the Electronic Beowulf and elegant illustrated medieval manuscripts from Oxford University and elsewhere. Renaissance Europe is represented by "Plague and Public Health in Renaissance Europe." ³⁸ Historic maps, such as those of dozens of Dutch cities in the seventeenth century, are available. "Maps of Paris" includes a range of maps of the capital city from 1721 to 1870. ³⁹

      One of the largest archives of materials associated with European history is the American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) at the University of Chicago. ARTFL makes available online and through CD-ROMs a corpus of almost 2,000 French literary, historic, and scientific works ranging from famous authors such as Molière and Racine to rare works. The works include a small selection of medieval, Renaissance, and seventeenth-century texts and a much larger volume of modern works from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. ⁴⁰

      An archive of the works of Marx and Engels is available, as well as many other primary texts in European history. ⁴¹

      Interest in electronic texts in U.S. and British history is growing. ⁴² In 1990, the Library of Congress launched its American Memory program, serving as a testbed for digitizing and distributing primary documents to the public. The program has placed on the Internet many of the Library's collections, including the Thomas Jefferson papers, U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates from 1774 through 1873, images and text of documents of the National American Women's Suffrage Association (1860-1920), narratives of California residents (1849-1900), African-American pamphlets (1820-1920), early films of New York City by Thomas Edison, and a variety of photograph collections. ⁴³ Eventually, American Memory flowered into the National Digital Library Program (NDLP), an ambitious program to digitize a much larger portion of the Library's collections. In 1996, the National Digital Library Federation (NDLF) was established as a collaboration of twelve research libraries, the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, the New York Public Library, and the Commission on Preservation and Access. The federation aims to coordinate and support the efforts of all libraries to make their collections accessible electronically and to use electronic media for their preservation. ⁴⁴

      The Model Editions Partnership, begun in July 1995, is creating electronic editions of major U.S. papers projects, including the documentary history of the first federal Congress, the Lincoln legal papers, the Nathanael Greene papers, the documentary history of the ratification of the Constitution, the Margaret Sanger papers, the papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the Henry Laurens papers. The electronic editions will incorporate essential elements of scholarly editing while augmenting these with electronic enhancements such as customized indexes, links to related annotative material, and various views of the documents (e.g., with and without standardized spelling and names). ⁴⁵

      The National Archives has encouraged the creation of Web sites for each of the presidential libraries it oversees. Some, such as the Franklin Delano Roosevelt site, include the full text of substantial materials from the library, including formerly classified materials from the 1933-1945 period, files dealing with U.S.-Vatican relations during World War II, and German diplomatic files dealing with U.S.-German relations in the 1930s and 1940s. ⁴⁶

      The works of many American literary figures from the nineteenth and early twentieth century are being made available, a rich source for U.S. intellectual and social historians. Examples include the Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive, which aims to put the complete works of Whitman on the Web, along with critical commentary and biographical information; many of the works of nineteenth-century U.S. novelists, poets, and essayists are already online. Other impressive social history projects include the annotated collection "Urban Planning, 1794-1918: International Anthology of Articles, Conference Papers, and Reports" from Cornell University, an electronic edition of Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, and the "Lower East Side Project," a Web site devoted to important turn-of-the-century U.S. speeches, papers, and articles of urban reformers. ⁴⁷

      Historical texts and multimedia histories are also being created on CD-ROMs, which, unlike the majority of Internet offerings, may be costly. Accessible Archives, a company in Pennsylvania, has published CD-ROM versions of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Benjamin Franklin's colonial newspaper, and its successors; "The Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective"; "African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century"; and Godey's Lady's Book, a significant nineteenth-century magazine for women. ⁴⁸

      This is just a sample of the historic texts available in electronic form. ⁴⁹ The establishment of national clearinghouses for electronic texts such as the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH), and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) is likely to increase the support and technical assistance for creating electronic texts. ⁵⁰

      How they will be used is important. One of the main advantages of electronic texts is the low cost and ease of dissemination. Thus, many of the text projects described in this chapter have the goal (shared with microfilm and microfiche projects) of broadening access to valuable primary materials instead of requiring costly trips to archives. ⁵¹

      Another feature that adds value to electronic texts is hypertext, or three-dimensional text, as one scholar calls it. With hypertext, one can link different texts together merely by selecting a word or words within the original texts. Thus, one could link passages from the electronic Adams and Jefferson referring to a specific event, person, or idea to compare the authors' views on the subject. One could track changes in legislation as it is amended by linking the various versions of the amended sections to each other.

      Hypermedia, requiring somewhat more sophisticated software, allows linking of nontextual media such as photographs, paintings and even moving pictures in a textual work. This is useful for many research projects when one wants to view places or objects as well as to analyze them.

      Electronic texts have another unique quality: the ease with which information within them can be identified, organized, and analyzed. Using electronic texts, scholars can search in systematic or random fashion for words, phrases, and concepts. Both word-processing programs and specialized software have been designed for this task. This software allows a scholar to search a text or group of texts for a specific word, such as all uses of the word suicide by Durkheim. Each occurrence of the word is identified and can be displayed in context. More sophisticated software programs allow the scholar to engage in complex Boolean searches, searching texts using two or more words occurring together or separately. For example, one might search the papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton for passages using the words abolition and women to identify sections about female antislavery advocates. ⁵²

      This ability to search offers a number of advantages. It acts as a secondary index, supplementing the print publication's index and customizing it to the needs of the individual scholar. As important is the capacity to collect all occurrences of a subject of interest to the scholar within a single text or from a wide assortment of texts. Traditionally, the historian transcribed by hand or typewriter each such occurrence onto cards or sheets of paper or use a copy machine. With an electronic text, the scholar can scroll through the various occurrences, transfer them to electronic note cards, or print them out together without any transcription. The time saved on this single task is significant, especially as the amount of text increases. Consider being able to perform these operations on the "Minutes of the Executive Council of the American Federation of Labor, 1893-1955" or congressional material about new deal economic policies from 1933 to 1938, now available only on microfiche.

      The computer is merely a tool; the task of conceptualizing or drawing conclusions is still left to the historian. In that sense, the computer is conservative, facilitating but not changing the traditional work of the historian. It is also transparent in that its use may not show up in the scholarly essay or monograph because the scholar's method of organizing and analyzing concepts is essentially unchanged.

      Some historians and social scientists have chosen to move beyond traditional textual analysis. They have undertaken conceptual analysis through quantification of textual material. In this sense, they are drawing on the tradition of content analysis, an approach used by a small number of political scientists and historians in the last thirty years. Especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a variety of texts were rigorously analyzed in terms of their themes and language. For example, a U.S. political scientist examined colonial and British newspapers from the 1730s through the 1770s (the prerevolutionary and revolutionary periods) for their use of American, British, colonial, and similar words. He was interested in the relationship between a growing American nationalism (as indicated by changes in the uses of these words) and critical revolutionary events such as the Stamp Act Crisis or the Boston Tea Party. A Latin American historian systematically searched the speeches of a nineteenth-century authoritarian Ecuadorean leader to identify the sources to which the leader attributed his authority, such as the church or the constitution. These studies used the computer for statistical analysis because the technology was not yet available for easy access to electronic texts. ⁵³

      Content analysis never achieved significant status as a method within the historical community. It may be that traditional historians believed that content analysts sacrificed too much of the complexity of a text in classifying its contents. They also may have attributed too much significance to small or skewed samples of texts. It is also likely that the effort of classifying texts and entering the data into the earliest computers was not justified by the results they found.

