The History Librarian

Sharon, of Early Modern Notes fame, has created Early Modern E-Prints, a directory of online scholarly books and articles relating to early modern history. In her blog post announcing the E-Prints project, Sharon remarks:

I hope that eventually there will be full-scale open access repositories for history and this resource will no longer be needed. But in the meantime it should help to facilitate access to good quality academic research for people who are studying early modern history but don’t have access to well-stocked university libraries, and it may also encourage the development of open access publishing/archiving by historians.

This brings many things to mind. First, history is one of those disciplines that non-academics care pretty deeply about. There are genealogists, war buffs, local history "amateurs" – a long list of people who are not in school but who love learning about history or who want to know more about the past (and perhaps their family's place in it). The broader public would eat up scholarly content if it were made more freely available. Even if there were simply open-access indexes to scholarly and popular works, this would be a large boon to the general public. Second, and this relates more crucially (in my mind) to world history but generally applies, it is difficult for scholars in various parts of the world to know about or access the work being done by other scholars. A repository for history scholarship would be a wonderful point of exchange for scholars around the world; take a look at DLIST, a repository for library scholarship – there are articles from Indonesia, Australia, the U.S., Spain, South America, Africa … and the statistics show that articles posted to this repository are downloaded around the world. It is detrimental to scholarship for historians to work in isolation; some kind of online repository would go a long way toward enabling greater collaboration in the discipline. The last point I'll raise is one of access here in the U.S. I went to library school at a large research university that had access to all sorts of databases and other resources; I currently work at a library where that level of access is not financially possible. Think of the differences for historians at either institution and how much more quickly someone at a large research institution, with access to a lot of scholarship, can produce articles, presentations or monographs for promotion, etc. than someone working at an institution with less access. This kind of access imbalance results in a scholarship deficit and the discipline as a whole suffers when a select few can produce more scholarship and thus make more scholarly "noise" than those in less-privileged positions. Also, consider the kinds of scholarship and experience that students at privileged institutions can have that are denied students at other, less well-endowed institutions.

While scientists and social scientists have taken to open access repositories (and journals and indexes), the humanities have lagged behind. The AHA made a positive step by making articles in the American Historical Review freely available online (via History Cooperative); more needs to be done.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention something important about Sharon's early modern directory of e-prints:  if you have suggestions of what she should add, leave her a comment. 

I’m so excited that I had to tell someone, so I’m blogging it: I’m working with our History Dept. on a new open access journal. We are very much in the early stages, but the journal will be dedicated to Atlantic World history.  Bah

I’ve been thinking for a while about how wikis could be used in an academic setting.  An idea I had recently (this morning while in the shower) was a wiki that would provide annotated reading lists for various subject areas in history.  Major pages would be geographic (European, African, World, etc.) and then broken down topically/chronologically.  This would be a good resource for grad students putting together comps lists and would also be a great place to find the 4 or 5 books to read on different topics (it could also turn into a useful resource for librarians checking their collections).  The wiki could be closed to a restricted population of advanced grad students and faculty or it could be totally open (I’m inclined to advocate the partially-closed model).  The wiki could be a good project for the AHA or for the RUSA History Section.