Unleashing the undigitized: promoting and accessing traditional historical resources in the age of Google

This session was designed to highlight the fact that despite the enormous amount of primary source material being digitized and made available online, either for free or via subscription, it is still just a drop in the ocean and historians still need to access material in print and microform. However, 'digital natives' increasingly rely solely on what they can find on the web and so there is a danger that a huge amount of valuable source material is being overlooked by students - "if it isn't digitised, it doesn't exist". A representative from ProQuest spoke about what ProQuest is doing to try to bridge the gap between print/microform and online materials - developing online finding aids to non-digitised material, and tools such as 'digital microfilm', which digitises microfilm in a basic way, virtually mimicking the way that microfilm is read, browsing, scrolling and printing rather than fully searchable text. He also gave us some interesting statistics from the realm of historical newspapers to show just how small a percentage of this material has actually been digitised. After some ten years of digitisation projects by various organisations, some 108 million pages have been digitised, which sounds like a lot until you realise how many pages exist in print - the British Library at Collindale has at least 750 million pages, and the Library of Congress some 3 billion!

A librarian and an archivist then spoke about the ways in which they have tried to teach students how to use print and microform primary sources and overcome the instinct not to look beyond Google. They had a large number of useful suggestions about practical ways to teach this kind of information literacy (letting students loose with archival material to give them a taste for the real thing), and about what librarians need to make sure they do - making sure that you really know your collection, especially if print resources are being moved to closed stacks/offsite storage, so that we don't just rely on the web ourselves. A big theme from all three speakers was about making sure that digital resources point to non-digital ones - including them in catalogues, websites, bibliographic databases etc - so that you lead people to them from the digital environment. The other major theme, not unusually for discussions of user education, was the need to get academics on board and realise how librarians can help both them and their students. Unfortunately none of this is really new, and the speakers didn't have any suggestion as to how we can actually overcome the reluctance of both students and academics to seek and accept help from libarians, beyond just 'keep plugging away' - likening it to Sisyphus endlessly pushing his rock up the hill. Not very comforting but I guess not surprising either. I think it's one of the biggest problems librarians have in general, that we feel that we can offer far more than our users feel we can. All the majority of library users really want is to be able to access the resources they want quickly and easily and for us to leave them alone while they do it! Which means that librarians spend an awful lot of time and effort trying to find ways to both justify our existence beyond that and to convince users that they do want more, if only they'd listen to us and let us show them.

That's quite a depressing thought! For me, the most useful thing about this session was the reminder that we shouldn't be complacent in thinking everything's online now, and even though this is something I come up against frequently back at the VHL, I will make sure to keep it in mind.