      Although their methods may have fallen short, there is great validity in the aims of content analysts. Their work complements that of traditional historians in its attempt to confirm the hypotheses included in more traditional studies. In traditional studies, the level of discussion generally does not extend beyond vague concepts of comparison such as "greater than" or "lesser than." Although these studies are invaluable for presenting interpretations, their being put to the test of a more rigorous analysis can enhance the understanding of the text and provide new insights, even if they do not result in a new interpretation. ⁵⁴

      Various approaches are being tested to improve textual analysis, including the work of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), an international initiative established in 1987. The TEI is one of many efforts throughout the electronic world to develop standard means of encoding texts. At its simplest level, the TEI encourages encoding of the most basic structures within a text (title page, chapters, chapter titles, paragraphs, and appendixes) to facilitate the presentation in print and online. ⁵⁵ The TEI also has the more ambitious objective of allowing the computer to assist the scholar in analyzing a text. Ever since electronic texts became available, scholars have developed their schemes to mark them up, to set off important portions of the texts to be picked out by the computer for analysis. Although the initial interest in encoding was expressed by linguistic and literary scholars, historians have begun to acknowledge the value of encoding as well. Encoding dates, names, places, political offices, organizations, occupations, currencies, and other discrete historical items facilitates the analysis of these texts using the computer. More complex encoding of concepts similar to that done in creating indexes is also possible, although it is not done often today. Historical projects using the TEI include the Model Editions Partnership, the American Memory Project, "Documenting the American South; or, The Southern Experience in 19th-Century America," "African-American Women Writers of the 19th Century," and the "Dutch Golden Age." ⁵⁶

      At the outer edges of computer-assisted textual analysis is the application of artificial intelligence to text interpretation. Several scholars from France and England have explored this higher-level use of computers in relation to analyzing textual descriptions of paintings included in seventeenth-century English probate papers, the belief systems of French public and private figures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the attitudes of conqueror and conquered in post-Columbian America. ⁵⁷

      The advantages of electronic texts for analysis thus range from making traditional methods easier and faster to potentially using the computer to count and conceptualize. Several questions have arisen about how these texts can be made most useful for analysis.

      One of these is the level of accuracy to be obtained in transcription from other media. Keyboarding, conversion of printers' typesetting tapes, and scanning are the primary means of entering text onto electronic media. All are error-prone, as is preparing texts for printed media. Various projects differ in the importance they assign to accuracy.

      Another issue is the level of encoding in electronic texts. The rawest form of electronic text is the plain ASCII version, which is the verbatim transcription of text onto electronic media. Many electronic text creators have gone beyond this ASCII version to help the researcher use and analyze the text. Often, text is combined on a single CD-ROM with a search program that allows the user to take advantage of analytical tools. This bundling of text and search program has been criticized by some scholars, who argue that it interferes with the ability to use one's preferred search programs. In addition, it prevents the combination of the text with other texts or the application of additional analytical tools by the scholar. Other electronic text publishers have encoded the ASCII text to assist in the searches, using standards such as the TEI, described earlier. No consensus exists as to which of these strategies is superior; it may be that all three are needed to satisfy a variety of users.

      A third debate is the amount of annotation or critical apparatus to be applied to archival documents. Electronic texts are more malleable in terms of their editing and distribution than are printed texts. Thus, they lend themselves to the possibility of a greater variety of editions, with various levels of annotation. The value of widespread dissemination is considered to be greater than the need for editorial interpretation, although ultimately the interpretation is deemed necessary to make the documents most understandable and useful to historians and the public. ⁵⁸

      A fourth debate is whether page images should be included along with searchable text. Images use much more electronic memory, so their inclusion may raise the costs of any products in which they are included and the demands on the users' computers. On the other hand, some consider transcribed text alone insufficient for the purposes of analysis; as described later in this chapter, these critics need to see the physical text itself (or its representation through digital imagery). ⁵⁹ As memory and storage space become cheaper, publishers may choose to incorporate both, although the quality of images remains an issue. ⁶⁰

      A fifth debate is over the most appropriate means of dissemination. CD-ROMs and the Internet are the two most common methods. CD-ROMs are favored by those who prefer a more traditional package for pricing and marketing reasons. CD-ROMs are like books or records in that they are discrete objects and are easier to price and more portable. ⁶¹ Even so, many CD-ROMs are licensed like software rather than sold outright because of the great possibility for duplication. CD-ROMs also allow the packaging of text with a search program, which many of those new to electronic texts prefer.

      On the other hand, distribution via the Internet and other networks is a goal for many projects. For many, the ideal is for free distribution, in the spirit of creating a rich information and collaborative culture. ⁶²

      Some scholars challenge the advantages of electronic texts, criticizing both the capacities and characteristics of electronic media. For example, the capacity of the computer to improve on unassisted textual analysis is still in question. Gilmore and Case note that a scholar engaged in an authorship study abandoned the computer in favor of his own intellectual efforts. Was this scholar typical in his frustration with the computer? Are there certain types of cases in which the computer is essential in an analysis? For example, authorship studies, including Mosteller's and Wallace's study of the Federalist Papers, have been considered good candidates for computer-aided analysis. ⁶³ In the absence of a survey of historians who have used the computer for textual analysis, this is a difficult question to answer. Extensive experience is needed with the tools described here to be able to truly evaluate their helpfulness to historians. It is important to include in any survey of satisfaction those who use textual analysis tools to pursue traditional tasks as well as those who attempt more difficult and unusual applications.

      Gilmore and Case also assert that the digitized text can never adequately replace the document itself. Some scholars have responded to this concern by developing elaborate means of describing the physical appearance of the document within the text. Others insist that images of the physical text accompany its transcription. ⁶⁴

      Another concern is the durability of electronic texts and the stability of the hardware and software needed to read them. One study of the problem observed,

The great advantages of digital information are coupled with the enormous fragility of this medium over time compared to traditional media such as paper. The experience of addressing the Year 2000 issue in existing software systems, or data losses through poor management of digital data are beginning to raise awareness of the issues. Electronic information is fragile and evanescent. It needs careful management from the moment of creation and a pro-active policy and strategic approach to its creation and management to secure its preservation over the longer-term. ⁶⁵

      1. See Dennis A. Trinkle, ed., Writing, Teaching, and Researching History in the Electronic Age: Historians and Computers (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998); Dennis A. Trinkle, Dorothy Auchter, Scott A. Merriman, and Todd E. Larsen, The History Highway: A Guide to Internet Resources (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997); and Daniel Greenstein, A Historian's Guide to Computing (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1994) for U.S. and British perspectives on history and computing. The American Historical Association has included a section on computers in its monthly newsletter, Perspectives, since 1989 and has produced two excellent volumes on the subject: Janice L. Reiff, Digitizing the Past: The Use of Computers and Communication Technology in History (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1999); and Janice Reiff, Structuring the Past: The Use of Computers in History (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1991). Journals explicitly dealing with the topic include the History Computer Review (formerly the History Microcomputer Review), the Journal of the American Association of History and Computing, and the Social Science Computer Review. The History Computer Review may be contacted at Department of History, Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kansas 66762; it is establishing a Web site at . The Journal of the American Association of History and Computing is an electronic journal established in 1998, available at . The Social Science Computer Review is published by Sage Publications and has an informational page with tables of contents of issues since 1996 at .

      2. For early articles about the Internet and history discussion groups, see Richard W. Slatta, "Historians and Telecommunications," History Microcomputer Review 2: 2 (Fall 1986): 25-34; David R. Campbell, "The New History Net," History Microcomputer Review 3: 2 (Fall 1987): 25; and Norman R. Coombs, "History by Teleconference," History Microcomputer Review 4: 1 (Spring 1988): 37-40.

      3. The H-Net Web site is at <http://www.h-net.msu.edu>. Also see Melanie S. Weiss and Mark L. Kornbluh, "H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences OnLine," History Teacher 31: 4 (1998): 533; "H-Net Teaching Resources Archive," Perspectives 34: 1 (January 1996): 20; and Steven A. Leibo, "Noteworthy: "H-Net and the Internationalization of Scholarship," Perspectives 33: 5 (May 1995): 2An interesting discussion of the H-Net Book Review project and its impact on traditional book review publishing is available in David Burrell, "Negotiating Book Reviews: A Study of Technology, H-Net, and the Emergent Status of a Contemporary Print Form," at .

