From dusty to digital

MADISON, Wis. -- It's a stately old building with looming columns, worn marble stairways and arched doorways -- dedicated in 1900 "to the conservation, advancement and dissemination of American Heritage."

But while the Wisconsin Historical Society contains one of the largest American history archives anywhere, fewer people have visited in recent years -- 40 percent fewer than in 1987 -- as more of them, including students at the nearby University of Wisconsin, turn to the Internet as their basic research tool.

So the historical society and many other institutions with large collections are doing something they see as means of survival: They're going digital -- creating and uploading images of many items in their collections for all the World Wide Web to see.

"History belongs to everybody; it shouldn't be locked away in dark rooms," says Michael Edmonds, deputy administrator of the Wisconsin Historical Society's library-archives division. "It should be on everybody's laptops at Starbucks."

The movement to "digitize" collections received a lot of attention last month when popular search engine Google announced a deal with several university libraries to put their books -- or snippets of those books -- online. Users would have greatest access to books with content that's not limited by copyright constraints.

But even before Google began scanning books, many libraries, archives and museums had already been quietly digitizing their most popular and rarest of collections and, increasingly, creating Web sites that put those collections in context.

It's a trend that Edmonds calls "revolutionary" -- and necessary.

"Our future depends on us being able to turn our collections inside out -- to show people what we have," he says.

Starting in 1999 with a $100,000 gift from a retired Wisconsin professor, staff members at his institution have been using some of their limited funds to scan thousands of digital images of rare older books and archived letters.

One result has been a Web site called American Journeys, which details eyewitness accounts of early exploration in this country and includes rare maps.

There are challenges to maintaining these digital archives, though. Steven Hensen, who helps oversee Duke's rare book and special collections, notes that even books in the poorest condition can survive for decades, if not longer. "We're not at all sure of this with digital material," he says.

There's also the fact that, generally, only a small portion of many archived collections are available online.

The National Archives site, for instance, includes such popular items as the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation. But most of the 8 billion textual documents the federal institution houses are not available online.

Some archivists envision the day when Internet surfers will be able to request to see a particular document -- having it "scanned on demand," perhaps for a fee.

But, for now, many librarians are focusing on helping Web surfers find archive images online and understand their significance.

David Bertuca at the Buffalo Arts and Sciences Libraries at the University of Buffalo is one who regularly gathers reliable links on particular topics, including the 100th anniversary of the paper that introduced the world to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Among other things, the page links to images of Einstein's handwritten journals at the Jewish National & University Library in Israel.

To Bertuca, compiling such pages is only logical. "It's what librarians do," he says.

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On the Net:

American Journeys: http://www.americanjourneys.org

National Archives: http://www.nara.gov

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Martha Irvine is a national writer specializing in coverage of people in their 20s and younger. She can be reached at mirvine(at)ap.org