Recently there was a thoughtful conversation on a history blog where I lurk regarding the "negative possibilities of the positive good of online access." From the original post:
The positive value is obvious: online documents means more access to more people. As a student of American history who lives an ocean away from my sources, I’ve grown to sincerely appreciate online access to research material. This digital movement will make broad research much more possible to people who live far away [from source repositories].
But there are, indeed, downsides. First and foremost, it can at times encourage lazy history. Previous historians have been forced to toil in libraries and archives for hours to find a nugget of gold; conversely, when all you have to do is open a browser and press a link, things can be taken for granted. Students and researchers may content themselves with reading a few pamphlets, glancing through a few newspapers, and skimming through some books, and then feel like they have a good “grasp” of the issue. Dependence on online sources has the potential to weaken, rather than strengthen, one’s overall background in the history, for using simple “search” functions to find quick answers will never compensate the practice of searching page by page, document by document, and journal by journal, and familiarizing oneself with the larger corpus of records.
Among the comments appended to that post was this cogent response by a woman of my (very slight) acquaintance, herself a published historian and genealogist:
The digital revolution hit genealogists a full generation before it is reaching historians, and I expect historians will to some extent follow in the downward steps of genealogists.
She explains:
First comes the unwillingness, and eventually the inability (through disuse) to use the research skills that you have honed and that have produced results in the past: if it isn’t on the computer, people won’t consult it. Whenever I go to the Family History Library [in Salt Lake City], I hear patrons flat out refusing to use microfilm. And yeah, after a few obvious searches of digital indexes, if they don’t find the name they are looking for, they assume the name isn’t there — they won’t (or don’t know how to) scroll through the pages looking for names that are misindexed, misspelled, or obscured for some other reason. And it is so easy to copy someone else’s work without really looking at it, either to know whether they did it right or whether you’re copying it right — I remember when a man was mislinked as the husband of his step-grandmother a few years ago and have watched in disbelief as that has spread to hundreds of websites like a fungus on the internet. The mistake is accompanied by legitimate-looking citations, and apparently nobody even thinks about its unlikelihood anymore.
I can think of one glaring instance of this myself: thanks to sloppy census data (from 1930!), my grandmother and one of her sisters were listed as having ages that were several years wide of the mark. Someone on Ancestry plugged those names and (wrongly extrapolated) years of birth into their tree; others have mindlessly copied the errors; and now I see a whole host of family trees on Ancestry that are not only wrong, but include my grandmother and great aunt twice, each as her own sister, each with the same name — once with the wrong birth years that can be traced back to that census error, and once with the correct dates. (A brother, Ralph, is often also listed twice, once as "Raebb," but that's due to a [somewhat more understandable] transcription error.) Unfortunately, many amateur genealogists seem to be going at it in their sleep. Caveat researcher.
Another hazard is what digitization does to libraries and the people who work with the public. I can and do still use the full resources of the Family History Library, but I have to do so from my experience and knowledge developed pre-Ancestry.com.
Setting aside for our purposes here the larger issue of what's happening to library staffing these days (an important topic in itself), I can relate, and I bet many of you can as well. I made a lot of boneheaded mistakes* when I began researching my tree, way back in the pre-internet mists of antiquity; but I like to think those mistakes (subsequently and shamefacedly corrected, I hasten to add!) were redeemed in a way by the hard work, the immersive experience, of poring through piles of microfilm reels and stacks of dusty old books. (Three cheers for "familiarizing oneself with the larger corpus of records"!) I'd have had to be very dense indeed not to have learned something worthwhile about the process itself. Plugging someone else's Ancestry tree into your own isn't just dangerous, or even merely lazy, it's a barrier to your own education and effectiveness as a researcher.
This is not to diss Ancestry.com itself (or other online resources), which has done a good job of organizing tons of data in ways that are generally easy for the layperson to retrieve; like the original poster said above, I "sincerely appreciate online access to research material." I'd be severely hampered without it. It's just vitally important to keep eyes open and mind engaged. As the original post concluded:
The digitization process, on the whole, is overwhelmingly positive. I hope that we can merge the work ethic of past generations with the remarkable access to documents we have in the new.
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*I still make mistakes, all the time. But I like to think I'm a little quicker at catching them than I used to be. :-)