History at your Fingertips: Electronic Information and Communication for Historians
by Thomas Zielke
I.
A few years ago, William H. Gates invented the slogan "Information at
your fingertips". This, he said, was to mean a new generation of
computer software that should be able to give you any information you
need with just a few keystrokes, no matter if it is a text, a
picture, a table, a chart - virtually all information stored in your
computer should then be within easy reach of the user. I think Bill
Gates has not promised too much - at least he is on a good path to
reach this ambitious goal within the next, let's say, ten or twenty
years, and it seems that this slogan will indeed prove more
successful than the last one about the "Paperless Office" - actually
I myself seem to waste more paper than ever before. Now we humble
historians, however, are on quite a similar path - of course it is
not as ambitious as Bill Gates' great vision, but our new slogan
seems to bear as much potential for a revolution and it seems at the
moment that we are much nearer to our goal - our own version of
Microsoft's slogan is 'History at your Fingertips'.
Now what is the meaning of this slogan? It is common knowledge that
these days both information and communication are more important than
ever before - not only in the world of politics, finance or business,
but also in our world of science, teaching and research. On the other
hand, we historians now have learned that time really is money, and
the speed of progress in our science has grown faster and faster in
the last few decades. Additionally, the historian who dedicates all
of his work to one single topic or problem and works on it all by
himself, without any help from colleagues or assistants has almost
become a figure of the past - today, we historians all need to
communicate with each other and we need to exchange information with
each other, and in some sub-disciplines of history it has become an
absolute necessity to work together in groups, and this on a
nationwide, if not on an international range.
So what our slogan "History at your Fingertips" means, and what we
want to achieve in the very near future is to make information and
communication available to every historian around the world, and this
in a way faster and much more comfortable than ever before. I know -
this does sound very ambitious and very expensive, but actually all
this is possible today; unlike Bill Gates we do not need new hardware
nor do we need new software, all we need to do is to use the
resources that are available right now.
II.
Communication via the computer - in our days of worldwide computer
networks, we find that especially our colleagues from the natural (or
exact, as some still like to call them) sciences, and even more those
from the computer sciences are more and more using the computer as a
communication device. Electronic mail seems to be the magic word of
our age: You type a letter just as you would normally do on your
computer, and then you simply press a button and the letter is sent
away - no paper, no envelope, not even a stamp is needed. Electronic
communication is indeed a fast and reliable way of communicating -
once a letter is sent, it will reach the recipient in less than one
hour, even if the letter has to cross the Atlantic Ocean on its way,
and it often takes only minutes for a letter to arrive at its
destination. Apart from sending letters, every kind of electronic
document can be sent via the net, be it a scanned page of a book, a
map, a picture or a photograph or just a data file - if it can be
stored on a diskette, it can also be sent as e-mail. Some systems
also allow to use the net just like a telephone line: You type in a
question, and your partner receives it within seconds and gives you
the answer - and it does not matter in which state, country or
continent your partner is, nor does it matter which network, computer
or program he uses.
But what is needed to get access to this wonderland of electronic
communication? Today, nearly every university or institution offers
free access to at least one of the world-wide computer networks, the
BITNET or the InterNet, for their members. Just ask your local
computer center's staff, and they will certainly tell you what to do
to use this network connection. The rest is similarly easy - if you
know how to log in into your system (and this can be a mainframe
system, a Local Area Network of several PCs or just a simple PC with
a modem that can connect to some remote system with BITNET- or
InterNet- access), there is not much more to know - some basic
knowledge about how to type a letter on your specific system, some
four or five commands to send and receive mail and you are ready to
use your system's mailing capabilities. Some more sophisticated
systems even have menu-based mailing systems which are operated with
just a few keystrokes, and if you need any help, a simple keystroke
will get you any help and information you need to have - so
electronic communication really is just as simple as using a
telephone or a fax or typing a letter. You see: there really is
nothing arcane or mysterious about electronic communication, and one
does not have to be an expert, or have a programmer or a computer
scientist at one's side to use it.