      4. The author is one of the founders of H-Net and its first list, H-Urban. This paragraph is based on her experiences as an editor since H-Urban's inception in February 1993.

      5. Matthew B. Gilmore and Donald O. Case, "Historians, Books, Computers, and the Library," Library Trends, Spring 1992, 667-87.

      6. See Mark Olsen, review of History and Computing I, ed. Peter Denley and Deian Hopkin (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1987), and History and Computing II, ed. Peter Denley, Stefan Fogelvik, and Charles Harvey (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1989) in Computers and the Humanities 24 (1990): 499.

      7. "What Is H-Net" at <http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/about/>.

      8. See the excellent essay by John Semonche, "Time Traveling: Historians and Computers," History Microcomputer Review 11: 2 (Fall 1995): 10, on this and other aspects of online communication. See also Karen L. Murphy and Mauri P. Collins, "Communication Conventions in Instructional Electronic Chats," First Monday 2: 11 (November 3, 1997), at .

      9. H-Net Teaching List information is available at <http://h-net.msu.edu/~teach/teach.html>.

      10. See Jeffrey R. Young, "A Historian Presents the Civil War, Online and Unfiltered by Historians," New York Times, June 29, 2000, D8. The article notes that approximately 3,000,000 people had accessed the Web site since 1995 and that a CD-ROM would be issued in August 2000. The "Valley of the Shadow" Web site can be accessed at <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/>.

      11. The architecture and art history courses are at . See also "Reading a Community: Doing Urban History at the Local Level," available at . This includes lectures, links to related resources, and an international bibliography on urban history.

      12. "Virtual Universities Look for Ways to Build School Spirit," Chronicle of Higher Education, February 4, 2000, A47.

      13. Western Governors University (Education without Boundaries) home page at <http://www.wgu.edu/wgu/index.html>. From that page, see also "About WGU" and links, "Academics," "Associate of Arts," and "Catalog" to search for the history courses being taught. Only a few of the classes explicitly indicate any degree of interaction with the professor or among students, so it is not clear from the Web catalog how much interaction actually occurs. In most cases, the course description is silent on this, and in some cases, mostly at Brigham Young University, it is stated that the work is "independent."

       A disturbing aspect of the degree of independence allowed in these courses is evident in Jeffery R. Young, "A Virtual Student Teaches Himself," Chronicle of Education, May 7, 1999, A31-A32. A computer consultant who is working toward a degree at Western Governors University observes that to prepare to take a competency exam in Western civilization, "He might ask a friend who's taken a course on the subject what textbook he used, and read that. Or he might just read a faded two-volume set on his bookshelf: Civilizations Past and Present, published in 1944 by what was then the U.S. War Department."

      14. Scott Jascik, "Historians Differ on Impact of Distance Education in Their Discipline," Chronicle of Higher Education, January 21, 2000, A43; E. L. Skip Knox, "The Rewards of Teaching On-Line," paper presented at the 2000 meeting of the American Historical Association, at <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/aha/papers/Knox.html>; "Western Civilization: A Course in European History," at <http://history.boisestate.edu/westciv>; "Asynchronicity," handouts distributed at Educom '96, at <http://history.boisestate.edu/westciv/admin/papers/asynchronicity.htm>; "Real Problems in the Virtual World," paper presented at Educom '96, at <http://history.boisestate.edu/westciv/admin/papers/realproblems.htm>; "The Pedagogy of Web Site Design," ALN Magazine 1: 2 (August 1997), at ; and "Real Problems in the Virtual World (Updated)" at <http://history.boisestate.edu/westciv/admin/papers/psa.htm>. For an earlier description, see Ellis L. "Skip" Knox, "The Electric Renaissance: A Course in the Ether," Perspectives 31: 2 (February 1993): 5-8, 10. See also Stephen E. DeLong, "The Shroud of Lecturing," First Monday 2: 5 (May 5, 1997), at .

       A somewhat negative experience with Internet teaching is described in a paper by Janet Smarr of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: "CIC Women Writers of the Renaissance Project," presented October 26, 1996, at the "Networking the Humanities" Conference of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. On other Internet-taught courses, see postings to <H-MMedia@h-net.msu.edu> from John Saillant of Brown University on April 13, 1996 (African-American religion), and the H-Canada cross-posting on March 14, 1996 (these are available from the Discussion Logs of these lists at <http://www.h-net.msu.edu>).

      15. See Florence Olsen, "Authors Argue That 'Distance Education' Is an Oxymoron," Chronicle of Higher Education, June 23, 2000, A49; and John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2000), the subject of Olsen's article. A large number of articles on distance education have been published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in recent years, including Lawrence Biemiller, "U. of Utah President Issues a Pointed Warning about Virtual Universities" (October 9, 1998), A32; "Role of Accreditors in Distance Education Is Debated at Conference" (February 12, 1999), A21; Dan Carnevale, "Assessing the Quality of Online Courses Remains a Challenge, Educators Agree" (February 18, 2000), A59; Florence Olsen, "'Virtual' Institutions Challenge Accreditors to Devise New Ways of Measuring Quality" (August 6, 1999), A29; Jeffrey R. Young, "A Virtual Student Teaches Himself" (May 7, 1999), A31-A32; Jeffery R. Young, "Rising Demand for Distance Learning Will Challenge Providers, Experts Say" (October 11, 1999), available at <http://chronicle.com/free/99/10/99101103t.htm>; Dan Carnevale, "Professor Says Distance Learning Can Increase Colleges' Income" (October 14, 1999), available at <http:chronicle.com/free/99/10/99101403t.htm>; "Student's F's Highlight Problems in Electronic Course at U. of Iowa" (November 26, 1999), A67; Beth McMurtrie and Katherine S. Mangan, "Education Dept. and Career Schools Clash Over Accrediting of Distance Learning" (December 17, 1999), A36; Jeffrey Young, "Faculty Report at U. of Illinois Casts Skeptical Eye on Distance Education" (January 14, 2000), A48; Dan Carnevale, "New Master Plan in Washington State Calls for More On-Line Education" (February 4, 2000), A50; Sarah Carr, "A Distance Education Advocate Calls for Better Financing for Such Programs" (February 4, 2000), A50; and Sarah Carr, "Chapman U. Administrator Studies Distance Learning's Effect on Faculty Pay" (March 3, 2000), A46.

       On the views of David Noble, see his extensive essay "Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education" in First Monday, which is an online peer-reviewed journal dealing with the effects of the Internet on international society, at . Books by Noble include America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1979), Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1986), and The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Penguin, 1999).

      16. The Web still uses some of the earlier technologies for transferring information (e.g., FTP and Gopher) but in a manner that hides them from the user.

      17. See Andrew McMichael, Michael O'Malley, and Roy Rosenzweig, "Historians and the Web: A Beginner's Guide," Perspectives 34: 1 (January 1986): 11, also available at <http://chnm.gmu.edu/chnm/beginner.html>. The Web version of "Historians and the Web" includes links to many historical sites on the Internet.

      18. Perspectives Online is available at <http://www.theaha.org/perspectives/index.cfm>. All post-1993 issues of the CLAH newsletter except the current issue are available to the public at <http://h-net.msu.edu/~clah> (the current issue is restricted to CLAH subscribers). The ASLH newsletter is at <http://h-net.msu.edu/~law/>. A gateway to electronic newsletters and journals on the World Wide Web is <http://ejournals.cic.net/toc.Topic.html> (organized by discipline). See also the ARL Directory of Electronic Journals and Newsletters at <http://arl.cni.org/scomm/edir>.

