Dan Cohen: Is Google Good for History?

“Is Google good for history? Of course it is. We historians are searchers and sifters of evidence. Google is probably the most powerful tool in human history for doing just that. It has constructed a deceptively simple way to scan billions of documents instantaneously, and it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of its own money to allow us to read millions of books in our pajamas. Good? How about Great?

But then we historians, like other humanities scholars, are natural-born critics. We can find fault with virtually anything. And this disposition is unsurprisingly exacerbated when a large company, consisting mostly of better-paid graduates from the other side of campus, muscles into our turf. Had Google spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Widener Library at Harvard, surely we would have complained about all those steps up to the front entrance.”

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Moving Words

“Cheerless and drab but ‘full of amazing stuff’. The British Library Newspapers collection at Colindale is moving and also becoming increasingly digitised. Huw Richards wonders if researchers will miss the feel of the paper beneath their fingers

// The journey to the far reaches of the Northern Line’s Edgware branch always did feel rather like time travel – an impression accentuated about 20 years ago when London Underground managers admitted that, on the “next train” indicators on that creaky, rattling stretch of line, one minute really was longer than 60 seconds.

Head out of the Tube station, cross the road and there stands the 1930s blockhouse that houses British Library Newspapers, known simply to its users as Colindale. There can be few historians, at least those concerned with the history of modern Britain, who have not made that journey. For many doctoral students it was the foundation of their research, requiring months of sustained attention to bound volumes and microfilm.

Not, however, for much longer. The announcement in mid-October of a £33 million capital grant, part of a government package for the cultural and creative industries, was Colindale’s death sentence. The hard copies – a collection estimated to total 750 million newspaper pages – will go to a new, purpose-built facility at Boston Spa in Yorkshire, while the 400,000 reels of micro-film and digital access will move to join the rest of the British Library at St Pancras, nine stops and 26 minutes down the Northern Line.”

Read full story. I spent MANY HOURS in Colindale researching material for my PhD

BBC History Website

As usual from the BBC, there’s a good mix of general history, including an interactive timeline (alongside other interactive options), links to the most recent BBC history programmes still available on iPlayer, and a number of themed stories, including a great collection of memories collected from “The People’s War“.