Researching and downloading primary sources online is probably one of the first ways that most historians interact with digial media. The technology has progressed to the point where almost entire monographs can be developed without leaving the confines of your home office– archives all over the world have digitized their collections and made them accesible.
As more and more collections and sources are digitized, access will undoubtedly become easier– and as John relates in his post this week, as companies move from subscription and fee-based access to advertising-driven systems, more of the limimtations will be removed. Access, however, has different meanings to different people. That we can find the sources we need online is only half the story– we still, as historians, need to be able to read and digest the material. Personally, I find it difficult to read long documents or books online– when I need a source, I routinely print out and compile a physical copy. With that in mind, I’d like to look at this end of the digitizing process.
GoogleBooks is perhaps one of the best examples for this– digitized files are easily searchable, printing can be done by single page, and all the different works i checked justify for printing to standard paper size. Though this may make the relative font size of larger-format works a bit small, I have had no difficulty working with the printouts from this site (reading, highlighting, and so forth).
Another good site, in this respect, is America’s Historical Newspapers, part of the Readex “Archive of Americana” system (I access this through the Boston Public Library’s “Electronic Resources” page– those of you who are new to Massachusetts, you can get a BPL electronic library card, simply for being a resident/ having an address in-state. Costs nothing, so it’s definately worth plenty more than you paid…). Newspaper images are displayed in full, or by selected article, once you determine what you want. SMall items such as advertisements will expand for printing to cover the whole page of standard printing paper, and the site gives you the functionality to choose your own layout and printing format for larger, multi-column articles.
I cannot say the same for works from Early English Books Online, however (note that this link is through the UMass library system). EEBO holds many sources not found on Googlebooks, but as an end-user, i find the way they arange their files very unsatisfactory. A short work, such as the twenty-two page “A Continuation of the state of New-England” (concerning the war with the Wampanoags in 1676) is split into eleven different .pdf files, each with two pages of the original work. Printing these pages reduces the original down to approximately half a printed page– relative font size drops to 8-point or less. EEBO does make .tiff files available for use, so with a bit of work in Photoshop you could make a comfortably-reaadable file… but that seems a lot of work left for the end-user. The situation os mitigate by EEBO’s offering a full-text version of each work, but I still wonder about their decision to seperate each page view of the original.