A Pilgrim’s Digression

When was the last time you stopped to think about the way the Internet has changed the way in which you acquire information?

I had a moment like that today. I was struck by the vast difference between the way I find things out now and the way I discovered information even twelve or fifteen years ago.

When I entered Graduate School in 1996, “Research Skills” meant going to the library, searching the card catalog for books (the card catalog was a DOS program with a command line interface). If I wanted magazine, newspaper, or professional journal articles, I had to use those red, paper-bound copies of the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, or its equivalent for scholarly articles.

Of course there was an Internet, but I didn’t have it at home. No one I knew had home Internet access. I could access the Internet through the computers at school, but my professors were still highly dubious about the use of Internet sources in student papers. One exception was Listservs. My professors thought listservs were the greatest thing. Every class I took, the professor required us to sign up for email from a scholarly listserv. One professor even required us to post to the Listserv once or twice a semester.

I had a school email account in 1996, but it was only accessible via a UNIX program called PINE. From home, I could connect my PC’s modem to the phone line, dial up the school server, and access my email account–but again, it was accessible only through a UNIX-based command line interface.

Today, things are a little different.

The technical changes that have occurred since 1996 are obvious and don’t merit a lot of comment. Something not so noticeable, perhaps, is how suddenly everything we could ever want to know is accessible on the Internet, and people in general believe this accessibility is now part of the American birthright.

I do a fair amount of research as part of my job. Veterans submit letters, photographs, diaries, postcards, maps, official military documents, and even artifacts (one fellow sent us his combat boots. No lie.), all of which it is sometimes my job to describe. Sometimes I use the veteran’s words to describe these materials. Sometimes I have to do my own research for the metadata necessary to describe an object.

Especially in the case of veterans who served in foreign wars, names of towns, official names of battles, names of weapons and artillery are sometimes spelled incorrectly. I do a little research, what in traditional research terminology would be called searching “Name Authority” records for correct spellings. And sometimes the veteran submits no metadata at all for his materials, and I have to make up the descriptive copy wholly from of my own knowledge and research.

This is the fun part of my job, in my opinion. But I daresay without the Internet, it would be no fun at all. I might actually have to get up from my desk.

For example, a veteran submits a photograph of an unidentified soldier holding what could be generically described as a grenade launcher. The veteran provides no metadata for the photo, other than a place name, which I suspect is misspelled, “Qua Thon.”

I take the harder research topic first: the place name. I enter the name into Google exactly as the veteran spelled it, adding “Vietnam” since I know that the picture must have been taken in Vietnam. Google returns results and even suggests an alternative spelling.

“Did you mean Qui Nhon?” Google asks. Sounds good to me, I reply, and a little reading confirms that there was an American presence at Qui Nhon during Vietnam.

Now, I could write a description that says “Unidentified soldier holding a rocket launcher, Qui Nhon, Vietnam.” Or I could go an extra step. What kinds of rocket launchers did American soldiers use in Vietnam?

A brief google search gives me the answer, including a picture, which confirms that what the soldier holds in his hand is an M-79 40mm grenade launcher. A small detail, but it adds a little to the pciture. There is no way I will ever identify the soldier in the picture, without contacting the veteran. But at least I can get the name of the gun right after about two minutes of research.

How long would that have taken fifteen years ago? Unless I had a reference guide to military weapons sitting beside my desk, the time expenditure probably would not be worth it.

Another example from my work today: a veteran submits a postcard of the Americana Towne Motor Motel in Seattle, Washington. The postcard probably dates from roughly 1966, when the veteran stayed there.

I have all the metadata I need to describe the postcard accurately. But it piques my interest and I embark on a little personal research. Is the Towne Motor Hotel still there? The Space Needle can be clearly seen in the background of the postcard photo, so it makes me wonder.

Fortunately, the address for the motel is on the postcard. 2205 7th Ave. I go to Google Maps, search on that address, restricting the search to “Businesses” and discover that the location is currently occupied by a Days Inn.

Is it the same Days Inn? It looks like it might have been remodeled on the old frame of the motel, but it is probably the same motel. Interestingly, the photograph of the Days Inn in downtown Seattle does not reproduce the view on the postcard, which included the Space Needle. It makes me wonder if the downtown has grown to the point that the Space Needle is no longer visible from the motel parking lot.

Oh, and if I wanted to, I could buy a very similar postcard on eBay. No need to go rooting around boxes of old postcards in antique stores. I remember a used bookstore in my college town that had just such boxes of postcards for sale, and I always wondered how anyone had the patience to look through them for the real gems.

Also thanks to the Internet, I can even bring you a digital image of that postcard. Nothing is beyond our reach now, even the most obscure information.

This kind of research is innocuous and fairly unimportant, as far as that goes. It raises questions in my mind about the differences between 1966 and 1996 and 2008, but these are not questions of imperative importance to anyone but me.

Yet the important point that keeps kicking me in the pants is how impossible this research would have been fifteen or more years ago–impossible without great effort that would far outweigh any reward in satisfying the researcher’s curiosity.

We live in a great age. I hope I never take it for granted.