Looking Back With IT

Looking Back : History and IT advances

Ambeth Ocampo aocampo@ateneo.edu
Inquirer News Service

TEACHING my favorite nephew to count is a delightful experience. His numerical world is limited by his little fingers. Sometimes as an excuse to tickle him, we extend the counting from 10 to 20 by going from his fingers to his toes. To go beyond one's hands and feet, one needs to use the brain or, at least, pen and paper. With a calculator, one can even go further and faster than we ever can on pen and paper. All this reminds me of the raging issue in grade school: Were we to continue doing Math with our heads, or would we be allowed the use of calculators?

One school of thought rightfully asserted that the calculators would dull the mind. Just go to any department store and watch sales personnel use a calculator for things as simple as 2 + 2. On the other hand, other teachers were of the opinion that a calculator would enable students to do very big and complicated computations. If one did not know the general principles of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, a calculator would remain useless. The impasse was broken when it was ruled that we could take Math tests with calculators provided every student in the class had a calculator.

The same can be said of computers, except that my computer use is limited to word processing. A desktop computer or a laptop is merely a typewriter to me, and I am humbled when people a fourth my age show me other things the machine can do. When I was in college, one of my professors refused to accept my term paper because it was printed with a dot matrix printer; she insisted that the paper be typewritten. Things have come a long way since then, and watching both sides of the political spectrum commenting on the "Hello Garci" tapes, armed with the expert opinion of audio experts, made me realize that in some ways technology has made the task of the historian more complicated.

One example is the use of OPAC -- Online Public Access Catalogs -- in most libraries today. When I give out an assignment, students will rush to the OPAC to do some research, and when the result is negative, they give up. Most students have to be told that there is such a thing called the Card Catalog, or certain published finding guides, on the shelves that will direct you to the book or manuscript being sought. Worse, some students only do research on the Internet. They make a Google search and if the result is negative, they have to be forced to physically seek out the source in a library or archive. When I give students a "bring me" quiz, I would let them look for something that is not yet on OPAC. Worse, if I know where on the shelf the book is, I would hide it just to see how far they would go in their research. What happens to research when there is no electricity?

Just recently I was reading a book that cited a source that I had used in an archive in Spain. The author was an armchair researcher who wrote the archive, requesting a copy, and was told what he was looking for did not exist. When I visited this same archive a decade after I had first done research there, the staff were bragging about their state of the art, modern search engines and their OPAC. I requested a document and got a negative reply.

I repeated the process and got the same answer. So I consulted an archivist who shrugged his shoulders and said: "Well. If it's not in the OPAC then it doesn't exist." I insisted that the document did exist because I saw it a decade earlier. The archivist just stared at me blankly. Fortunately, I had my notebook and showed him the call numbers. To humor me, he went in the stacks and came back red-faced and apologetic. The document did exist in the file, or "legajo," that I specified. Why did this escape the OPAC? This is very distressing to a historian because, if I didn't see the document earlier and relied solely on OPAC, I would never have seen this important 19th-century document.

More distressing is the news that some libraries and archives have restricted files that can only be accessed by the director or those with the appropriate clearance. What happens to researchers? What about materials that are on diskettes, on programs that are now extinct as dinosaurs? For example, if we didn't print all the files that were on earlier editions of Word or on the now-Jurassic Wordstar, wouldn't all those have been lost to us? What about materials that are on vinyl records or even on those early tape recorders or dictaphones? If you go to the Library of Congress and ask to listen to the famous Watergate tapes that got US President Nixon impeached, you will be told that these have to be run on the antiquated machines that were used to record them, and at the moment there are less than six of these machines in the universe, which are working.

History used to be simpler. You have a photograph that was good as a historical document; but with the advance of Photoshop you can manipulate, enhance or even invent photographs. A tape with a recognizable voice used to be enough to go on, but now we can edit and splice that.

The Internet is filled with a lot of unreliable information. So the historian still has to be armed with a critical and inquisitive mind. This pre-requisite has not changed no matter how advanced and complicated technology has made of the discipline.