Jamel Ostwald's Gateway to the Early Modern World Gateway Research

• Before going, if at all possible take notes or transcribe all the sources and documents available to you before you go. If you cannot do this, at least note the bibliographic information on each document that you know you will have access to later on (i.e. Archive info, Author, Recipient, Date, Place). Be warned that many 19th century and early 20th century printed collections may have omitted significant parts of some letters from their published versions (or even provided incorrect information identifying the document information on occasion - especially Old Style-New Style dating, for example, with Englishmen on the Continent). So if you can transcribe what is available before you go, you can then save time by just filling in the blanks (mark the excised locations well so you don't have to search around in the text).
   
• Contact the archivist before you go - they may have important suggestions and warnings, as documents and collections do get moved to different archives and are even destroyed at times. Be sure documents listed in catalogs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries still exist - can you say World Wars I and II? And ask the archivist if there are any other scholars researching similar topics.

• Many archives have extremely useful websites with policies and hours - this is the first place to start. For archive links I've found useful, click here. What are the archives' hours, and as a warning to Americans, are they closed for lunch? Many of the European archives I've gone to closed for 1-2 hours each day during lunchtime. Nice for the European lifestyle, but an immense annoyance for American scholars on a tight schedule and even tighter budget. Also find out any access restrictions for specific collections (not an issue for most early modern documents, excepting of course the papers of the greatest military engineer in history), how many requests per day you are allowed, whether you can place orders before you even arrive (via the web, mail or phone), whether you can order them all at the same time, how many documents/cartons/folders you are allowed to order or have at your desk at one time, whether you can have items "held" at circulation for the next day, etc. Also expect to wait at least 15 minutes to receive your request - if you're lucky your documents will be in the same building as the reading room and there won't be 50 other people waiting for their own bundles. Use this time to browse the reading room - they'll probably have lots of reference works that you might find useful (dictionaries, catalogs, secondary histories, etc.). Planning ahead of time will also allow you to fill out call slips and other forms in the evening or during lunch breaks, so you don't waste time when the archives are actually open.

• Pay particular attention to reproduction policies: whether you can photocopy items or get them microfilmed, how much it costs, how their copying process works, etc. Sometimes you may have to photocopy the items yourself (unlikely if they're early modern documents however), or you might even have to make microfilm copies yourself. This can be a real pain, especially if you have to use a different microfilm machine from the one you viewed it on (as was the case at the Archives de Guerre in Paris). You may want to pay the extra few cents to have the staff do the copies, particularly if you're running short on time - of course you may have no say in the matter depending on their policies. When deciding whether to make copies or take notes, ALWAYS make copies if you can at all afford it. Reproduction prices will invariably go up in the future (I've been severely burned on this in a matter of just a couple years); your reproduction costs aren't outrageous when you weigh them against the costs of room and board you'd otherwise spend doing additional archive research. Use a similar opportunity-cost calculation to decide if you should copy rather than take notes on data-dense documents (e.g. lists of numbers - where a numeric keypad would be quite useful, by the way); and always remember that full, verbatim transcriptions of documents are always preferable to de-contextualized paraphrased notes - not only will you be able to recognize authors by their handwriting, but more importantly, later in the write-up stage you may discover that you want something different from what your notes give you, something that you weren't looking for originally and therefore didn't bother writing down in your notes. And your colleagues will be more impressed when you give them a useful quote in full rather than just as a paraphrase. Depending on the type of history you do, e.g. literary/cultural history or qualitative analysis, your methodology may mandate the full texts for analysis anyway. At the very least, always transcribe verbatim the first line or so of every letter you find useful, so if you later come across documents of the same date in another location, it will be relatively easy to see if they are copies or not. It may also be useful to transcribe the salutation (Sire, Sir, Milord, Monsieur, Monseigneur...), since it may give an indication of who the recipient was when there is no addressee. You might even get a sense of hierarchy by looking at the closings of letters; see, for example, Jon Rudd, "A Perception of Hierarchy in Eighteenth-Century France: An Epistolary Etiquette Manual for the Controller General of Finances," French Historical Studies17 (1992), 791-801.

• When you first arrive at the archives, accept the fact that you'll probably have to "waste" the first day registering (this may take several hours), looking through catalogs, and orienting yourself to the collections and procedures. Of course, the more of this preparatory work you can get out of the way before you arrive, the better. If you're lucky, you may even be able to order documents in advance (e.g. over the web), which would cut down on the waiting time.
  

• Prioritized list of what items to look for (you'll probably have less time than you need). This could include a list of published primary sources which you can give a low priority to (see above). Plunder the footnotes of secondary sources mercilessly - this might also tell you what kind of material is available in the archives (is there a reason they never talk about topic X? maybe it's because the archives don't have anything on X). But if you have time, be sure to skim through all the collections in search of the stray diamond in the rough - serendipity is your friend. This may also help prevent the tragic occurrence of discovering at the end of your research trip that you don't have enough material on your topic. You also might want to first skim through all the documents in each bundle before you start taking detailed notes. Make sure to make a note of interesting documents that you might not have time to look at right now but can come back to in the future.

• List of keywords to search in Subject catalogs and indexes: important people (their full names and DOB/DOD, as there might be several relatives with the same names), subject headings as used in classification schemes, place names, etc. Don't forget to use the place and person names in the language used by the archive: from personal experience, don't ask for a folder on "Ghent" in France, ask for "Gand"; and know if the person is listed under "Auverquerque" or "Ouwerkerk" or "Overkirk."

• Bibliography of all the sources you've consulted and would like to consult (preferably in a bibliographic database program like EndNote or ProCite). The more things you put on the computer, however, the more you may have to switch between programs, so having some of the information printed out (or on a separate Palm/Pocket PC) may not be a bad idea. For example, I have a simple database app on my Axim into which I imported all my bibliography titles, personalities, and so on.