I had my first contact with electronic communication in 1987. To me,
it was then an undiscovered country - it was in fact a mere
coincidence that I heard of it at all. I was working on a project
then where we had to transcribe and store a considerable amount of
historical tax data for statistical analysis. We had to use two
different systems, a brand-new and highly expensive high-end
XT-computer (which was the first computer to be installed at our
institute) and our university's new mainframe system, and of course
we had many questions concerning hardware and software. On one of
these days, when I was at our computer center's information desk
again, the clerk asked me whether I might possibly be interested in
joing a special e-mail forum where I could ask all my questions and
have them answered by an international expert forum. Naturally, I was
interested, and I was given a small but highly informative
introduction brochure to read.
One chapter was dedicated to the LISTSERV-facilities, a computerized
message distribution service which offers a large variety of public
discussion groups, the so-called lists. These lists, I learned, are
actually a list of persons (or, more precisely: their electronic
addresses) who want to discuss a specific topic with a larger group
via the net. To become a member of such a list, one simply sends a
one-line subscription-command to a LISTSERV-site giving the name of
the list one wants to join and one's name. After this request has
been accepted (which usually only takes a few seconds), one receives
a copy of all mail contributions that are sent to list, and one can
of course send own contributions to the list as well. All this
sounded very interesting to me, and with a few hints and tips I
managed to join a few of those discussion groups where people talked
about programming and computers. It was amazing - whenever I had a
problem, I just had to send it to the forum, and soon afterwards I
received a large number of tips, ideas and even whole source program
texts to solve my problems. It really was like having a whole staff
of experts sitting in the office next door, just waiting for me to
ask for help.
One of those countless letters gave me a hint that there was a list
that was dedicated to the discussion of history in all its aspects.
The name of this list was (what else could it have been?) HISTORY,
and to hear of it and to join it was only a matter of seconds. At
this time, the list was physically located somewhere in Finland -
Helsinki University of Technology, to be more exact - and had about
90 members (of which a considerable number are still on the list),
and the initiator and list-owner (which is what the person is called
who does all the necessary adminstrative work and who is finally
responsible for the list) was a Finnish scholar at that time. Soon I
noticed HISTORY's unique atmosphere - the conversation was lively,
sometimes a bit chatty, but always very informative, and I felt
somewhat reminded of a discussion which could as well take place in
the corridor of my department. The variety of topics was enormous -
it ranged from Ancient History to the Second World-War, from Social
History to Historiography, from teaching History to research
problems; virtually every discipline and aspect of history was
covered on this list. Again - whenever I had a question, I only had
to send it to HISTORY and to wait for all the answers to come in.
Some months later, the Postmaster of HISTORY's home-node informed the
list-members that the owner of the list had obviously moved to new
duties and was no longer available for maintaining the list. In
addition, we were told - or rather: warned - that if nobody would
volunteer to become owner of this list, the list would be closed and
deleted. A few list-members, including me, immediately offered to
fulfil the duties of owning the list. I did not really think that I
would be the one to be chosen, but a few days later I received a
letter from the Postmaster informing me that, since I was the only
volunteer from Europe and they preferred to have a list-owner whose
home-node was as near as possible to HISTORY's node, I had been made
the owner of the HISTORY list. Imagine my surprise and horror - there
I was, owning a list consisting of a large number of scholars from
all around the world, with virtually no idea what to do. However, as
LISTSERV is one of the best-documented software-systems I have ever
seen, I was soon provided with whole stacks of material how to
operate a list - and to my great relief I found out that it really
was not that difficult to do - a simple set of four of five commands
were all I needed to do the job, and the Postmaster of HISTORY's
node, Mr. Salminen, was so kind to offer me any help and assistance I
needed in my first days as a list-owner.
Now what exactly does it mean to be a list-owner? As a list-owner,
one's main task is to keep the list running: if there are problems
with mail returned to LISTSERV because of invalid addresses, it's the
list- owner's duty to fix that problem, normally by stopping
distribution of mail to the address in question or by deleting that
address from the list; and if the whole list comes to a stand-still
due to a LISTSERV-problem, the list-owner has to contact the people
that are in charge of LISTSERV to find and solve the problem.
