Digitizing and democratizing historical research

Two Addiction-related developments have recently opened up new possibilities for historical research on substance use. The early Proceedings of the Society for the Study of Inebriety (originally the Society for the Study and Cure of Inebriety) have been digitized and are now available to view, page by page, on the Society's own website (http://www.addictionjournal.org). The Proceedings ran from 1884 until 1901–2, after the death of the first President Norman Kerr: then a yearly volume of Transactions appeared. The new British Journal of Inebriety was first published in July 1903. The Society's website has volumes to view from the first one in 1884 up to 1901. The digitization has been generously made possible by the Royal Society of Medicine. A parallel development through the Blackwell Synergy system operated by the Journal's publishers has given us more recent digitized volumes, available from 1969 onwards. These are available for full text searching for full members of the Society and subscribing libraries through the normal user name and password on which the system operates. The Journal thus joins a rapidly changing digital field. Through the University of London library and my own library at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine I can already access digital copies of many journals back to their dates of foundation; for example, through the JSTOR archive of digitized journals, in most cases going back to the first issue. The journals and dates covered are available at http://www.jstor.org. The Lancet has been available digitally since 2003 on a subscription basis. Projects such as the joint Wellcome Trust/JISC/National Library of Medicine medical journal backfile digitization project are making available scientific journals in digital form back to their dates of inception: these journals will be on open access in line with Wellcome policy [1]. These developments significantly alter the availability of research materials and the possibilities for research. Let me illustrate this from my own experience. I have used our Journal for two pieces of research: research on drug use in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which led to a book on the subject, and later for the history of the Society which was published as a Journal Special Issue [2, 3]. For the initial research, I ventured regularly into the basement of the Royal Society of Medicine in London, then a mass of shelving where one never knew what treasures might be found in the next dark corner. Well-used issues of the Proceedings were to be found bundled on a high shelf. But when I undertook the research on the Society, the basement had been modernized and the issues had been moved. Some had gone missing and the journal was to be found on rolling shelves elsewhere in the building. Researchers were used to these types of problem; physical inaccessibility, incomplete runs, trailing from one library to the next in search of a missing issue. Digitization, of course, transforms the situation. For the early issues, no more basement searching; one can simply sit at the screen and review them in their entirety. This is also the case for the last 40 years, and the later text is also fully searchable by keyword. The earlier issues are not currently searchable, but an index of contents for the whole early run has been added, together with an index of the contents of executive committee meetings for the years between 1884 and 1893. Two key periods of addiction history are thus made available: the early days of the Society's history, when it was defining the field in the United Kingdom and lobbying for inebriates legislation, and the later days from the 1960s, when drug use expanded and links were forged between British and American researchers. However, one should also be aware of what is not available. A 60-year period of the Journal's history from the early 20th century has not yet been digitized; not a particularly distinguished period of the Society's history, perhaps, but an interesting one. The Society and its officers reflected many of the trends in thinking about social policies of the day. My understanding is that Blackwell's will digitize this remaining block of material. As with all research materials, and particularly the case for digital ones, one should always be careful to question what is and is not available: what selection has been made? It would also be useful to know where a continuous run of the early journal (and the later one, too) is now kept: digitizing can be used as an argument for disposing of journal hard copies or putting them into storage, given the space constraints under which librarians operate. According to its catalogue, the Royal Society of Medicine in London still has its copies of the Proceedings starting from 1884, but its set of the British Journal of Inebriety is incomplete. The Addiction editorial office has bound copies from volume 1 of the British Journal of Inebriety (1903) and the Institute of Psychiatry library has holdings from 1904. Digitizing also represents a wider democratizing trend in historical research, and I will use this editorial to comment on that tendency. In the United Kingdom at least, the democratization of historical research had its origins in two developments: in the ‘people’s history' of the ‘history from below’ movement of the 1960s and1970s, and in the rise of interest in ‘roots’ and tracing family histories. The History Workshop movement, prime mover in the first tendency, concentrated on encouraging the research and writing of the histories of the sorts of people whose lives had been ‘hidden from history’. Its pioneer and leader, the historian Raphael Samuel, welcomed the subsequent moves towards media and public popularization of history; his stance was controversial at the time [4]. But it was family history which more directly drove the move to make sources accessible over the web. When the 1901 census went online in the United Kingdom a few years ago, the initial demand was so great that the site collapsed. In the UK National Archives priority for digitizing materials has been for those likely to be used by family historians. Twentieth-century professional historians are beginning to catch up, but their arguments for resource allocation are weaker. These developments have also impacted on the substance use history arena. In the June 2006 issue of Addiction White & Reis wrote of the Brown University Alcohol and Addictions Studies collection, some of which has been digitized and is available online [5]. However, the major development in the field has been the accessibility of tobacco industry documents, first made available through US legal settlements and ‘whistle-blowing’ activities [6]. In the United Kingdom, research has concentrated on the British deposits of British American Tobacco which are held in a depository at Guildford near London. A series of papers has emerged from research into that archive and the material from it is being added to the general web facility operated from the University of California at San Francisco [7]. Researchers from the Globalisation Centre of my own institution have been prime movers in these UK-based developments [8]. Some historical material is now open to all. Families can research their own history and the substance use and tobacco fields can do similarly. So: are we all historians now? Has technology done away with the need for professional historians? I would argue ‘no’, as one might expect. Researchers in the tobacco field are also perhaps beginning to realize this. Recent papers emanating from that source have begun to grapple with the problems of historical interpretation and its probable change over time. The field is just beginning to address the full complexity of historical research [9]. Such research has been a powerful anti-tobacco tool, but has also illustrated the problems of ‘field history’. Some of these problems are connected with the move to digitization. This has encouraged researchers without historical training to use only what is easily available to them. Digital sources are easier to access—and such researchers do not generally track down, or even know of, the more inaccessible manuscript archival material which might be available in just one location. Using a range of material is essential in order to develop a rounded interpretation. Like Raphael Samuel, I see distinct possibilities in the current situation. The lacuna in the ‘family history’ of the substance field offers an opportunity for professional historians to advise. They could advise on the need to take on board the existing historiography or trends of historical interpretation; the need to question the provenance and significance of material; the need to use more than one source (industry archives); the need to triangulate and to set into changing context. As industry documents become available from an earlier period, these opportunities for historians could multiply, if the field is receptive. And historians can also learn from the new working methods being developed by non-historians who are using digitized archives and adopting collaborative modes. Communities of interest are possible. There are possibilities, too, for the Journal. Now that some of its back issues are digitized will it be easier or more difficult for historical papers to appear in its current pages? The Journal has played a pioneering role with another type of historical source—that of oral history—exemplified in its long-running series of Journal interviews [10]; and recently it has taken an interest in the visual side of addiction history. Paradoxically, however, the publication of the end products of access to such sources—analytical historical research—has almost disappeared from its pages. Why is this so? Lack of interest on the part of historians, the science format of the journal, a lack of shared language and perspectives? This gulf is also worth some thought.