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[llanfair]

In response to your question, glowdart, I would expect them to have a copy of the article available anyhow through their own database subscriptions.  As for a book, I would wait to see if they purchase a copy on their own, and if not, go ahead and send it -- if partly to make sure that other scholars can consult your work when they are researching at the same archive.  Those are just pragmatic considerations -- others may have more information about the dimensions of "courtesy" in making such a donation.

I agree. I might send the book in the hopes of them adding it to their collection. I wouldn't send a hard copy of an article. If your goal is to let them know you published something as a result of work in their archives (and are therefore thankful for their support), then an e-mail to your contact person giving the publication details of the article or book would be nice and a copy of a book would be nice and might get it added to the collection.

On my recent trip to the UK, I found a collection that will make a paper; when I told the archivist about it, he said he'd look forward to reading it.  Since most journals send courtesy copies to the author, why not send one along to the archive? If they don't want to keep it, they can recycle/discard it, but I think it's a nice gesture ... isn't it?

That was kind of my thinking, llanfair, although I'd need to buy at least one of the volumes since publishers are not sending many proofs these days.  I am thinking of this less as "please add this random volume to your collection" and more "thank you for letting me publish materials from your collection! Here's what I did.  Please let me continue to mine these materials in future publications."  I needed to get the archive's permission to use these materials, so it strikes me that the least I can do (aside from the crediting and thanks in the publication) is to send a copy of the publications to them.  (But, this isn't some small county archive, either.)

But then I thought maybe that was strange.    

And then I thought, maybe I'm burning bridges if I don't send a copy, but do I send a hard copy or a photocopy?  Do I buy the volume to mail to them?  

And then I thought, Fora to the rescue!  

In my case, it'll be articles for the foreseeable future, rather than books - I can see why someone would think twice about a/buying and b/shipping a book to an archive that might not be the least bit interested! But this particular archivist has been pretty keen on getting another collection published, so I knew he'd enjoy reading this paper.  (This paper, that is, that doesn't yet exist except in the dark recesses of my tiny little brain ...)

[merce]

Ok kids.

I don't usually work in American archives but I want to do up a birthday present for a friend who works on San Francisco. I wanted to get images of maps from his period and of the specific part of San Fran he does.
Why on earth am I not finding anything? I ended up at the National Archives but my sleuthing techniques seem uneffectual in this New World of the Modern era. Any tips on how to get maps and pics of San Francisco from archives.
I thought this would be an hour search but I have been trolling for an hour sans success.
Man, I feel like a total dunce!

The San Fran Public Library seems to have some nice photos though.

[glowdart]

Ok kids.

I don't usually work in American archives but I want to do up a birthday present for a friend who works on San Francisco. I wanted to get images of maps from his period and of the specific part of San Fran he does.
Why on earth am I not finding anything? I ended up at the National Archives but my sleuthing techniques seem uneffectual in this New World of the Modern era. Any tips on how to get maps and pics of San Francisco from archives.
I thought this would be an hour search but I have been trolling for an hour sans success.
Man, I feel like a total dunce!

The San Fran Public Library seems to have some nice photos though.

http://www.themapdatabase.com/?s=san+francisco

Not much under that search, but if you play with the search engine, there might be more.  He links to the archives where he's found them. 

[systeme_d_]

Ok kids.

I don't usually work in American archives but I want to do up a birthday present for a friend who works on San Francisco. I wanted to get images of maps from his period and of the specific part of San Fran he does.
Why on earth am I not finding anything? I ended up at the National Archives but my sleuthing techniques seem uneffectual in this New World of the Modern era. Any tips on how to get maps and pics of San Francisco from archives.
I thought this would be an hour search but I have been trolling for an hour sans success.
Man, I feel like a total dunce!

The San Fran Public Library seems to have some nice photos though.

http://www.historicmapworks.com/Search/city.php?query=san+francisco&State=CA&x=34&y=5

http://www.davidrumsey.com/SanFran.htm

http://www.davidrumsey.com/view/2d-gis

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/gmd:@filreq%28%2B@FIELD%28SUBJ%2B@band%28%2BUnited%2BStates%2B%2BCalifornia%2B%2BSan%2BFrancisco%2B%2B%29%29%2B@field%28COLLID%2Bpmmap%29%29

[systeme_d_]

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/mapsaux/histopo/sfhistopo.html

[merce]

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Y'all rock!
Thanks a ton! I'm going to have plenty of material to make a cool gift. Now all I need is some artistic talent to pull off the process.

[diogenes]

Grad student in 17th/18th century Atlantic world here. I've been doing archival research for four months now in a Western European country with another four to go, so I read this thread with great interest. Its interesting to see an aggregate of different people's experiences, and a bit reassuring too, since archival work is pretty isolating. (It didn't help that my being abroad for so long caused the end of a fairly serious relationship, an all too common tale it seems).

I've found grappling with paleography to be by far the most unexpected challenge so far. I had experience with English paleography going back to circa 1540 before I started my dissertation research so I thought I was fairly well prepared, but working with manuscripts in other languages has presented a challenge because of all the unfamiliar abbreviations. In fact I wasted my first month deciphering a fairly short but rather illegible document, only to realize afterward that it had been published in an obscure book from the 1820s that is scanned on archive.org!

