Words I never thought I would say: I miss microfilm.
Not the faint chemical odor or the kind of sea sickness that inevitably results, of course, but the time it required of me. I came to this realization during a recent visit to the New-York Historical Society. I had to look at a few things on microfilm, and it felt like returning to an old friend. (More on this visit in a later post).
With a few exceptions (including my day at the NYHS), I haven’t used microfilm since my dissertation research because most of what I need has been digitized. Digitization has allowed more people to access historical documents, and the ability to do keyword searches of an entire run of a newspaper has led to new kinds of research questions, as Caleb McDaniel has discussed on his excellent Offprints blog.
At first, I didn’t put a lot of thought into how digital research differed from what I did before. When I began my first post-dissertation research project, I turned to databases like America’s Historical Newspapers to collect dozens of articles on a topic in a 30-minute break between classes. I saved the articles that seemed relevant, and, if I had time, I created an entry in Zotero. ”Search/scan/save” became my new research process by default. I rarely had time to read and take notes on the articles as I found them; nor did I read through complete issues of newspapers anymore. But I did have several brand new folders on my laptop’s desktop filled with PDFs. I would read through them later, I told myself — when I had time.
While this looked like research, it didn’t feel that way.
In the old days – the early 2000s – I lived in the microfilm room. I spent hours each week sitting in the basement of the library. The microfilm reader and the ten-cent charge for printing a page forced me to progress slowly. I read every handwritten letter then and there. Using the old notecard system, I wrote out an index card for each one – author, date, a few notes about the content. The already glacially slow process would ground to a halt when I decided to print. Later in the day, I would sort and staple the day’s stack of documents, at which time I had to re-read each letter again in order to make more detailed notes on the letter’s card.
I do not mean to romanticize microfilm. The microfilm room could feel like an over-air-conditioned prison. There were no windows, and time seemed to stand still. To make matters worse, while I had sentenced myself to this machine for three or four hours, I watched the editorial assistants for the Journal of Southern History come and go, fact-checking their one item, merrily rewinding their reel, and returning to the light.
Yet now I understand how vital this experience was to my work. The process of reading and printing from microfilm forced me to move slowly. It carved out a quiet portion of my day when I was alone with my thoughts and unable to multitask. I had to focus on each letter at that moment. I can’t remember this time in the library’s basement leading to any particular breakthrough – for me that happens when I write and revise – but I think this time away from books, my own writing, and, of course, the Internet was essential. It was a researcher’s version of what Pico Iyer describes in a recent New York Times piece about the importance of quiet and solitude to creative thinking.
One of running topics here will be to consider how the means of research shapes our process and the relationship we have to our sources. If you have any similar experiences or thoughts on this matter in your own research, please share!
Part III will examine how I’ve tried to reinsert slowness into my research process and to blend the good aspects of my old practices with the advantages offered by new technology.
