I am writing in regard to the query about the Accessible Archives
CD ROM of Civil War era newspapers. I have my doubts about the
project, and would like to offer you some of my reasons why.
As founder and editor of the H-CivWar electronic newsletter, and
as a teacher of the Civil War, I have had several opportunities to
speak with the authors of this project, and I have met them once.
The Nagys are affable sorts, and I have no doubt that they offer
this project to the historical community with all the sincerity in
the world. They have previously offered a colonial newspaper on
CD ROM, and it has been well received. There is a fine review of
that project by my friend Wendy Plotkin (UI, Chicago) in the winter
edition of this year's _JAH_.
But there is a world of difference between the colonial project and
the Civil War project. In the first instance, they selected one
newspaper and printed it in its entirety. Everything that went into
the original newspaper went into the CD ROM version of it. This must
have been quite a task, and it is worthy of a good deal of commendation.
But the Civil War project is of a different ilk altogether. What they
have done in this case is to select a few newspapers, from which they
have reprinted only some articles. I have no doubt that the absolute
number of reprinted articles in enormous, but no researcher can be
sure of what is missing. The authors of this project are not
historians, they have no historical training whatsoever, and they did not
consult any historians before embarking on the project. This means that
they established no credible scholastic or professional editorial criteria
prior to ripping these newspapers up and choosing what to reprint and,
most important, what not to reprint.
And this means that no serious researcher will be able to use this
collection as a reference point. After noting how impressivley
large the collection is, the researcher is bound to ask: "But what has
been left out of the collection? How can I be sure my research is
complete unless I go back and look at the primary resources themselves?"
And this kind of research is, of course, the essence of history itself.
If historians did not like crawling about smelly archives and far-
flung libraries, they probably would have chosen different professions.
So the question becomes -- is the project worth anything, as incomplete
and as seemingly random as it is? I say yes, but only in a limited
fashion. If someone wanted pithy quotes really quickly, the collection
is indexed in a manner which could make retreiving the quotes very easy.
And if your school has a large Civil War program for undergraduates,
this collection might be just the thing for the occasional assignment
to research "primary" documents. Of course, it would not give the
students any real experience in primary research, as very few primary
documents are on CD ROM. And in any case, this would be a very
expensive investment for the limited uses I can imagine.
I have spoken with many historians who have looked into this project,
and, with one exception, none has had any enthusiasm for it at all.
The lack of a well thought out and established set of professional
standards and criteria in the selection of documents to reprint makes
this project a hit-or-miss exercise with little value to the serious
researcher, but too expensive for the amateur.