Additionally, the list-owner helps people who are experiencing
problems with the list or who just need information about the list
and how to join the discussion group- but this is only the easy part
of the job.
The list-owner is also a kind of ombudsman for the whole group:
Whenever a list-member receives unwanted or even offensive mail, the
list-owner is the person to contact and who has to take proper
actions to solve the problem. In most cases, a short, polite letter
to the person who caused the problem will do, but sometimes one meets
a situation where harder measures are unavoidable; ranging from
temporarily removing the offender from the list to having the person
in question withdrawn further access to the net. Luckily, I have
never had to go this far - in fact I often find that the members of
HISTORY have, as a group, evolved a sense of responsibility,
discipline and control, a set of rules that helps to avoid most of
the problems that may come up in a large and heterogenous group of
people. But what, you may ask yourselves, is the HISTORY list like?
I think one can describe HISTORY best as by the first impression I
had of it: a kind of electronic Common Room where you find your
friends and colleagues discussing various things in a number of small
groups, where questions are asked and answered, where you can find
information and help - or just chat about things and problems that
you would normally discuss with colleagues.
So when you first enter the HISTORY community, you might find the
group discussing things you would not have expected - we have been,
for example, discussing the Los Angeles riots, the German
re-unification, H. Ross Perot' campaign or whatever is a current
issue. Certainly, you might expect us discussing History instead -
but then whatever we discuss is being looked at from the historian's
point of view, and every of those 'unexpected' discussions reflect
the way we historians see the world that surrounds us. And what is
more, these discussions reflect the perspectives of the American
historian, the French historian, the German historian, and I
personally find that I this is as important as discussing history
itself - these discussions help us understand the views and opinions
of our colleagues in other countries. And is it not true that
especially we historians must learn to see things from more than one
point of view? In that respect, HISTORY can certainly be a help in
reaching the historian's goal of being as objective as possible.
Nevertheless: Whoever wants to discuss a topic or a specific problem
that is related to history can feel free to bring up a new discussion
about whatever he or she would like to have discussed in our forum,
be it Medieval History, American History, political history - you
will always find some partners for your discussion. Sometimes some
list-member will point you to another, perhaps more specialized forum
which is also discussing your topic at the moment, or you may as well
find yourself in a very lively and intense private correspondence
with one or two list members very soon.
Besides being a forum for discussing history and related topics,
HISTORY also acts as an information service - we receive conference
announcements, calls for papers, information about new e-journals,
bibliographies and data files that have been made accessible to the
public, invitations for new, specialized LISTSERV-lists, and if you
need tips which books to use in your class or for your paper, you
will get most certainly get several recommendations, if not even a
complete bibliography. As you see - with HISTORY, we historians have
a fantastic source for information, and all you have to do is to go
and collect the information you need.
III.
After a few months as a list-owner, I noticed that HISTORY had from
its small beginnings grown to almost 180 subscribers, most of them
from the USA and Canada. The communication was livelier than ever,
and on some days almost 80 pieces of mail from HISTORY arrived in my
mailbox. Since HISTORY was then physically located in Finland, this
meant that every single contribution from, let's say, the United
States, had to be transmitted across the Atlantic and then via
France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Sweden
till it would finally reach Finland where it would be re-distributed
to the subscribers - and then, of course, the mail had to travel all
the way back. This whole process took quite some time as well as it
used up a considerable amount of network resources, and whenever one
of the various communication links on the way to Helsinki was down
for a while, communication with HISTORY was down, too. I was then
thinking about moving HISTORY to a new home site somewhere in the
U.S., but I knew this would only mean shifting the problem, not
solving it.
I discussed the problem with the Postmaster responsible for
HISTORY, and he suggested to use LISTSERV's peered-list feature. This
feature allows large lists to be split up into a number of smaller
lists, all of which are then connected with the other lists to form a
kind of sub-network. In a second step, all subscriptions are moved to
their nearest list-site - this is done with one single LISTSERV
command, as LISTSERV 'knows' of all list sites that are available and
can calculate which of these sites is nearest to which subscriber.
