 . . . Spring 1998
THE MAKING OF AMERICA
Out in Spokane, Washington, a Boeing aircraft inspector with a passion for early photography was searching for references to the daguerreotype--a type of photograph produced on metal plates in the 1800s. In Santa Clara, California, a historian needed a few more examples to include in his book on the origins of hobbies.
Instead of spending days prowling library stacks, thumbing through brittle pages or scanning reel after reel of microfilm until eyestrain sets in, users can simply point and click their ways into writings on slavery, temperance, women's rights, Darwinism, overland travel and other issues of the day. They can search the online materials (accessed at http://www.umdl.umich.edu/moa/) by entering an author's last name, a title, a subject heading or a specific year. But more--they can search for words or combinations of words throughout the more than 600,000 pages of text. What appears on the screen is a scanned image of an actual page from the 19th century volume. A few volumes also been converted to electronic text, which can be organized in ways that help users zero in on specific chapters or sections.
"This is the most exciting thing I have seen in research since I first discovered Xerox machines in 1967 and realized I did not have to take notes anymore," says Steven M. Gelber, chair of the history department at Santa Clara University. In his research on the origins of hobbies, Gelber turned up "a treasure trove of data in a matter of a couple of days." It would have taken months to find the same material using traditional methods, he says.
Gelber found "a section in an etiquette book on how to behave at fancy-fairs [forerunners
of church bazaars] that was wonderfully useful, which I never would have uncovered
otherwise." The Making of America (MOA) resource, he says, "is what I assumed the future of libraries would be. But to be quite honest, I never believed I would live to see so much of the past put online in such an accessible form--a genuine electronic library, or at least an electronic archive. The ability to search and then read the originals is quite magical."
Part of the magic for Gary W. Ewer of Spokane, Washington, is not having to drive 300 miles to Seattle when he wants to do research on early photography. Ewer, who has been fascinated with daguerreotypes for 15 years, started out collecting the old photographic plates. But as collecting became more costly, his interest turned to scholarship. As secretary of the 850-member Daguerreian Society, he produces an electronic newsletter and contributes to the society's annual scholarly publication, The Daguerreian Annual. He also built and maintains the society's website (http://www.austinc.edu/dag).
Ewer adds that it is also much easier to copy materials online than it is at a library, where you "just sit there and read things or you beg and cajole and bribe the librarian" to get photocopies.
The result is a resource that isn't just for professional historians and researchers. Teachers, students and anyone with an interest in the nation's past can easily use it to look up specific events, people and issues or just to browse through the collection.
"It has stimulated a kind of research that just couldn't be done before," making it easier to trace the evolution of ideas and customs that shaped American culture, says Wendy Lougee, assistant director of the University Library. Lougee oversees the Digital Library Initiatives program, which is supported by the School of Information, the University Library, and the Information Technology Division, and is working to create a comprehensive, networked set of research tools and resources.
As librarians worked on MOA, they came to appreciate even more the project's potential for preserving books and journals that are too fragile to withstand repeated handling.
To keep that from happening to other books, project developers plan to convert more volumes in the U-M's brittle books program into online-searchable form. The cost of preserving printed materials this way is comparable to that of converting them to microfilm. Other goals are to make more volumes available as both original page images and electronic text, as funds become available for that costly and time-consuming process, and to integrate the U-M Making of America collection with similar materials at Cornell.
Clearly, the project will continue to grow, and as it does, so will its usefulness. Gelber predicts, "historians who deal with printed sources will never work the same way again."
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Although they live more than 2,000 miles from Ann Arbor, both men turned to a Michigan resource--the 
When another early photography buff told Ewer about the MOA website, he "immediately went right to the site, plugged in the word 'daguerreotype,' and came up with 366 matches." Although he's just begun to work his way through the list, he's already struck gold--an 1857 book called Arctic Explorations that describes an effort to use a daguerreotype in the Arctic. Ewer said that he had never before read any account of Arctic explorers even taking a daguerreotype camera with them.
It was people like Ewer and Gelber that Michigan's MOA developers had in mind when they sought to make historic materials more accessible to a broad range of users. In deciding what to include, U-M librarians Judith Avery and Jean Loup looked for books and articles that showed "what it was like to be an American at that time," Avery says. That's why the collection focuses more on diaries, first-person travel accounts and popular magazines than on military histories and political tomes.
"One thing that became apparent was that some kind of preservation was needed for these materials," says Avery, British and American Studies Librarian for the University Library. "All of them are brittle. After I'd work my way through a cart of them, my floor would be littered with little scraps of paper that had broken off."