      19. Kristin Stapleton [kestap01@ukcc.uky.edu], "Chinese Urban History News," on H-Urban [H-Urban@uicvm.uic.edu], May 19, 1995; Helen Dunstan [HIDUNSTA@ruby.indstate.edu], private e-mail messages to Wendy Plotkin [U20566@uicvm.uic.edu], July 5 1995, and June 19, 1996. According to Dunstan, the online version of the Chinese Environmental History Newsletter is much more popular than the print version, which she attributes to the ease of subscription (via an e-mail request) as much as to the lack of a charge. For a list of electronic discussion groups on the Web, see the Directory of Scholarly and Professional E-Conferences at <http://www.n2h2.com/KOVACS/>.

      20. A list of many of the historical societies with Web sites is available at . The Center for History and New Media provides a link to "History Departments around the World" at <http://chnm.gmu.edu/chnm/departments.taf>.

      21. See Michael Grossberg, "History Journals in the 21st Century" (1997) at <http://www.theaha.org/perspectives/issues/1997/9705/9705NOT.CFM>; "History Journals and the Electronic Future: The Final Report of a Conference Held at Indiana University, Bloomington, August 3-8, 1997, at <http://www.indiana.edu/~ahr/report.htm>; David Ransel, "The Present and Future of Historical Journals," Perspectives 33: 5 (October 1995), at <http://www.theaha.org/perspectives/issues/1995/9510/9510ARC.CFM>; and Sara B. Bearss, "Book Reviewing and Journal Publication in the Electronic Age: Report of a Joint Meeting at the OAH," Editing History 12: 1 (Spring 1996): 9. Bearss's article is one of several reporting on a March 29, 1996 meeting between representatives of the Conference of Historical Journals and of H-Net's Book Review Project. See also Michael McGiffert, "Editors and Electronics: A Survey of the Uses of Computers by Journals of History," Occasional Paper of the Conference of Historical Journals, Report No. 1, Winter 1989; and Michael Moore, "President's Column," Editing History 8: 2 (Fall 1992): 2-3.

      22. Project Muse is at <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.

      23. Information on JStor is available at <http://www.jstor.org>; for the list of journals published, see <http://www.jstor.org/about/content.html>.

      24. The "Making of America" project is lodged at two libraries: Cornell University (at <http://library5.library.cornell.edu/moa/>) and the University of Michigan (at <http://www.umdl.umich.edu/moa>).

      25. The Bryn Mawr Classical Review is available at <http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/>. The Medieval Review is available at <http://www.hti.umich.edu/t/tmr/>.

      26. "Editorial," Electronic Antiquity: Communicating the Classics 1: 1 (June 1993). Electronic Antiquity is available at <http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ElAnt/>.

      27. Cromohos is available at <http://www.unifi.it/riviste/cromohs/>.

      28. The Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History is at <http://www.jcu.edu.au/aff/history/>.

      29. The Journal of Southern Religion is available at <http://jsr.lib.virginia.edu/index.html>.

      30. Essays in History is at <http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/EH/>. Before becoming an exclusively online journal, it was published in print for four decades, and it was available in both print and electronic form from 1991 to 1994.

      31. Chronicon is at <http://www.ucc.ie/chronicon/>. An earlier online electronic journal in European modern history, the On-Line Modern History Review, lasted for only a few issues.

      32. See note 18 for information on indexes to electronic journals. Many of the journals included in these indexes are only partially online: They publish Tables of Contents, article abstracts, selected articles and books reviews, and subscription information on the Internet.

      33. The OCLC is at <http://www.oclc.org>; most university libraries subscribe to its First Search catalog, so access to this catalog is available to those affiliated with the universities. The National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections is at <http://lcweb.loc.gov/coll/nucmc/>.

      34. The Library of Congress Manuscript Finding Aids, which currently cover about 200 collections, are available at <http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/mss/f-aids/mssfa.html>; see <http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/ead/eadhome.html> for a more general discussion of finding aids available electronically from the Library of Congress.

      The National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) finding aids are available at <http://www.nara.gov/guide/>.

      35. See Tulane University's "Ready, 'Net, Go!: Archival Internet Resources" at <http://www.tulane.edu/~lmiller/ArchivesResources.html>.

      36. UMI's Research Collections is at <http://www.umi.com/hp/Support/Research/>.

      37. Beverly T. Watkins, "A Data Base of Ancient Greek Literature Revolutionizes Research in the Classics," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 18, 1991, A24-A27. See also Michael Neuman, "The Very Pulse of the Machine: Three Trends toward Improvement in Electronic Versions of Humanities Texts," Computers and the Humanities 25 (1991): 365. The Perseus Project, a collection of Greek and Roman texts and images, is at <http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/>. The Dante Database (La Commedia and commentaries) is at <http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/etc/dante.htm>.

      38. "Labyrinth" is available at <http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/index.html>. The "Plague" project is at the Institute for Advanced Technology (IATH) at the University of Virginia, an innovator in applying technology to research and teaching. Information on the project is available at <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/osheim>.

      39. General Dutch maps are at <http://grid.let.rug.nl/~welling/maps/maps.html>; the city maps are at <http://grid.let.rug.nl/~welling/maps/blaeu.html>. "Maps of Paris" are at <http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/courses/parismaps/>.

      40. The ARTFL project is on the World Wide Web at <http://humanities.uchicago.edu/ARTFL/ARTFL.html>. See also John Price-Wilkin, "Text Files in Libraries: Present Foundations and Future Directions," Library Hi Tech 9: 3 (1991): 11-12; Neuman, "Very Pulse of the Machine," 366; "ARTFL Preparing CD-ROM of Database" and "MOPS: ARTFL by E-Mail," The ARTFL Project Newsletter 7: 1 (Winter 1991-92): 1.

      41. The Marx/Engels Web site is at <http://www.eserver.org/marx/>.

      42. For a comprehensive collection, see Rutgers University's "American and British History Resources on the Internet," <http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/rr_gateway/research_guides/research_guides.shtml>.

      43. The American Memory Web site is at <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amhome.html>. The American Memory project serves as a source of information for other digital projects and has made available a series of technical papers at various stages and on various aspects of the project at <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ftpfiles.html>. For early impressions of the American Memory project, see Beverly T. Watkins, "'American Memory,' Coming Soon to America's Campuses," and "Scholars, Librarians, and Technologists Urged to Join in Using Electronic Information," both in Chronicle of Higher Education, November 27, 1991, A18-A20, A21.

      44. See the "National Digital Library Program" at <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dli2/html/lcndlp.html>; "A Periodic Report from the National Digital Library Program, November/December 1995 (No. 4)," at <http://lcweb.loc.gov/ndl/nov-dec.html#pilot> and "National Digital Library Federation Constituted as a Charter Organization (Adopts Three-Point Agenda)," press release, August 16, 1996 (available at <http://lcweb.loc.gov/loc/ndlf/news8-96.html>); "Mission and Goals: National Digital Library Federation" (available at <http://lcweb.loc.gov/loc/ndlf/agree.html>); "NDLF Planning Task Force Final Report, June 1995" (available at <http://lcweb.loc.gov/loc/ndlf/plntfrep.html>).

      45. The Model Editions Partnership Web site is at <http://mep.cla.sc.edu>. The partnership's director, David Chesnutt, is a former president of the Association for Documentary Editing (ADE), the editor of the Henry Laurens Papers, and a leading advocate of electronic texts and their encoding. For his views on the value of historical editions in print and electronic form, see "Quid Pro Quo: Today's Challenges in the Editorial Community," Documentary Editing, March 1993, 1-3, and "The Papers of Henry Laurens: Editing in the Digital Age," paper delivered at the American Historical Association meeting in Washington, D.C., in 1993.

      46. The NARA Presidential Libraries Web site is at <http://www.nara.gov/nara/president/address.html>. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt library is at <http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/>.

