Digitization of NARA holdings

[Gregory Deych]

Does anybody know if NARA has any plan to digitize their German microfilm collection? It would be nice if we could just access the records online.

[Gregory Deych]

I guess nobody has heard anything. Perhaps there is a room for a community based project to take the NARA microfilms that people have ordered over the years, scan them and put them on the web.

[Geheime Feldpolizei]

Such a project to put ALL "captured German microfilm" online is, at present, not possible. Firstly, the quantity of records involved is, to say the least, "significant." Secondly, the "captured German microfilm" is not a complete microfilm copy of ALL "captured German records" that passed through American hands at the end of World War II. Finally, the cost of having such material "online" would be very expensive. Remember, server space is not free. Despite what you may think of the internet and its potential, nothing will EVER take the place of doing your one research on site.

People who have never visited an archive seem to have the impression that it is like a library; ask for what you want and someone can immediately retrieve it for you. Archival work is simply not like that. It is not an "exact science." Often, if you have done your preparatory research in advance, you will know more about your topic than the archivist you will consult with. He/She can assist you by indicating the most LIKELY places for you to search, but, at the end of the day, it is you, ON SITE, looking through records (often for days on end) that will develop a sense of where such records will be located. Doing research on site will also allow you to develop a sense of the context in which your records exist.

The next time you pick up a well researched book, give thought to what I have said here. A well researched book can take YEARS to put together (and that is just the research work). As someone who has spent thousands of dollars of his own money on research trips to Germany and elswhere, I think I can speak with some authority here.

[Larry D.]

Well said, GFP. As someone who spent 3 to 4 weeks every year between 1979 and 1989 at NARA downtown and at the Suitland Federal Records Center, plus two 3-week research trips to BA-MA Freiburg in the early 'nineties, plus other trips to AFHRA Maxwell and the PRO in London, I can heartily agree with your statement. The younger generation wants everything handed to them and they want it instantly. They don't want to have to spend any money and they don't want to have to work for it. Oh, I almost forgot. They also want it all translated into English for them, too. :roll:

[Richard Hargreaves]

Amen to that. I've made a good couple of hundred visits to the PRO, a similar number to the IWM, NYC Public Library, Berlin Central Library, a dozen Uni libraries over the past 15 years and even now my book isn't quite ready!!
However, in defence of digitisation, I feel a lot more people would use their records if NARA/ BA-MA/ PRO/ IWM did digitise. My funds have been exhausted and I've yet to get to Freiburg. Digitising would open up to a huge new audience, and even if records are digitised there's still a hell of a lot of work for researchers to do (sifting through hundreds of pages for that nugget, then translating it).

[Larry D.]

All good and valid points, halder. Perhaps as a large and hopefully ground-breaking step in the right direction, the two fellows who own the lion's share of Google have pledged an enormous amount of money taken from the proceeds of the company's initial stock offering some months ago toward an 8-year project to begin digitizing the holdings of the Library of Congress, Oxford University Library and the New York Public Library. So the digitization process is off to a good start. As for NARA, I do not see the USG ever putting up the money for digitization, but if substantial private funds are ever donated then something might be done there, too. A good place to start might be the PRO's HW collection and the NARA's RG 457 and RG 38/Crane collections. These of course are the 4.5-million ULTRA decrypt translations held between the two repositories. Having those in a data base where researchers can get at them would be a giant help to all historians of the Second World War.

[John P. Moore]

I derived a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from my experiences in research in archives and institutions from opening till closing in the Czech Republic, Germany and the USA over the past 20 years. Seeing the actual documents, along with discussions with the archive staff, coupled with personal interviews with former German military personnel, readings from several hundred books, over 1,500 rolls of NARA microfilm and battlefield visits established facts and placed fragmented information into context. If all the information was there to find on the Internet I would have missed out on a personally rewarding experience and probably would have had a rather narrow perspective.

John