Online history overload?

[John Lee]

The more time I spend online engaging historical resources, the more convinced I become that the shear volume of what's available has outstripped my (our) abilities to comprehend or even discuss digital history as body of content. Just take the collection online at HeritageQuest Online (http://www.heritagequestonline.com) from ProQuest. The site includes access to U.S. Census records, Freedman's Bureau records, Revolutionary War records, over 22,000 books on local and genealogical history, and Periodical Source Index, or PERSI, which is a collection of almost 2 million references to articles in over 6,500 publications on genealogy and local history (for more see an About.com article on PERSI). All of these materials are part of what is beginning to feel like an infinite universe of digital historical resources. It wasn't too long ago that the American Memory online collection at the Library of Congress with its one to two images of historical resources seemed overwhelming. Today, resources on the scale of American Memory exist in much more narrowly focused collections such as HeritageQuest. Furthermore, these resources are distributed across a number of outlets. For example the PERSI collection is not only available at HeritageQuest, but also through Ancestry.com, and the Allen County Public Library, where the collection was founded http://www.acpl.lib.in.us/genealogy/persi.html).

With all these resources available, I wonder what the implications are for their use. For one thing, as the scope of digital history expands I think we need to expand opportunities for using these resources online. This means more spaces like Footnote.com that enable students, historians, enthusiast to publish their work. Collaboration and communication are vital to understanding and utilize digital history resources and online space for doing work with digital historical resources could very well help us open up the pipeline to digital historical resources.