      47. The Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive is available at <http://jefferson.village.Virginia.Edu/whitman>. "Urban Planning: 1794-1918" is at <http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/homepage.htm>. How the Other Half Lives is available at <http://tenant.net/Community/Riis/contents.html>; the Lower East Side project at <http://tenant.net/Community/LES/contents.html>.

      48. The Accessible Archives is at <http://www.accessible.com/>. The Pennsylvania Gazette CD-ROMs cover the periods 1728-50, 1751-65, 1766-83, and 1784-1800. For the author's review of the first disk, see "Research and Reference Tools: Reviews," Journal of American History 80: 4 (March 1994): 1572-73. For a general discussion of historical CD-ROMs, see Roy Rosenzweig's review essay "'So What's Next for Clio?': CD-ROM and Historians," Journal of American History 81: 4 (March 1995): 1621-40. This review is available at the Center for History and New Media Web site established by Rosenzweig at <http://chnm.gmu.edu/chnm/clio.html>. The site also includes a list of more than 200 historical CD-ROMs. The History Computer Review and its predecessor, the History Microcomputer Review, have been among the best sources of CD-ROM and Web site reviews since 1985.

      49. The most comprehensive introduction to historical electronic texts, including links to many of them, is Andrew McMichael, Michael O'Malley, and Roy Rosenzweig, "Historians and the Web: A Beginner's Guide," at <http://www.gmu.edu/chnm/beginner.html>. See also Beth Juhl, "Red, White and Boolean," Choice 35: 8 (April 1998), at , offering a comprehensive review of all electronic historical materials, including full texts. Also valuable are Avra Michelson and Jeff Rothenberg, "Scholarly Communication and Information Technology: Exploring the Impact of Changes in the Research Process on Archives," American Archivist, May 1, 1992; John Daly, ed., Workshop on Electronic Texts: Proceedings, June 9-10, 1992, Library of Congress, at <http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/etext.html>; Neuman, "Very Pulse of the Machine"; and Price-Wilkin, "Text Files in Libraries."

      50. The CHNM Web page is at <http://chnm.gmu.edu/>. It is one of the best sites from which to start a search for historical resources on the Internet, including far more than are described here. The CETH Web page is at <http://www.ceth.rutgers.edu> and the IATH Web page is at <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu>.

      51. For the importance of access, see Beth Luey, "Wedding the Past to the Future: Planning a National Database for Our Documentary Heritage," Documentary Editing 17: 4 (December 1995): 101-4; Martha L. Benner, "'The Abraham Lincoln Legal Papers': The Development of the Complete Facsimile Edition on CD-ROM," Documentary Editing 16: 4 (December 1994): 100-107; David Chesnutt, "Presidential Editions: The Promise and Problems of Technology," Documentary Editing 16: 3 (September 1994): 70-77, and "Historical Editions in the States," Computers and the Humanities 25: 6 (December 1991): 377.

      52. Reiff, Structuring the Past, 19-23, 62-66, and Richard Jensen, "Text Management," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22: 4 (Spring 1992): 711-22, are especially useful in providing an overview of textual analysis tools.

      53. Richard L. Merritt, Symbols of American Community, 1735-1775 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966); Peter H. Smith, "Political Legitimacy in Latin America," in New Approaches in Latin American History, ed. Richard Graham and Peter H. Smith (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), 225-55.

      54. Charles M. Dollar and Richard J. Jensen, Historian's Guide to Statistics: Quantitative Analysis and Historical Research (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), 205-14, 267-68; Reiff, Structuring the Past, 31; Daniel Scott Smith, "Notes on the Measurement of Values," Journal of Economic History 45: 2 (June 1985): 213-18; Price-Wilkin, "Text Files in Libraries," 8. See Greenstein, A Historian's Guide to Computing, 183-87, for an excellent discussion of the strengths and limitations of computer-assisted textual analysis.

      55. In this use, the TEI is similar to HTML, the markup language of the World Wide Web, both of which use the Standardized General Markup Language (SGML) as the metalanguage, or base. Marking up structures allows those who are "printing" these documents (online or print) to designate special fonts for titles and other headings.

      56. The TEI has created a consortium to govern its affairs, with a Web site at <http://www.tei-c.org>. Other online descriptions include John Price-Wilkin, "Using the World-Wide Web to Deliver Complex Electronic Documents: Implications for Libraries," Public Access Computer Systems Review 5: 3 (1994): 5-21, available at <http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v5/n3/pricewil.5n3>. Scholarly literature on the TEI includes three special issues of Computers and Humanities (29: 1-3 [1995]), edited by Nancy Ide and Jean Veronis, on "The Text Encoding Initiative: Background and Contexts"; in particular, see Lou Burnard and Daniel Greenstein, "Speaking with One Voice: Encoding Standards and the Prospects for an Integrated Approach to Computing in History," Computers and the Humanities 29: 2 (1995): 137-48. Other discussion of the use of the TEI in encoding historical texts is in Chesnutt, "Presidential Editions"; Model Editions Partnership Prospectus ("2.5 Conforming to Relevant Standards" and "4 Why Mark-Up Is Important"); and Daniel I. Greenstein, ed., Modelling Historical Data: Towards a Standard for Encoding and Exchanging Machine-Readable Texts (Göttingen: Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte, 1991). Modelling Historical Data is also useful in explicating the European approach to text analysis that has been developed in the last twenty years, an alternative approach to that offered by the TEI that is associated with many of the historians affiliated with the Association for History and Computing (ACH).

       For a critique of text encoding based on issues of time and expense, see Ann Gordon, "I Already Have a Job: An Editor/Historian Contemplates Electronic Editions," in Conference Abstracts: Posters and Demonstrations, ACH/Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) joint international conference, University of California at Santa Barbara, July 11-15, 1995. Technical critiques of the TEI are available in abstracts of Claus Huitfeldt, "Why SGML Is Prescriptive and Interpretive," and Mark Olsen, "Text Theory and Coding Practice: Assessing the TEI," papers presented at the panel "Encoding, Interpretation, and Theory" at the 1996 meeting of the ACH/ALLC, available at <http://gonzo.hd.uib.no/allc-ach96/Panels/Giordano/molsen.html>. The Model Editions Partnership is at <http://mep.cla.sc.edu/>, the American Memory project at <http://memory.loc.gov>, "Documenting the American South" at <http://metalab.unc.edu/docsouth/aboutdas.html>, the African-American Women Writers' Project of the 19th Century at <http://digital.nypl.org/schomburg/writers_aa19/>, and the Dutch Golden Age at <http://www.etcl.nl/goldenage/>.

      57. Michelson and Rothenberg, "Scholarly Communication and Information Technology," 40-43.

      58. Chesnutt, "Presidential Editions," 76.

      59. See B. Burningham, "Attitudes of the Canadian Research Community toward Creating and Accessing Digitized Facsimile Collections of Historical Collections," Computers and the Humanities 33: 4 (1999): 409-19. This article describes a study undertaken by the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (CIHM) to determine whether historians would prefer images or searchable text if only one format was possible. The overwhelming demand was for the images, even at the loss of searchability, if an index searchable by subject, author, and title accompanied the images.

      60. Manfred Thaller, Abstract of "Text as a Data Type," paper presented at "Digital Manuscripts: Editions v. Archives" panel at ACH/ALLC 1996 meeting, available at <http://gonzo.hd.uib.no/allc-ach96/Panels/Thaller/thaller2.html>. The Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive offers a good example of a project that incorporates both images and electronic searchable text. See, for example, "I celebrate myself" at <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/whitman/works/leaves/leaves67/index.html>.

      61. See Juhl, "Red, White and Boolean": "The ability to deliver Web-based products outside the libraries and campuses must also be measured against the comparative speed and dependability of a stand-alone CD-ROM."