Now that I've got more paleography and language skills I'm going at a better pace, but I'm still a bit worried about the "yield" of usable data that I'm getting from the sources I'm looking at. I often will put in a good 6 hour day of leafing through uncatalogued colonial documents and end up with only one or two citations that I can actually use in my dissertation (this is after looking over around five hundred pages or so of manuscripts). Other days I end up with five or six, but its still pretty slow going. I'm curious what others on this thread find their daily yield to be.

As for organization, for the past month I've used a database program called Devonthink that I like quite a bit. Each "unit" of archival findings (basically corresponding to a single footnote citation) gets its own .rtf file that Devonthink organizes and indexes for search in a fairly sophisticated manner. I'm writing using Scrivener and collecting bibliographic data using Zotero and the three seem to work together fairly well.

One thing that's been on my mind here - what will become of archival work (and travel grants to visit archives) as digitalization moves forward? Already I've come to the realization that quite a few of the rare books I thought I needed to travel to Europe to view (and received outside funding to do so) are actually on Google Books. Even a good chunk of the manuscripts I'm looking at could just as easily be accessed from my couch back in the states... It all makes me wonder when the people who administer research funding for visiting archives will catch on, and what they'll do about it.

[tuxedo_cat]

Welcome, diogenes!  I've definitely enjoyed hearing other people's reflections about what makes archival research both frustrating and incredibly fun -- maybe both at the same time.  I can't offer much concrete feedback about daily yield for the kind of research you're doing, since my work is pretty different.  But I imagine almost all of us have had periods of feeling daunted by the stuff we're trying to make sense of -- for a whole slew of reasons.

Since you're a grad student, it might be helpful to keep in mind that you're really accumulating two sets of knowledge: both material for the diss, but also the concrete experiences of simply learning how to be an archival scholar and developing more efficient ways of doing all that research.

Your question about the impact of digitalization is one that I've been thinking about for a long time -- I really assumed that the broader access of materials might really change the kind of scholarship that is being done, but in my field (literary studies, interdisciplinary), I have not seen any tectonic shifts.  I am *very* grateful, however, for the fact that I can drive to a local college only 40 min. down the road to get access to EEBO instead of waiting until I have the time and money to get down to the Folger from where I teach in New England.  

In terms of funding, I suspect that those resources may not change that much.  You probably already have some sense of the fact that in many cases, it makes a huge difference to have the artifacts in your hand, and to be in a research library that has a full range of other research resources easily at hand.  At least I hope that will continue to be the case!

[watermarkup]

Diogenes, when I was doing archival research for the first time as a grad student (in an MLA field), I also felt like my limited experience in paleography was preventing me from reading some things. After that year abroad, I came back and started writing, and then returned after two years for a month-long follow-up visit. What I found on the follow-up visit was that I did miss some things from sources I had examined at the beginning of my year abroad, but that my ability to decipher the writing improved enough over the following months so that I didn't get all that much out of re-checking sources I had looked at later in that year. So if you get a chance you may want to take a second look at things you looked at when you first arrived, but before long you'll probably be much more comfortable and productive.

I know that Google Books and various digitalization projects have made it possible for me to conduct a serious research project from my current home (approximately 50 miles from the middle of nowhere) that ten years ago would have required substantial time abroad and access to a major research library. Still, the smaller collections aren't going to be digitized any time soon, and there's a lot about a book or manuscript you can't tell from a digital image. We can get access to some version of a lot of things these days, but it will be a long time before we'll have access to every version. Alas, we will have to keep finding funding to spend summers in Europe for several decades yet, I fear.

[seniorscholar]

As for the work you're struggling with right now, diogenes, is there any chance the archive is one which will allow you to take digital photographs (some do, some don't, and some that don't will change their mind if you promise to turn off the flash). I have never tried to actually transcribe lots of material from a photo, but being able to put it on the computer (months or years later, at home) and enlarge the section that's driving me nuts has been a great boon, as has the ability to check "exact quotations" when I have a final manuscript ready to send to an editor.

[diogenes]

This particular archive does allow photographs. I plan to take a lot of during my last couple weeks, but for now I'm trying to force myself to spend a lot of time transcribing so I can improve now while I'm in my research country rather than later at home. I also found that some of the photos I took during a research trip in London last year were so poorly lit that I couldn't even read them, which was unfortunate... hope not to make that mistake again.

As for digitization, I agree that there is a lot that's lost by not having the opportunity to physically handle a document (what's written on the back of it, for one thing). I think that little details like the quality of the paper can also offer some clues and insights. But then again, I learned upon arriving at one of my archives that almost everything I needed to look at was now available only on microfilm. In the case of that, I'd much prefer to see a scanned document at home. Its hard to justify the travel costs if you're just going to be looking at a duplicate image anyway. In the next 5-10 years I imagine a lot of archival microfilms will be digitized, which I think will change the nature of historical research quite a bit.