Thanks to all those who read my post yesterday, on skills for digital historians.

Today, I want to briefly touch on another aspect of the increasingly digital world. I heard in our meeting yesterday that a history academic asked a room full of students how many had gone to the library and consulted books as part of their work. Actual, physical books. Only about half put their hands up.

Do we live in a world where people go for digital convenience rather than the right source at the right time? Do some assume everything (or everything worthwhile) is available digitally? Do people think that if you can’t find something using Google it doesn’t exist? And what effect does all this have on the subjects students and scholars choose as their focus?

Newspapers are a great example. Some archivists see newspaper clippings as the bane of their existence. They take time to list, they are difficult to preserve, they take up lots of space and they are rarely unique. My first day as an archivist was spent re-foldering mounds of loose, oddly shaped newspaper clippings from the Alfred Dunbavin Butcher collection. I know what it’s like.

Today we have the wonderful Trove Digitised newspapers and more. It’s an extraordinary resource, and growing all the time. But as most users will be aware, the majority of papers are digitised up to 1954. So it’s fabulous if you are studying a topic pre-1955. Otherwise, you will either need to wait until 2025 when we catch up to copyright law and can start the slow crawl into the late 20th century, or you need to rely on other resources.

Which explains why, early this year, my boss and I hired a van and went to pick up a large collection of newspaper clippings. It was in danger of being discarded because repositories could not justify the resources and space required to store so much material which was duplicated elsewhere. Though we were called old-fashioned a couple of times, we brought it back to our offices, and here it remains until we work out what to do with it.

It is a substantial collection (406 boxes) which would be enormously difficult and time consuming to recreate. And it covers topics which – apart from being of great personal interest – are closely or tangentially related to some of our other projects. The collection contains boxed clippings on subjects including:

  • abortion
  • adoption
  • AIDS
  • birth control
  • child abuse
  • child care and development
  • disability
  • domestic violence
  • ethics
  • homosexuality
  • incest
  • infertility
  • marrage/divorce/alternative lifestyle
  • menopause
  • men’s issues
  • menstruation
  • parenting
  • pornography
  • pregnancy/birth
  • rape/sexual assault
  • sex and the law
  • sex education
  • sexual discrimination
  • sexuality
  • STDs
  • stress
  • transvestites/transexuals
  • women’s health
  • women’s issues

The collection dates: c.1970-c.1991. If the current copyright restrictions remain and Trove keeps up to date, these articles will start to become available digitally in 2040.

So here we have a physical collection of chronological newspaper clippings, pre-filtered and sorted by subject, which will likely not be generally accessible digitally (outside of subscription-based or proprietary databases) for more than 25 years. These 406 boxes could form the core of Masters theses, Honours theses, journal articles, conference presentations and more, and could save researchers in the above areas a huge amount of time.

None of this is a critique of Trove, who work under clear legal constraints, or archival repositories who need to make decisions based on available resources, collection priorities and more. But we still have a way to go before resources like this are no longer required. With reference to my post a few days ago – Musings on collections [#blogjune 2] – this collection of clippings is greater than the sum of its parts.

As we continue to make the most of the wealth of digital resources and tools available, we need to remain aware of what is missing, and we need to understand why it is missing. Historians and others need to continue to look at non-digital sources, and libraries and archives need to continue acquiring and preserving them.

More broadly, we need to be aware of the potential impact of these digital spaces or silences on the areas people study, and archivists and librarians need to be conscious of their role in both creating and filling these gaps. (Kate Theimer wrote a great post on this a couple of years ago which is worth reading: Two meanings of “archival silences” and their implications.)

While, as I argued yesterday, there are core digital skills, tools and resources which should be included, we also need to ensure people do not default to the digital for the sake of convenience, to avoid manual searches through records or because they are not familiar with the way physical libraries and archives work. They will miss out on key skills and resources, and scholarship will be skewed towards the ‘pre-copyright’ past, the centre, the mainstream and the canonical.

Finally, if anyone is studying gender, sex, sexuality, reproduction, violence and related social issues in the 1970s and 1980s, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. I have a fantastic collection of newspaper clippings ready and waiting.