      62. See Chesnutt, "Presidential Editions," 76. Chesnutt also comments on the problem of speed on the Internet, although over time it is likely to be faster to download a text than it is today. In addition, the Internet is beginning to acquire many of the attributes of CD-ROMs that may make it a more promising climate for pricing and charging. For example, it is possible to limit access to a World Wide Web site to those who have paid a fee; the technology of Java and newer Internet programs also allows programs to be packaged with texts. Thus, Project Muse can make valuable assets available online by charging fees and restricting access to those who pay. Many of these issues are discussed in the proceedings of the three conferences held to date by the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) on electronic texts. The proceedings have been published in the following volumes: Scholarly Publishing on the Electronic Networks: Proceedings of the Second Symposium, December 5-8, 1992 (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1993), available at <http://arl.cni.org/scomm/symp2/1992.toc.html>; Gateways, Gatekeepers, and Roles in the Information Coniverse: Proceedings of the Third Symposium, November 13-15, 1993 (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1994), available at <http://arl.cni.org/symp3/1993.toc.html>; and Filling the Pipeline and Paying the Piper: Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium (Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1995).

      63. Gilmore and Case, "Historians, Books, Computers, and the Library," 681; Susan Hockey, A Guide to Computer Applications in the Humanities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 134-35.

      64. Gilmore and Case, "Historians, Books, Computers, and the Library," 683. See also Burningham, "Attitudes of the Canadian Research Community." The History of Science CD-ROM conference held in Rome in December 1991 strongly affirmed the need for a physical image to be included with the textual transcription of the document. Robert H. Kargo to Wendy Plotkin, May 11, 1992.

      65. Neil Beagrie and Daniel Greenstein, "A Strategic Policy Framework for Creating and Preserving Digital Collections," Arts and Humanities Data Service, Version 4.0, July 14, 1998, available at <http://ahds.ac.uk/manage/framework.htm>.

      66. John Garrett and Donald Waters, eds., "Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving Digital Information," commissioned by the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Record Libraries Group, Inc., May 6, 1996 at <http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF/index.html>. See also Jeff Rothenberg, "Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation" (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 1998), at <http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/rothenberg/contents.html>.

       The National Historic Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), one of the major funders of documentary editing projects in U.S. history, has had an ambivalent attitude toward digitization. In 1992, it published a study that called for the continued use of microfilm as the primary medium for disseminating primary documents, with almost no mention of electronic dissemination. This recommendation probably was based in part on the traumatic experience of archivists with microfilm. In its early days, microfilm was very unstable, and a number of preservation disasters occurred. Since then, microfilm has undergone great improvement and is governed by the recommendations of the American National Standards Institute. Archivists are thus wary of experimenting with new media, aware of the loss of a portion of the Vietnam archives caused by the extinction of all machines that could read their obsolete magnetic tape. See Ann D. Gordon, Using the Nation's Documentary Heritage: The Report of the Historical Documents Study (Washington, D.C.: National Historical Publication and Records Commission, 1992); Ann D. Gordon, "A Future for Documentary Editions: The Historical Documents Study," Documentary Editing 14: 1 (March 1992): 6-10 (in which the author describes the need to "balance the medium's obvious appeal against its uncertain future" and recommends further research into the topic); conversation with Ann Gordon, September 10, 1992.

       Despite the initial caution indicated in this study, the NHPRC has supported electronic editions on an experimental basis. It has financially supported the Model Editions Partnership, a major demonstration of the use of electronic media in critical editions, and the CD-ROM edition of the Abraham Lincoln Legal Papers, a project that carefully considered the relative merits of microfilm and CD-ROM dissemination and chose the newer medium. Martha L. Benner, one of the editors, describes in some detail the debate within the archival community over the desirability of microfilm and electronic distribution and the Lincoln Papers' reasons for deciding on a CD-ROM for dissemination in Benner, "'The Abraham Lincoln Legal Papers,'" 100-101, 104. Benner notes, "It would take around 20 discs to store 250,000 images and the database [describing the documents] as compared to slightly more than 200 reels of microfilm for the same number of images alone" (100-101).

       In 1996, the NHPRC formally adopted a policy encouraging the development of electronic editions in new projects and the approximately forty print projects it was already funding. see "NHPRC Revises Plan and Approves Grants for State Records Boards, Documentary Publishing, and Electronic Records Research and Redevelopment (November, 1996)" at <http://www.nara.gov/nhprc/comnov96.html>. However, it retracted this policy in 1999, issuing a new statement: "The National Historical Publications and Records Commission generally regards projects to preserve endangered records, to provide basic access to significant historical materials (e.g., to arrange and describe the materials), and to compile documentary editions as a higher priority than projects to convert materials and existing finding aids to electronic form or projects whose main purpose is to make digitized materials available via the Internet. At this time, therefore, the Commission prefers not to spend its limited funds on projects that primarily involve digitization activities." See "NHPRC: November, 1999 Commission Meeting" at <http://www.nara.gov/nhprc/comnov99.html>.

      67. Beagrie and Greenstein, "A Strategic Policy Framework"; National Archives of Australia, "Managing Electronic Records, 1997 Edition" at ; Hartmut Weber and Marianne Dorr, "Digitisation as a Method of Preservation? Final Report of a Work Group of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Association)," at <http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/ecpatex/reports.htm#weber>.

      68. See Anne Kenney, "Digital Image Quality: From Conversion to Presentation and Beyond," presentation at the Scholarly Communication and Technology Conference (organized by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), April 24-25, 1997, at <http://www.arl.org/scomm/scat/kenney.html>. This highly technical paper discusses the tradeoffs involved in selecting the quality of the digital image. See also Peter B. Hirtle, "The National Archives and Electronic Access," The Record (NARA's newsletter), May 1995, at <http://webgopher.nara.gov/0/about/what/record/vol1no5/vol1no5.txt>; Foe Bauman, "National Archive Brings Past to Life by Putting Photos, Documents on the Web," The Record, January 1998; and other columns in "NARA Online" at <http://www.nara.gov/publications/record/>.

      69. See "U.N. Fears Divisive Impact of the Internet," New York Times, June 29, 2000; Katie Hafner, "Common Ground Elusive as Technology Have-Nots Meet Haves," New York Times, July 8, 1999; and Barbara Crossick, "A New Measure of Disparities: Poor Sanitation in Internet Era," New York Times, May 12, 1998. For earlier expressions of concern, see Daniel Eisenberg, "The Electronic Journal," Scholarly Publishing 20: 1 (October 1988): 55; Kenneth S. Warren, "Information Deluge and Information Drought," Scholarly Publishing 23: 4 (July 1992): 223-30; Ian Montagnes, "Sustainable Development in Book Publishing," Scholarly Publishing 23: 4 (July 1992): 231-41 (deals primarily with print publication in developing countries); Beth Luey, "The Concerned University Press: An Academic Experiment," Scholarly Publishing 23: 4 (July 1992): 263 (deals primarily with marketing print publications to developing countries); Anne B. Piternick, "Electronic Serials: Realistic or Unrealistic Solution to the Journal 'Crisis?,'" in A Changing World: Proceedings of the North American Serials Interest Group, Inc., ed. Susanne McMahon, Miriam Palm, and Pam Dunn (New York: Haworth, 1991), 25 (discusses access of southern European nations).

      70. Erez Navaro, Adel Gureli, Ozlem Gursel, and Kathryn Starnella, "Internet Access in the World," written as part of a group project for the class "Communication Technology, Community and Identity" at Northwestern University during the fall of 1996, at <http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/ena346/group paper.html>. The source of this estimate is Phil Noble, "International Cyberspacing: Use of the Internet Worldwide" Campaigns and Elections 17: 7 (July 1996): 29.

      71. "Internet Survey Reaches 19.5 Million," CSS Internet News, August 26, 1997, included in e-mail posting on Sustainable Development Networking Programme Coordinators List, August 29, 1997, at <http://www3.undp.org/lstarch/mgrs/msg00983.html>.

