Thoughts on technology and the historian

Last week I was working on annotations for a translation of a Latin text I am preparing to submit to a journal for publication. The text was printed in 1526, but luckily I had taken some digital photos of the pages from a photographic reproduction of the text that I found in a library in Toronto. One passage in the text had me a quite stumped, until some clues led to me think about another book that a contemporary wrote about my text. That book was printed in 1527. I deftly opened a new tab in Explorer and typed the title into Google. Within seconds I was electronically flipping through the book and found the solution to the passage that had puzzled me for weeks. I even downloaded a .pdf for future reference, and stored it on my gazillion gig hardrive. At last count, I had a small library of over 100 sixteenth-century digital books. And I don’t even think I am breaking any copyrights in doing so (experts might disagree). I guess the point is I can do the kind of research (in North Bay even!) in minutes that it would have taken months to do visiting libraries across Europe. That doesn’t mean that I won’t make strategic visits to actual libraries anymore, it just means that I can do a lot more, more quickly, in between visits. Lamentably, it will take several more decades to make a more complete electronic library – but in the interim I am happy to take advantage of what’s there.