All Things Considered

Evans Digital Edition, 1639–1800. Produced and distributed by Readex/NewsBank, Inc., in cooperation with the American Antiquarian Society, Chester, Vermont, 2002—.

National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition: Saturday" introduces its listeners' mail segment with this sound clip: rapid, light typing on the keys of a manual typewriter, punctuated by the bright "ping" of a small bell as the carriage returns. The sound is instantly recognizable to people my age, calling up memories of term papers and homework assignments. But it has often occurred to me that for my students, unless they grew up in the most eccentric or Luddite of contemporary American households, NPR's auditory cue must be meaningless, as unfamiliar as vinyl records or rotary phones or, a layer down in the technological trash heap, slide rules and sticky bottles of "white-out" correcting fluid.

That trash heap is about to get bigger, fed by discarded sets of Microprint card editions of Early American Imprints, Series 1. Early American Imprints contains every extant book, pamphlet, and broadside published in British North America from 1639 to 1800, and for a generation or two it has been a mainstay of research for students of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. It began as the brainchild of Charles Evans, who determined in 1902 to create his American Bibliography, a "chronological dictionary of all books, pamphlets, and periodical publications printed in the United States of America from the Genesis of printing in 1639 down to and including the year 1820, with bibliographical and biographical notes."¹ Given the scope of this project, it is perhaps not surprising that Evans had reached only the listings for 1799 by the time of his death in 1935. Clifford K. Shipton, the head librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, a mecca for early American research located in Worcester, Massachusetts, completed Evans's catalog through 1800. And then he did something even more important: he arranged with the Readex Microprint Corporation to create a microcard edition of the imprints. The project was launched in 1955 and finished issuing the first series in 1968. It is a safe bet that anyone who has attempted any original research in early American history in the past forty years, from class essays to senior theses to major works, has used, and often relied upon, the Evans Early American Imprints collection. We may sometimes have cursed the eyestrain-inducing cards and the clunky machines used to read them, but such grumblings were dwarfed by the extraordinary opportunities for research this collection presented, especially for those whose access to major research libraries or archives was limited or intermittent.

Now the American Antiquarian Society and the Readex Corporation are completing a new generation of this project, a digital "Archive of Americana." The early American collections include the Early American Imprints, Series II (based on the Shaw-Shoemaker bibliography, 1801–1819) and Early American Newspapers (1690–1876). The cornerstone of these projects remains the Evans imprint series. The digital edition, with full-text searching, contains more than thirty-six thousand items and 2.3 million images, along with integrated bibliographic records from the American Antiquarian Society; searchable ASCII text generated by OCR (optical character recognition) software is associated with each image. It is an extraordinary resource.

It is extraordinary, first, for its sheer convenience. If you have access to the digital collections of a library that has bought or leased the Evans Digital—187 libraries so far—you can bring almost anything published in North America before 1800 to your office desk or your home study or to your laptop in a cyber café. You can work anytime you want to, in shorts or pajamas; you can start work hours before the library opens or turn insomniac episodes to good use. You can download pamphlets to read later or print out entire documents if you prefer to work with hard copies. You can even bring a set of documents to a "smart classroom" and walk students through searches and other research tasks.

My "wow!" response...