Though there have been many tools developed over the course of the past 100 years that have allowed for historians to be able to reference materials, I think that the two things that really allowed for the greatest leaps were the Compact Disc and the Internet.
Though photographs and microfilm have been around for more then a hundred years, the Compact Disk has allowed for storage of information on a scale much larger then anything we had seen in the past. Starting in the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, educational tools and programs started to be developed for the general public and for research institutions. The ability for programs such as Encyclopedia Britannica to be published on a few Disks, instead of in dozens of large, bound books, has revolutionized the way in which we get information. For more specialized information, all a person would have to do is take photographs or type up transcripts of documents, and they would be able to easily transport the to where ever they want, without having to transport cans of film or get special permission to borrow an item.
Of course being able to transport 600Megabytes of information on a disk that is barely 6 inches in diameter was a huge boon to any industry trying to sell information, but it couldn’t even compare to the Internet in both it’s scope and it’s availability. Though used by the military for years to relay important information, what we know today as the internet really didn’t gain popularity until the mid 1990s. People were now able to host their own domains and give out their addresses (Uniform Resource Locaters…URLs) to anyone to view. Now that people had the ability to share any information they wanted with anyone around the world, the amount of groups dedicated to housing and giving out scholarly information skyrocketed.
Though it is only a small subsection of the internet age that we live in, the resource that I find most useful in the digital world is that of online libraries and archives, especially those here at UMass Amherst. I have been doing research on Soldiers of Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War, and there is an entire 17 Volume Archive that is available here at UMass. Not only is the entire thing viewable online, but it has also been tagged so that you can word search any part of the 17 volumes and instantly find pretty much anything you want. It’s great!
I heartily concur that the compact disk has done much to change the way that historians do history today. Making information easily portable certainly makes its transmission to the general affordable. I remember hearing apocryphal stories that encyclopedia sets used to be a sign of middle class prosperity and I recall that the computer seemed to steadily replace that symbol in the early 1990’s.
I think what truly needs to be stressed here is the portability of information. Not only does the compact disk and the internet bring history to the public, they also allow historians to quickly and easily share their work and exchange data. Once reliant on yearly conferences, telephone calls, and the limits of postal mail, historians can now share their scholarship with each other much more efficiently. This richness of exchange has certainly has made our community of historians much more tight-knit. The expectation that we share our scholarship with each other has increased and the ongoing digitization of primary sources further reinforces that sharing.
I agree with you as far as the cd rom and the Internet became a way of bringing large amounts of knowledge to the common man. The portability factor of each is a boon to usefulness.