Archives and Travel

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Benton (a pseudonym, which is common and I suppose understandable in the careers section of the Chronicle but is something with which I am still somewhat uncomfortable) has an article on visiting archives that might strike a chord with the archive rats among my readership.

I am well aware that digitization increasingly makes many archival trips unnecessary, strictly speaking. But I am of the firm belief that being amidst the archives, that holding an old, pre-digitized finding aid, that following a path from one set of documents to another that might well not be clear from a boolian search, can lead to discoveries that one might not ordinarily experience sitting in front of one's computer screen. I also tend to agree with him about the way that procrastination plays a role in research.

Yet another aspect for my desire to go to archives won't surprise regular visitors to dcat -- I am a traveler. And while many of my trips take me abroad, I also love the fact that research trips will lead me inevitably to university campuses. Given my work, some campuses have become regular haunts, places I have come to know and like -- Oxford, Mississippi or Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in the US are examples for me, alongside literally dozens of others. There is something enjoyable about immersing one's self in campus life for a few days, a week. There is something comforting about becoming a regular at an archive, even if only for a few days.

In the next few months I hope to make trips to Baton Rouge, where I last conducted research while working on my MA thesis more than a decade ago (and got into a whale of a fight at a hotel bar) and to Tallahassee, where I last was at FSU to compete at the Florida State Relays back when I was a jumper on my college's track team. (I beat a future Olympic decathlete in one of his his strong events, the high jump -- I believe he still might hold some sort of Olympic decathlon high jump record -- when I cleared my opening height and he missed his, which was some 6 inches higher than where I came in. He also said one of the funniest, crassest things I have ever heard when we all gathered before the event began to have the officials explain the process.) I am looking forward to both trips and am happy that in neither case will most of the documents I need to explore be available to me on line.