Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800, and: Early American Imprints, Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819 (review)

Most people who study early America have a love-hate relationship with Early American Imprints. The collection has always been of immeasurable value, but its format made for headaches and stronger eyeglass prescriptions, and it was extremely difficult to use for teaching at the graduate or undergraduate level. The new digital version of the collection goes a long way toward rectifying this state of affairs. Hardly devoid of limitations, this collection will nonetheless be of immediate and obvious benefit. If nothing else, it may eliminate headaches and eyestrain.

Early American Imprints began as a published version of the texts digested in the massive bibliographies commissioned by the American Antiquarian Society and published by Readex. The material was produced in two series known colloquially by their respective bibliographers. The Evans collection (for Charles Evans) contains materials published through 1800. The Shaw-Shoemaker collection (for Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker) covers the period from 1801 to 1819. Purchased by libraries throughout the country, Early American Imprints immediately provided researchers with access to the full breadth of early American publishing, including legislation and legal codes, novels and poetry, political pamphlets, and religious tracts.

The problem was less one of content than media. Printed on opaque microcards that could only be read through a specialized viewer, Early American Imprints was supposed to simulate the black ink on white paper of the original objects. When Early American Imprints I was published in 1969, microcard may well have seemed to offer the revolutionary possibilities that people now attribute to the digital medium. But then the problems began. Microcard never caught on, so libraries did not repair aging microcard readers and did not replace them once they broke down. Worse still, microcard readers had no printing capability. Although Evans eventually became available on microfiche, Shaw-Shoemaker users still suffered with microcard. While identifying materials became far easier once libraries incorporated the detailed bibliographical information on Early American Imprints into online catalogs, viewing those materials remained challenging at best, and painful at worst.

Readex and the American Antiquarian Society have now transferred the collection to the digital medium through a subscription-based Web site, which contains the Evans collection in its entirety. The Shaw-Shoemaker material is coming online in chronological sequence and is due for completion in 2007.

The collection works like many other searchable online document collections. The interface is a standard Web browser. The search feature mimics both the look and options of most online catalogs for research libraries. The front end of the Web site is rather inviting, presenting ways of exploring the collection that should prove intuitive to scholars and students alike. Users can locate documents through various full-text keyword searches or browse by author, subject, chronology, publishing location, and language. Several intermediate steps conclude with access to an entire text, with each page image appearing at the center of the screen and a page index appearing on the left-hand column.

Individual pages can appear at various sizes (all of them black-and-white GIF images), and users can print pages in PDF format, either individually or in groups of up to twenty-five pages. These cryptic formatting issues notwithstanding, what Readex and the American Antiquarian Society have produced is less a dramatic change to research or learning than a vast improvement in document delivery. Indeed, the collection itself bears more similarities than differences to its original microcard version. The search and browse features simply imported the bibliographic information that had long been available through library catalogs. The Web site does not consist of full-text transcriptions, but rather contains scanned page images. Like the old microcard versions, the Web site presents facsimiles of the original texts, complete with their pagination and font, as well as all the smudges, printing errors, and page damage typical of early American publishing.

The collection...