Additionally, LISTSERV automatically informs every subscriber that he
or she is served by another node from that time on. After these
operations have been completed, a contribution sent to the list is
handled in a different way than on a single-sited list: The
LISTSERV-installation which receives the mail first distributes it to
all subscribers on the local list. After that, another copy is sent
to the adjacent list-sites, which then distribute it to their local
list of subscribers and pass it on to their neighbour-lists until the
last site in the chain is reached. This system, of course,
considerably speeds up the process of mail distribution and makes the
whole list-traffic less vulnerable to broken communication links,
since even if a link between two sub-lists is down, the lists that
are connected can still communicate, and should all inter-list links
break down for some time, one can still communicate with the
subscribers on one's local list.
As soon as I knew about this feature, I contacted several postmasters
to find out if any of them was willing to host HISTORY at his node.
Within two weeks, I received positive answers from a number of sites
in the U.S., and I decided to have at least two HISTORY-sites there,
as the number of subscribers from North America had grown even higher
in the meantime. The first new HISTORY site was opened in Buffalo,
followed by another site at the Rutgers University, and a few weeks
later I could proudly announce the opening of yet another site at the
University of Missouri at Rolla. The last node on the American
continent has been installed here, at the University of Kansas,
several months ago. On my side of the Atlantic, things took a bit
longer, but after some negotiations I was able to add the University
College of Dublin and the Gesellschaft fuer wissenschaftliche
Datenverarbeitung at Goettingen to my list of HISTORY sites. The
latest new sub-list is located in Czechoslovakia - this node has been
in operation for just a few months now.
Nodename Location Country Subscribers
CSEARN Czech Technical University, Prague Czechoslovakia 2
DGOGWDG1 Gesellschaft fuer wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung,
Goettingen Germany 16
FINHUTC Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki, Finland 7
IRLEARN University College Dublin, Dublin Ireland 24
RUTVM1 Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ USA 188
UBVM State University of NewYork at Buffalo, NY USA 61
UKANVM University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas USA 19
UMRVMB University of Missouri, Rolla USA 10
Table 1: Current HISTORY nodes
So what used to be managed by one single node is now done by
altogether eight nodes. The nodes at Buffalo and Dublin form the
trans-Atlantic backbone, every piece of HISTORY mail is being sent
via this link to reach the - respectively - other continent. From
Ireland, HISTORY-links go to Finland and Germany, and the
Czechoslovakian node is linked to HISTORY through Germany. The node
at Buffalo is connected to Rutgers and Kansas, while the
Missouri-node is connected via Rutgers. This new structure, as
complex as it may appear, was quite easy to install, and it did in
fact speed up the process of message re-distribution dramatically -
for some subscribers it now took only seconds to receive the
acknowledgement that their contribution had been received by
LISTSERV, and I myself was able to receive mail from HISTORY only ten
to twenty minutes after the sender had transmitted it to his HISTORY
site.
The subscribers of HISTORY, however, normally do not notice that
HISTORY is split up in a number of sub-lists. For them, the only
change was that they had to direct their mail to another node than
before, while the system itself behaved just as if it consisted of
one single list. Maintaining the list became more comfortable, too.
Before, I always had to wait one or even two days whenever I told
LISTSERV to send me a copy of the list for maintenance, and I what I
received was a rather large file that was a bit awkward to handle on
my system. A major problem then was that from the moment I was sent
the list until the time the changed file arrived at the LISTSERV site
the whole list was 'locked', which means that during that time
LISTSERV did not accept any subscriptions to the list - sometimes as
long as four or five days. After splitting up the list all I had to
do was to order a copy of just those sub-lists that needed
maintenance, while the rest of the lists could remain totally
operative, which made things much more convenient for the users of
HISTORY and for me as the list-owner. Some of the new history lists
have, by the way, been set up in a similar way. Both SOVHIST and
RUSHIST, for example, are split up in four sub-lists which are
located at USCVM, UMRVMB (Rolla), DOSUNI1 (Osnabrueck, Germany) and
CSEARN (Czechoslovakia), and I assume that some more lists are going
to follow our example.