• User's guides to the archives you will be visiting. If you're lucky, you'll have access to the archive's index/catalog before you go, in which case you should obviously go through it all, noting personalities, year ranges, etc. for each volume or carton, if you don't just photocopy the whole thing (probably a good idea). When you're in the reading room, spend as little time writing/entering bibliographic data as possible - make blank records with the basic info (from the catalogs) before hand. See my comments on using placeholding records in a note-taking database.

• Have your note-taking system worked out before you go - refine it on published primary sources you can consult at home. For my own relational database note-taking system using MS Access, which has the most important features to include IMHO, click here. For archival research, it's particularly important to have a system that fulfills a number of scholarly apparatus and administrative needs: 1) forces you to record all the bibliographic info you'll need for citation, 2) lets you keep track of what you've looked at already, 3) keeps track of what's worth coming back to in the not-so-near future, 4) quickly tells you what still needs to be looked at in the near-future, 5) provides a way to prioritize the items still to be looked at, and 6) minimizes the time spent entering all this info as well as the notes themselves. Don't forget to develop a consistent system of abbreviations (or use something like MS Office's AutoCorrect) but avoid potentially confusing abbreviations - is "Alb" for "Albergotti" or "Albemarle" or "Alberdingh"? Note, however, that while abbreviations to speed up note-taking may let you take notes on more sources, the resulting notes may also mask subtle differences in vocabulary. For example, you might note the synonymous terms "counterscarp" and "covered way" with the abbreviation "ctsp," which means at a later point you would not be able to recreate this distinction. To continue this hypothetical example that has absolutely no connection at all to my own personal research experience, if you wanted to see whether there is a pattern to their use, as a measure of tactical dissemination and determining who provided the paradigm other countries looked to you could see if English and Dutch authors use the French term "contrescarpe" or "chemin couvert" rather than their own "covered way" or "bedeckte weg." But of course if you abbreviated them all the same, too late. *This warning also applies for MS Office's AutoCorrect - proper names and mis-spellings in the text (good-ol' sic) will be eliminated in some cases. So be careful to check your AutoCorrect list before you go to the archives - you need to decide how faithful to the original sources you want your notes to be. Obviously this should be determined by the likely types of analysis you'll perform in the future - the more fidelity to the original, the slower the note-taking (intentionally typing mis-spellings and proper nouns five different ways can be difficult - the database developer in me cringes at the thought!) and the more effort needed to later recall that information in all its variety (by standardizing spelling for recall), but the greater your ability to later analyze the document and the more flexible your notes will be.

Other "gadgets" I've found useful include:

• Foreign language dictionaries, preferably on your laptop or Palm/Pocket PC. Good computer dictionaries allow you to quickly search for words regardless of their grammatical forms (i.e. words in all their conjugations, declensions, genders, and numbers, instead of only the infinitive or masculine singular form), use wildcards (useful when you can't read a letter or two and want to narrow down the word possibilities), and the best dictionaries also allow you to enter in annotations or add additional definitions or quotes to existing entries. I use the French Le Petit Robert on CD, which provides all of these features plus many more. Another nice feature would be an ability to add completely new entries (some Palm/Pocket PC dictionaries have this feature). These computer dictionaries also have the advantage of eliminating the need to carry such bulky print items around with you. They should be available for purchase online at foreign websites. Many reading rooms will also have print dictionaries on the reference shelves.

• Relevant maps of the subject under study (can be scanned into the computer to refer to in the archives). You might want paper copies you can mark up in the archives - or follow along with while you take notes on the laptop. Or bring acetate sheets (i.e. transparencies) which you can trace documents on - though you should check with the archive staff before you attempt this. If you have a Palm/Pocket PC, they sell maps of cities (including mass transit line maps) that might come in handy when you're on the go doing more touristy things.

• Calculator (preferably on a laptop or Palm/Pocket PC). There are many to choose from, but I use the free www.cdml.com on my laptop and Calc98 on the Pocket PC. The latest versions include useful conversion functions: English distance/area/volume to and from metric, temperature conversions, and various time/date conversions (hours to days/weeks, etc.). The most recent version of CDML even includes a calendar that goes back to the year 1500 (see next item). Quite handy, and you might be able to program in currency conversions too.

• A perpetual calendar (either software or a paper copy) which allows you to figure out dates when given a specific date and a day of the week. For example, with a letter dated April 5, 1704 mentioning only that something happened "last Wednesday," you can quickly find out what date that Wednesday was.

• A camera or digital camera might be helpful, assuming the archives allow you to take photographs. All of the archives that I've been to do not allow readers to photograph their holdings (I think it has to do not only with conservation but also with copyright issues). You might also find a scanner (perhaps a small pen scanner) helpful. Even if the archives don't allow photographing, you can still use the camera to photograph things like architecture and paintings. Note that you can easily manipulate digital photos, adjusting the lighting of pictures taken in dark museums that don't allow flashes, for example. Very useful!
  For a great introduction (and specific advice) on digitizing archival/library research, see http://archiva.net/electronicresearcher/index.htm.

• Some sort of task organizer, e.g. Microsoft's Outlook (or one of the many PIMs available for Palm/Pocket PCs such as Pocket Informant), so you can keep track of your daily progress, as well as plan your research time.

• A contact list, e.g. Outlook or PIM, so you can keep in touch with people while you're away from home, and keep track of people you'll meet during your trips.

Further recommendations or suggestions are welcomed. I suggest Microsoft products only because that's what I use and they're ubiquitous.

Last Updated: February 9, 2005