Charles Evans (1850-1935) created his
American Bibliography as a labor of love. Evans, an orphan whose education ended at age fifteen, was fifty-one and unemployed when he began singlehandedly cataloging every printed document published in America between 1639 and 1820. At the time of his death thirty-four years later, he had set down 35,854 entries through 1799, twelve volumes totaling over 5,500 pages.
It took two decades (1950-1968) for a team of bibliographers to transfer the pamphlets he cited onto microfilm, and three more years (2002-2005) to digitize them. The result,
Evans Digital Edition, is a full-text searchable collection of 2.3 million pages of pamphlets. Some see it as
a revolutionary innovation that will democratize the historical profession, but others are
not so sure--the original cost $25 a volume, but Evans Digital Edition costs $20,000-$100,000 to subscribe.
posted by nasreddin
on Jun 13, 2007 -
11 comments