At this point, I'd like to point out that HISTORY with its whole
structure is remotely operated from a terminal in Oldenburg, Germany
- it is not necessary to have a LISTSERV installed at one's local
site, nor is it needed to have an account at the node where your list
is located. All LISTSERV commands can be sent via e-mail or
interactive messages, so it is no problem at all to have a list
located at a site hundreds of miles away from wherever you are - and
this means that everybody who has access to electronic mail
facilities can be a list-owner.
IV.
In the following months after its re-structuring, HISTORY continually
grew larger and larger, and it soon reached the number of 250
subscribers. On some days, more than 100 messages were sent via
HISTORY, and we often had four or five discussions on the list
simultaneously. Very soon I received private letters from several
subscribers whether it would be possible to have some of the various
discussions on HISTORY moved to separate, specialized lists. I
tried to find out if there were such lists, but I only found a few,
and none of these were discussing what my subscribers wanted to
discuss - so there was obviously a great need for more
history-related lists.
I decided to ask the list if some of the members might be interested
in becoming list-owners themselves, and I was amazed to hear that
quite a few subscribers had already thought of starting their own
lists, but did not know how to do so. I told them that I would of
course provide them with every information they might need and began
asking the forum which discussion list they would like to have on the
net. I received about ten suggestions and managed to find some people
to volunteer as a future list-owner, while I myself created two new
groups - EMHIST-L for the discussion of Early Modern History and
GRMNHIST for German History.
A few months ago I asked again whether there was any need for new
discussion groups, and I received about twenty letters, all full with
ideas and requests for new lists. As a result, we have about ten new
lists on the net since then, and I feel encouraged to start a new
round of list-creation by the end of this year - as far as I can see,
there are a lot of topics that would be worth a special list. Just to
give a few examples of recently opened lists: we now have a list for
Islamic history, one for the history of law, one for medieval
history, one for the history of the American West, another one for
Soviet history and a list for Russian history - there are many more,
of course, but to name them all here would take too much time. In
addition, a list for the discussion of Social History has been opened
only a few days ago, and we hope to have a new special list for
Women's History very soon.
However, HISTORY has grown even larger since then, and it seems that
it is still growing. I had in fact thought that if we introduced new
specialized lists, a larger number of subscribers would leave HISTORY
and move to those new lists, but though the new lists were more or
less stormed with subscriptions from HISTORY-members, these
subscribers did stay participantss of HISTORY, too. It seems that
they discuss their special interests and questions on specialized
lists, while they come to HISTORY to discuss more general issues - in
fact, HISTORY has since then become more and more like a kind of
electronic Common Room.
A recent count showed that HISTORY now has about 320 subscribers from
about 20 countries, with the majority of subscribers coming from the
USA. A number of the subscriptions are not from individual persons
but from so-called newsgroups or local message re-distribution
services, so we may suspect that the actual number of readers is even
higher - some rough estimations go as far as to more than 600 regular
readers. Of course, these numbers are subject to seasonal changes -
we notice quite a number of people leaving the list during the summer
(which is the time when students leave university and lose their
e-mail accounts), while at the end of summer there is a wave of new
subscriptions to our lists, but in the long term there is a
continuing rise in the number of subscriptions. So if we regard the
numbers above, I think it would not be too audacious to say that
HISTORY is one of the most successful electronic discussion groups in
the Humanities.
V.
As you can see, with our HISTORY list and all its affiliates we have
quite a lot of facilities to offer in the area of electronic
communication for historians. However, so far we have only been
scratching the surface. Our plans go as far as to create a world-wide
federation of all these lists - the History Network. While we were
still in the process of creating new discussion groups, Professor
Lynn Nelson and I began discussing if it would make sense to form a
kind of co-operation between all existing and future history-related
lists to make information exchange between all those faster and more
effective. I found this idea a rather fascinating one and began
immediately to set up a new list named HISTOWNR - a list that should
serve as a discussion forum for those persons who own and maintain
history-related lists as well as a kind of information exchange where
people can send whatever they feel might be interesting for more than
one list, so that those list-owners who are members of HISTOWNR can
re-distribute this information to their own lists. HISTOWNR is also a
forum that provides help and assistance to all those who want to
create a new list but need information on how to do this. We assist
them in finding a host site for their list, help them in the
technical process of creating the list and provide them with all the
manuals they need, and after the new list has been opened, we help
the owner solving all the problems that may occur.
