College students, and those curious about primary source

research.

Well restarted reading a book on the history of labor, and on a lark went to the Wisconsin Historical Society, which is mentioned in my oh 1975 copy. Folks, they have oodles of material on labor history online. I mean news paper articles, and all that. Yes the things we Historians salivate over.

On the bright side, I won't have to TRAVEL beyond my living room to start trolling primary sources which was my great worry. That said, if any of you is in College and you need access to PRIMARY Sources, there you have it. I will look later to see what OTHER state archives have been digitized...

Oh and yes tippy tappy dance...

Oh and here you go, for the obligatory linky

http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/wihistory.asp

Only thing that sucks is... well it is not like I can prod the minds of the reference librarian and I need to know what I am doing... good news I do... but even if you don't know how to cite... the Chicago Manual will help you.

And yes I will have to find a way to support them... perhaps a mug I don't need... or just plain out donation.

This is GREAT WORK they are doing!

There's no good reason to keep source material hidden away offline. Thank you for the link.

and you also risk hurting the primary source...

but it costs money to do these things, costs money to pay for servers to host these things, costs money to pay for archivists to create searchable records - and libraries are funded by taxpayer dollars - and states are hurting b/c so many people are jobless, so many jobs have been sent overseas - so libraries can only do what their budgets will allow.

nevertheless, there is TONS of information online that had been made available to people.

sometimes you have to go to a U. library or have permission to log on to through their servers for access to some things - but source material is not kept hidden away because libraries choose to do so. they don't have funds to pay for the work hours, equipment and material. even libraries that are endowed often have endowments that specify how the money can be used. if the endowment was really strict, no new technology applies in the use of those funds.