Unlocking the Virtual Stacks

My research in the history of botany and medicine relies heavily on early printed books and the transactions of the first scientific societies. Thanks to the libraries and scholars who have been scanning these works and generously making them available on the web, my computer has become a doorway into the rare book collections of the world. These online facsimiles will never reveal everything that the physical volume can—the pressed flower that gives precious evidence of an earlier reader's use of an herbal, for example—but the ease of comparing texts and illustrations across editions has inspired research projects that would have otherwise required long journeys or days hunched over a microfilm reader.

In the decade since the World Wide Web became part of daily life, my ability to use primary sources has vastly increased. It is a different story when it comes to tapping contemporary scholarly conversations about those works.

I am in the midst of putting together an exhibition on great eighteenth-century scientist, Carolus Linnaeus. Before I can write a succinct label about how, say, Linnaeus's classification of all human beings as a single species influenced Jefferson's declaration, "All men are created equal,"—or Linnaeus's sub-dividing of Homo sapiens into four races affected American racial attitudes—I need to know what other historians, anthropologists, and biologists are saying about this complex issue.

I am lucky enough to live two miles from Princeton University Library; $580 a year (cheaper than parking) gets me a community borrower's card. That allows me to pass through the turnstiles of a magnificent research library, browse its shelves, and check out its books. Its electronic resources, however, are still closed stacks.

What I have been missing became very clear to me this past year when an appointment as a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania opened up Penn's on-line databases and journals to me. I saved the time and expense of trips to Penn's library (at least $50 for gas and parking) and eagerly explored the papers that bolstered a grant proposal, enriched an article, gave new perspectives to the Linnaeus exhibition plan, streamlined the editing of a book, and strengthened my teaching.

In a posting on the SHARP listserve (1/18/2006) immediately after the Call for Papers that led to this forum, Professor R. Kent-Drury, "a faculty member at a mid-sized, underfunded public university," noted the sharp "acceleration of research" that she had experienced when an NEH Summer Seminar gave her five weeks of access to Brown University's electronic resources.

Prof. Kent-Drury's posting prompted me to warn my students to print out any on-line article or data they might ever want to consult again. Once they leave Penn, they too may be standing wistfully outside the gated community of password-restricted knowledge they now take for granted. Indeed, as academic libraries choose online journal subscriptions over bulky paper copies or cancel subscriptions entirely, the odds are good that they will share my experience of being, in effect, locked out of my study, unable to see my own work online.

As individual researchers, we often try to gain access by appealing to the good will of our closest institutions—finding a sympathetic librarian, for instance, or persuading a professional society to grant online access to its journals to all individual members. That simply substitutes personal networking for organizational affiliation as the basis of access. What is needed is a system that recognizes both the investment it takes to create electronic resources and the public good of making them widely available to everyone with a yen to learn.

The current licensing arrangements serve a small, concentrated piece of the market for scholarship, but they ignore a much larger, global audience: the alumni of the privileged schools whose expectations have been raised, students and faculty at the less-privileged schools, high-school students and teachers, local historians, staff at museums and cultural sites, journalists, whistle-blowers, genealogists, public librarians, public officials, health-care providers, and retirees (see http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com/2006/07/wi...