HISTOWNR, however, is only the first step towards the History
Network. Our next step will be the creation of a History Network
Committee whose members will come from the HISTOWNR group and whose
primary task will be to plan the future activities of the Network and
to set up a kind of official charter for the History Network which
will describe the nature, the purpose, the tasks and the activities
of this institution.
One of these future tasks of the Network will be the creation of even
more electronic discussion groups, until we reach a point where there
is a specialized forum for virtually every period, region and sub-
discipline of history, so that every potential subscriber will be
able to find at least one forum that covers his particular fields of
interest. The owners of these groups will find their forum in the
already existing HISTOWNR list which will provide technical help and
assistance as well as it will serve as a forum for administrative
questions. A first step in the latter direction has already been
made, as we will soon begin setting up a model guide for history
discussion lists providing both technical information for the user
and a kind of 'e-mail manner book'.
Additionally, the History Network Commitee will co-ordinate all
activities in and around the History Network - apart from being the
Network's top instance of information and assistance for list-owners
and subscribers it will also maintain contacts to institutions,
historians' associations, universities, journals and the press. For
example, we hope to establish a co-operation with the Gutenberg
Project in the near future, and we intend to have regular contacts
with the AHC, the Humanities Computing Faculty of UCSB and the
Canadian Historians' Association.
Another task of the History Network will be to make more and more
electronic resources available. Besides all the present and future
history discussion lists, we need to have a larger number of
electronic archive sites within easy reach of the e-netted historian
- archives that store papers or even whole books, sources, lectures,
bibliographies, pictures and many more. We do have already two such
sites, one right here at the University of Kansas and one at
Mississippi State University, but this certainly is not enough for
the masses of data that are only waiting to made available for public
access. Our goal is to have at least one FTP-site for every list
associated with the History Network as well as a collection of texts,
files and utility programs that should be available at several sites
within easy reach. (Those of you who are interested in hearing more
about FTP-servers for historians might be interested in Professor
Mabry's paper that will be presented later in this session).
Of course, we have many more plans for the History Network. Imagine,
for example, conferences and congresses being held via the net, where
papers are presented and discussed while you do not have to travel at
all but can follow every single session on the screen of your
computer. You might have noticed the short note in the program of
this conference asking all the participants to have an electronic
copy of their paper stored on this university's FTP-server -
this is our first experiment in this area, and we hope that, if this
will prove successful, other universities will follow our example.
Another highly promising idea is to have national or even
international research groups work together through a special,
private discussion list which allows them to discuss their work and
exchange all information just as easy as if the members
of the group had their offices just across the corridor. Even the
exchange of information on your campus or in your faculty would be
much more comfortable with the aid of a message distribution service
- all information presented on your screen for quick selection and
retrieval, without the need to have stacks of paper copied and
carried through the whole department, and with one or two keystrokes
you could send important information or announcements to your
colleagues of other universities. Your students could have texts,
bibliographies and sources as well as the text of your lectures
available on a local file-server, and you could as well answer their
questions via e-mail.
Again, the tools and resources for all these services are already
existing - and the History Network will be glad to help and assist
all those who want to make use of these facilities. Still, there is
one major problem that we must deal with - it is the status of the
work that all those who are maintaining file-servers, editing
e-journals or moderating discussion lists do for our academic
community.
For example, we have to convince our faculties and our colleagues
that e-mail is not just a mere waste of time, but a valuable and
comfortable tool. We must find more professional acceptance for
e-journals - what makes a printed journal more serious and important
than an e-journal, especially when the latter is more easily
available and can be produced and distributed in a much easier - and
cheaper - way? And finally, the work we do out there in the networks
for our academic world must start to win at least some recognition in
the academic community itself - the owner of a list or the editor of
an e-journal is in quite a similar position as the editor of any
other printed newsletter or journal, so why is the work of the latter
highly recognized and reputed while the first is not? Working as a
list-owner or as an editor of an e-journal is in fact a highly
responsible task, and this work is done in and for an international
forum, but at the moment, all of us who are helping to offer this
large number of communication services and facilities are still
lacking the support they need to accomplish all their tasks and
duties - the History Network will hopefully be able to offer at least
some help and support, but still there will be a great need the
support of our universities, faculties and colleagues. And I am not
speaking of mere technical support, of course.