      72. "Latinas Lead the World in Networking," Chicago Tribune, July 10, 1994, sec. 6, 1 and 11.

      73. Erez Navaro, Adel Gureli, Ozlem Gursel, and Kathryn Starnella, "Internet Access in the World," at <http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/ena346/group paper.html>. There is an extensive amount of information on the World Wide Web about Internet access in undeveloped countries, much tied to the issue of economic and human resource development. See Murali Shanmugavelan, "Information Technology in (IT) in Developing Nations," available at <http://www.fao.org/waicent/faoinfo/sustdev/CDdirect/CDre0050.htm>; Sustainable Development Department, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, "The Internet and Rural Development: Recommendations for Strategy and Activity," at <http://www.fao.org/sd/cddirect/CDDO/chapter2.htm>.

      74. See Stefan Aumann, Abstract of "Digital Archives," paper presented at panel "Digital Manuscripts: Editions v. Archives" at 1996 ACH/ALLC meeting, available at <http://gonzo.hd.uib.no/allc-ach96/Panels/Thaller/aumann.html>. Copyright concerns also constrain archival electronic dissemination. Private collections—that is, unpublished papers donated by private individuals and organizations—carry the most stringent copyright protection of all documents because they are not subject to the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. Thus, they are least available to the researcher. This protectiveness has persisted into the electronic age. See Helen Humeston, "Archives, Optical Discs, and the Copyright Act of 1976," Archival Issues 18: 1 (1993): 15-30.

      75. See Luey, "Wedding the Past to the Future," 104; Gordon, "I Already Have a Job."

      76. See Perry Willett, "The Victorian Women Writers Project: The Library as a Creator and Publisher of Electronic Texts," Public-Access Computer Systems Review 7: 6 (1996): 5-16, at <http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v7/n6/will7n6.html>.

      77. The Library of Congress first began to publish print editions of its collections in 1904. In 1938, financially assisted by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Library established "a Photoduplication Service for the purpose of 'competently supplying distant investigators with microfilm and other photoduplicates of materials otherwise not available for use outside Washington.'" In 1943, it began microfilming the papers of Thomas Jefferson. See "Jefferson's Legacy: A Brief History of the Library of Congress: The Collections," available from the Library of Congress Web site at <http://lcweb.loc.gov/loc/legacy/colls.html>.

      78. "The Mission and Strategic Priorities of the Library of Congress, FY 1997-2004," available at <http://lcweb.loc.gov/ndl/mission.html>. This includes the statement, "The Congress has now recognized that, in an age in which information is increasingly communicated and stored in electronic form, the Library should provide remote access electronically to key materials. For the general public, the Congress has endorsed the creation of a National Digital Library Program through a private-public partnership that will create high-quality content in electronic form and thereby provide remote access to the most interesting and educationally valuable core of the Library's Americana collections. Schools, libraries, businesses, and homes will have access to important historical material in their own localities together with the same freedom readers have always had within public reading rooms to interpret, rearrange, and use the material for their own individual needs."

      79. For electronic text centers and digital libraries, see the CETH Directory of Electronic Text Centers, at <http://harvest.rutgers.edu/ceth/etext_directory/>. For older literature on the beginnings of electronic text centers, see Anita Lowry, "Machine-Readable Texts in the Academic Library: The Electronic Text Service at Columbia University" in Computer Files and the Research Library, ed. Constance C. Gould (Mountain View, Calif.: Research Libraries Group, 1990), 16-23; and Price-Wilkin, "Text Files in Libraries," 15-43. The volume Gateways, Gatekeepers, and Roles in the Information Omniverse: Proceedings from the Third Symposium, November 13-15, 1993, includes descriptions of the University of Virginia Electronic Text Library and Project Janus at Columbia Law School (a "virtual" law library) as well as other initiatives discussed in this chapter, such as Project Muse. It is available at <http://arl.cni.org/symp3/1993.frontmatter.html>. On digital libraries, see the Digital Libraries Initiative at <http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/>.

      80. The Association for Research Libraries has a special Web page devoted to copies of its newsletter articles that deal with copyright, at <http://arl.cni.org/newsltr/copy.html>. These articles document the positions of the library community on copyright since 1996. For example, see Arnold P. Lutzker, "In the Curl of the Wave: What the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Term Extension Act Mean for the Library and Education Community," April 1999, at <http://arl.cni.org/newsltr/203/curl.html>. That article begins with the statement, "In the coming 18 months, the library and education community faces a series of fast-paced public policy forums where significant copyright and other intellectual property issues will be addressed." Among the provisions on which the library community obtained some exemptions was the ability to use material in the twenty-year period of copyright protection added through the act. According to Lutzker, "It was posited that the overwhelming majority of works are neither commercially exploited nor readily accessible in the marketplace after several decades, much less seventy-five years (or seventy years after an author's death). Yet, for researchers and scholars, access to such works from the library's collection are important and no limitation should be made on such noncommercial uses." The June 1997 issue of the Association of Research Libraries newsletter is devoted to the topic of copyright in the digitized environment and the efforts of the National Humanities Alliance. It is available at <http://arl.cni.org/newsltr/192/192toc.html>. See also "Educational Community Articulates Principles for Managing Intellectual Property in the Digital Environment" (June 1997) at <http://arl.cni.org/newsltr/192/nha.html>.

      81. See "Create Change: A Resource for Faculty and Librarian Action to Reclaim Scholarly Communication" at <http://www.arl.org/create/home.html> for current essays and views on the relationship between journal prices, electronic journals, and the ability of libraries to afford other forms of traditional material. For earlier literature on the topic, see Eldred Smith, "A Partnership for the Future," Scholarly Publishing 22: 2 (January 1991): 83-92; Ann Okerson, "With Feathers: Effects of Copyright and Ownership on Scholarly Publishing," College and Research Libraries 52: 5 (September 1991): 425-38; "OSAP Develops Electronic Publishing Workshop," ARL 160 (January 2 1992): 12.

      82. Many of these issues are addressed in the three volumes of the proceedings of the joint Association of Research Libraries/AAUP symposia on electronic publishing described in note 62. See the special issue on "Keeping the Pace: How Librarians Retool for Changing Times" in the Association for Research Libraries electronic journal Leading Ideas: Issues and Trends in Diversity, Leadership, and Career Development 14 (May 2000), at <http://www.arl.org/diversity/leading/indexalt.html> for a comprehensive look at the effect of technological change on librarians. See also Brett Sutton, ed., Literary Texts in an Electronic Age: Scholarly Implications and Library Services (Urbana: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 1994).

       The Public-Access Computer Systems Review is one of the best online sources for discussion of the impact of electronic media on librarians and library services. It is available at <http://info.lib.uh.edu/pacsrev.html>. See especially Charles W. Bailey Jr. and Dana Rooks, eds., "Symposium on the Role of Network-Based Electronic Resources in Scholarly Communication and Research," a special issue of Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2: 2 (1991): 4-60, at <http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v2/n2/bailey1.2n2>. Older literature on the topic includes Stephen E. Wiberly Jr., "Habits of Humanists: Scholarly Behavior and New Information Technologies," Library Hi-Tech 33: 9-1 (1991): 17-21; Robert D. Stueart, "Libraries: A New Role?" in Books, Libraries, and Electronics: Essays on the Future of Written Communication, ed. Efrem Sigal et al. (White Plains, N.Y.: Knowledge Industry Publications, 1982), 93-116; John Gurnsey, The Information Professions in the Electronic Age (London: Clive Bingley, 1985), 155-92.

