New research tools kick up dust in archives

Seated recently in the special collections room at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology library, Anders Fernstedt raced through an imposing set of yellowing articles and correspondence.

Several years ago Fernstedt, an independent Swedish scholar who is studying the work of the 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper and several of his colleagues, would have scratched out notes and set aside documents for photocopying.

Now, however, his tool of choice is the high-resolution camera on his iPhone. When he found a document of interest, he quickly snapped a photo and instantly shared his discovery with a colleague working hundreds of miles away. Indeed, Fernstedt, who conducts his research on several continents, now packs his own substantial digital Popper library on the disk of his MacBook Air laptop computer - more than 50,000 PDF files that he can browse through in a flash.

In just a few years, advances in technology have transformed the methods of historians and other archival researchers. Productivity has improved dramatically, costs have dropped and a world distinguished by solo practitioners has become collaborative. In response, developers are producing an array of computerised methods of analysis, creating a new quantitative science.

However, the transformation has also disrupted many of the world's historical archives, long known as sleepy places distinguished by vast and often musty collections of documents that only rarely saw the light of day. It has also created new challenges for protecting intellectual property and threatened revenue streams from document copying, creating financial challenges for some institutions.

"It gives me a bit of a chill," said Henry Lowood, curator for History of Science and Technology Collections and Film and Media Collections in the Stanford University Libraries. "It's not so much that we try to control things, it's that we have agreements with people who give us their papers, and in order for us to monitor those agreements we need to monitor things at some level."

© 2013 The New York Times News Service