Actually, we all do all this work on a more or less voluntary basis,
in our spare-time, our lunch-break or after office-hours - so far, I
have not heard of any employer who allows a list-owner to dedicate an
hour or even half an hour of his working hours to his list.
Naturally, I do not mean to persuade universities and institutions to
offer jobs and positions wholly dedicated to e-communication - I am
not sure whether it would make sense for any institution to have a
full-time list-owner. But it would be a good thing if our employers
were to recognize that the work we do out there in the net might make
the name of our universities and institutes known all over the world.
They are, in fact, right now missing a chance to gain some more,
perhaps worldwide, reputation for their institution - for example,
who of you has ever heard of my university, the
Carl-von-Ossietzky-University Oldenburg, although this university
seems to become more and more a center of electronic
communication for historians?
It seems that at the moment, only a small number of us historians
know about electronic communication at all. Especially in Europe, the
number of those who use the computer as a communication tool is
almost negligible - for example, in Germany there are less than five
historians who are members of at least one of the various discussion
lists, and we have a similar or even worse situation in France, the
Netherlands, Spain or any other country on the continent. This is
especially curious if we remember that, for example, France and
Germany have gained some reputation in the field of History and
Computing - I could easily name some German historians, institutions
or Departments of History who have specialized in this field, but are
not using their facilities to take part in electronic communication.
The History Network will find a lot of work to do here as far as
making our e-mail facilities known and available for the historian is
concerned, and as soon as the History Network has been officially
established, we hope to be able to publish a number of articles and
papers in various history journals to show our colleagues the
benefits of electronic communication.
VI.
History at Your Fingertips - in this short paper I was only able to
give you a rather sketchy idea of the present and the future of
electronic communication for historians - a more detailed overview
about LISTSERV, for example, would fill more than twenty pages, and
the list of all LISTSERV lists that are available is more than forty
pages long, and if I were to start discussing all the technical
details of e-mail, we would need hours, if not days to do so. (We
will of course be glad to give you any detailed information you would
like to have, and I hope that I will be able to answer most of your
questions in a few moments.) Fortunately, as I hope to have made
clear, it is not necessary at all to have a thorough understanding of
what is happening behind the scenes of the network - for us, it is
only interesting to know how to operate our e-mail facilities, and
that, as you have seen, is just as easy as sending a fax or making a
telephone call.
One last point needs to be considered here. We do not intend to have
our academic community of historians communicate only via e-mail. It
is a very different thing if you can talk to somebody personally,
with the other person being in the same room as you are - there is a
special quality in direct human contact e-mail will never have, and I
myself would never want to miss the direct contact with my
colleagues, where I can hear their voices and see their faces and
their gestures. However, if this direct, personal contact is not
possible for any reason, electronic mail provides a very effective,
fast and reliable tool for communication. For example, while I was
preparing this paper, I was in communication with Mr. Dell (whom I
would like to thank for his kind help and assistance at this point)
almost every day - without electronic communication I would have
never been able to present this paper at this conference at all. We
certainly do not want academic communication to lose any of all those
qualities - instead, we want to add to these qualities.
Hopefully, we will soon be able to announce the formal foundation of
the History Network - I have decided to send a first call for
participants for a founding commitee within the next few weeks.
However, it will still be a long and hard way before all our plans
finally become reality, and there is a vast amount of work to be done
before we can talk of electronic communication as a routine tool for
the historian's work and research. As I have said before, all
the resources we need are already available and are waiting for us to
use them - what we need today is your help, your support and your
assistance to make electronic communication the powerful and helpful
tool it could be - for history, for the historian, for every one of
us.
Thomas Zielke
Historisches Seminar
Carl-von-Ossietzky-Universitaet Oldenburg
Postfach 2503
D-W-2900 Oldenburg
Germany