      83. Kenneth Arnold, "The Body in the Virtual Library: Rethinking Scholarly Communication," Journal of Electronic Publishing (January 1995), <http://www.press.umich. edu/jep/works/arnold.body.html>. The University of Michigan Press's online Journal of Electronic Publishing, established in 1995, is a good source for information and elaboration of the issues associated with electronic publishing, although those who contribute are more likely to be those already comfortable with the electronic medium. See also J. E. Gregory Rawlins, "The New Publishing: Technology's Impact on the Publishing Industry over the Next Decade," The Public-Access Computer Systems Review 3: 8 (1992): 5-63, available at <http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v3/n8/rawlins1.3n8>.

      84. Michael Jensen, "Cost Recovery and Destiny: Developing the Appropriateness Matrix," Journal of Electronic Publishing 4: 1 (September 1998), at <http://www.press. umich.edu/jep/04-01/jensen.html>.

      85. The AAUP Web page is at <http://aaupnet.org/>; the link to Charles W. Bailey Jr., "Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (June 16, 2000)" is under "Resources" at <http://aaupnet.org/resources/index.html>; the bibliography is at <http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html>. The AAUP established a computer committee and electronic discussion group in the early 1990s to help the presses assess the opportunities and the pitfalls of electronic publishing. A list of the current AAUP Electronic Committee members is at <http://aaupnet.org/committees.html>. An article about the organization and its use of the Internet to increase access to its catalogs is included in Gateways, Gatekeepers, and Roles in the Information Coniverse: Proceedings of the Third Symposium, November 13-15, 1993 at <http://arl.cni.org/symp3/creesy.html>.

      86. A review of the Encyclopedia of Kentucky CD-ROM is in "Research and Reference Tools: Reviews," Journal of American History 80: 4 (March 1994): 1573-74.

      87. "The History E-Book Project: Introduction," at . One of the most interesting features of the project is the planned use of the electronic medium to publish the primary materials associated with the monograph, moving beyond their mere citation in a footnote. One of the challenges is to learn how much of this material to include, in terms of cost and capacity of the medium. See "Why the Electronic History Monograph?" at <http://www.historyebook.org/electronicmonograph.html>.

      88. An H-Net review of the CD-ROM Who Built America? can be found at <http://www.unimelb.edu/au/infoserv/urban/hma/hurban/1994q2/0436.html>.

      89. This generalization is based on a perusal of reviews of multimedia on the H-Net Review Web site and in the History Computer Review. One typical review suggests that "as long as historical CD-ROMs are written by publishers for popular audiences, not historians for scholarly audiences, the problems inherent in this CD will likely be repeated" (David Rexelman, review of "The War in Vietnam," H-War (February 1997) at <http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/mmreviews/showrev.cgi?path=24>).

       In his 1995 Journal of American History article "'So What's Next for Clio?'" historian Roy Rosenzweig reveals a similar dissatisfaction with historical CD-ROMs. Commenting on the presentation of an abundance of primary documents without commentary, he writes, "Multimedia and hypertext can offer multiple perspectives and to allow readers to draw their own conclusions, but that potential is best realized where, as in good books, readers can encounter real authors with deeply held convictions—even if the reader ultimately rejects those perspectives" (1628-1629). Thus, he calls for an informed interpretative voice in these CD-ROMs. Other commentary on CD-ROMs is available in the discussion "CD/ROMs in Higher Education" on H-MMedia in April 1996, available from <http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=lx&list=h-mmedia&user=&pw=&month=9604>.

      90. See "Who Owns What? Intellectual Property, Copyright, and the Next Millennium," Journal of Electronic Publishing 4: 3 (March 1999), available at <http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-03/index.html>, for a good overview of publishers' views on copyright in the digital environment. Charles W. Bailey Jr.'s "Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" includes a section on "Electronic Commerce/Copyright Systems," at <http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/pcomm.htm>, with links to many articles on the topic. See Pedro Isais, "Electronic Copyright Management Systems: Aspects to Consider," Ariadne 20 (1999), at <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue20/ecms/>. The Journal of Electronic Publishing also includes excellent articles on the topic, including Bill Rosenblatt, "Solving the Problem of Copyright Protection Online," at <http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-02/doi.html>. A good source on the present state of the copyright law is "The Copyright Page," at <http://www.benedict.com/>.

       For information on the National Information Infrastructure Copyright Protection Act, see NCC Washington Update 2: 29 (September 12, 1996), "Update on Copyright Legislation" and "Copyright Conference on Fair Use," available at the H-Net Web site at <http://h-net.msu.edu/ncc>. The critics' perspective is available in Page Putnam Miller, "Copyright and 'Fair Use' in the Electronic Environment," Perspectives 33: 2 (February 1995): 5-6. The history of copyright in the United States, including the recommendations of the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU), are covered in Humeston, "Archives, Optical Disks, and the Copyright Act of 1976."

      91. See Rosenzweig, "'So What's Next for Clio?"

      92. Ronald W. Zweig, "Electronically Generated Records and Twentieth-Century History," Computers and the Humanities 27: 2 (1993): 73-83. On the general impact of electronic communication on the historical profession, see Edward Higgs, ed., Historians and Electronic Artefacts (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998). This recent work includes essays by R. J. Morris, "Electronic Documents and the History of the Late 20th Century Black Holes or Warehouses: What Do Historians Really Want?," and Seamus Ross, "The Expanding World of Electronic Information and the Past's Future." See also the papers presented at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Electronic Recordkeeping and Archival Research's "Working Meeting on Electronic Records," May 1997, at <http://www.sis.pitt.edu/cerar/er-mtg97.html>.

      93. Carol Elizabeth Nowicke, "Managing Tomorrow's Records Today: An Experiment in Archival Preservation of Electronic Mail," Midwestern Archivist 18: 2 (1988): 67-75.

      94. PROFS was the e-mail system used by the federal government at this time.

      95. An excellent overview of the litigation and the issues raised is David A. Wallace, "Preserving the U.S. Government's White House Electronic Mail: Archival Challenges and Policy Implications," presented at the Sixth DELOS Workshop: Preserving Digital Information (Lisbon, Portugal), June 19, 1998, at <http://www.ercim.org/publication/ws-proceedings/DELOS6/wallace.rtf>. See also the "Public Citizen" summary of the cases at <http://www.citizen.org/litigation/foic/foia highlight.html> and the following issues of NCC Washington Update: 1: 8 (February 16, 1995); 1: 11 (March 3, 1995); 1: 22 (May 3, 1995); 1: 46 (September 6, 1995); 1: 62 (December 21, 1995); 2: 17 (May 29, 1996); 2: 18 (June 4, 1996); 2: 25 (July 25, 1996); 2: 30 (September 18, 1996); 2: 43 (December 27, 1996); 3: 4 (February 5, 1997); 3: 16 (April 25, 1997); 3: 20 (May 20, 1997); 3: 21 (May 29, 1997); 3: 26 (June 30, 1997); 3: 41 (September 30, 1997); 3: 44 (November 6, 1997); 3: 47 (December 2, 1997); 4: 7 (March 7, 1998); 4: 9 (March 17, 1998); 4: 10 (March 25, 1998); 4: 19 (May 20, 1998); 4: 28 (July 21, 1998); 4: 32 (August 19, 1998); 4: 33 (September 1, 1998); 4: 38 (September 30, 1998); 4: 42 (October 26, 1998); 5: 27 (August 9, 1999); 5: 39 (November 10, 1999); 6: 1 (January 4, 2000); 6: 6 (February 24, 2000); 6: 7 (March 6, 2000), all available at <http://h-net.msu.edu/ncc>.

      96. The GPO Web site is <http://www.gpo.gov>. A general gateway to federal, state, and local Web sites is at <http://usgovinfo.about.com/newsissues/usgovinfo/blindex.htm>.

      97. The availability of the New York Times electronic archives, as well as the abundance of online papers and reports on scholarly publishing, librarianship, and the electronic revolution, have served as a first-hand demonstration to the author of the benefits to the researcher of online material.

      98. This trend is already apparent: The accuracy of scanners is increasing at the same rate that their costs are dropping.