The Archive and the Internet

The American Historical Association has been in the forefront of professional academic organizations that have seen the potential of the Internet for fomenting the production and circulation of academic scholarship and for contributing to the teaching of history.¹ This has been no more apparent than in the AHA Workshop, "Entering the Second Stage of Online History Scholarship," carried out in the days before the 118th annual meeting of the American Historical Association and under its auspices. In the AHA Workshop, the topic was electronic scholarly publishing: maintaining its quality, mediating its use and access, and assessing its impact on the changing shape of the profession.² It took into account the perspectives of all those involved in scholarly production: authors, journal editors, department chairs, university press publishers and editors, and, at the same time, those involved in mediating its use and access at the technical level, that is, the librarians and technicians.

The present discussion aims to complement those presentations by focusing not on the production of scholarship but rather the preparation and presentation of scholarly sources. Here the interests of historians and philologists (both of whose interests I share) merge, bringing together the historical scholar's selection of sources and the philologist's skills at preparing them as accurately transcribed, reader-adapted, user-friendly, and self-explanatory. This convergence of skills mediates between the secrecy or unavailability of the Archive and the open access of the Internet, and it provides the needed link between them.On the face of it, the Archive and the Internet seem to be antithetical concepts. As Roberto González Echevarría has argued, the notion of the archive brings together the concepts of secrecy (the privacy of knowledge), power, and origins.³ "Archive" comes from the late Latin archivum, which in turn comes from the Greek archeion, or "residence of the magistrates," which is derived from arkhe, "command," hence power. Arche, in philosophy, was "the first principle"; with Aristotle, it was "cause," hence "beginning," "origin." And finally, secrecy: through arche, archive is related to arcane, arcanum, a secret or mystery.⁴

The secrecy of power, knowledge and origins was well kept in the institution of the royal archive.⁵ The topic to be considered here stands between the secrecy or privacy of the royal or state archive,—translated today into the far-flung modern public national archives worldwide,—and the open and public domain of the worldwide Internet. I am referring to a new type of collaboration in the scholarly world between the archive and the academy, that is, between the research library and the university scholar, creating together not a set of print editions of library or archival holdings or establishing an actual research center within a library. These models are the familiar, necessary points of reference, but a newer version of them (which will augment but not replace them) is just now coming into view: It is the electronic research center, which can take maximum advantage of the flexibility of the electronic medium and provide through it the resources that would be impossible or extremely expensive to assemble and make universally accessible by any other means.

The concept of the electronic research center becomes sharper if juxtaposed to that of the library. The library provides a vast array of resources but while doing so inevitably loses in uniform high quality what it gains in range and inclusiveness. The tighter focus of a research center is organized thematically and, if carefully done, can overcome the library's limitations; though sacrificing range, it gains in quality. Currently available electronic examples of the "library" model are both institutional and commercial. In the institutional setting, the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes at the University of Alicante in Alicante, Spain, is pertinent. The Alicante institution's "holdings" are vast and it is, as it states, a "virtual library."⁶ In the private sector, the commercial publisher Dastin in Madrid also offers an example pertinent to the...