Historiography and Technology In the translator's introduction to A History of Civilizations by the late eminent historian Fernand Braudel, it says: ...like all research workers [Braudel] had to face other setbacks, including a ban on photographing documents in the invaluable Ragusa Archives, where he worked in 1935. This, he noted, 'made my research a hundred times more difficult'. The introduction to Braudel's posthumously (2001) published book Memory and the Mediterranean begins by boldly asserting: Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) was the greatest historian of the twentieth century. So universal has his influence been on the study of history since the publication of his first major work fifty years ago that it is almost impossible for us to remember what history was like before Braudel... He was an innovative researcher in two respects, conceptual and practical. He made the move from government archives to commercial archives, and by chance he invented the microfilm, which he used in order to copy two or three thousand documents a day, to be read during the university year [1935 - RF] in Brazil... [Braudel: ] "I bought this machine in Algiers: [then French Algeria - RF] it belonged to an American cameraman and was used to make rough images of scenes for films. On it you had a button that allowed you to take one photo at a time, or you pressed it and you took the whole shoot at once. When I was offered it, I said to the cameraman, 'Photograph me that: if I can read it, I'll buy it.' He made me a magnificent photo. And that's how I made kilometres of microfilms. It worked so well that when I was in Brazil I could spend whole days reading documents." Today, Internet-based archives like the University of North Carolina's Documenting the American South (http://docsouth.unc.edu/) provides "access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture" through the magic of digital technology. They skip microfilm and go directly to electronic media, which are instantly available worldwide at trivial cost. And now initiatives like the Google Books Library Project publish over a MILLION books the same way. Better yet, every word is indexed, which would have been impossible with old-fashioned paper-based (or microfilm-based) indicies. Ron Feigenblatt Postscript: Now that the origin of popular use of the Internet is fading into history itself, some readers may enjoy reviewing the genesis of an early online history library, the Historical Text Archive. Another interesting essay on the early electronic publication of history here looks at the Gutenberg-e project, and mentions related efforts.