The Actual and Potential Role of
Microforms in British Historical Research
Alan Macfarlane
[ From
Microform Review vol.12, no.2. Spring 1983]
British history is replete with documents,
manuscripts and other written records. Owing to favorable historical and
climatic conditions and a long-standing tradition of antiquarian research, this
immense body of archival material has been remarkably ",ell preserved. Its
reproduction and dissemination, which began with the era of book publication,
has been greatly augmented-the author believes-by microform technology. After citing
numerous outstanding accomplishments in the field, he proceeds to identify the
many as-yet-untouched
British historical sources whose micropublication
would benefit scholars. Then, in imagination, he embraces the era into which he
feels we are now moving-that of the confluence of microform, videodisc and
computer technology.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
p.74
Although this article is titled 'British
historical re-
search,' it is in practice almost totally limited
to
English history. There are two reasons for this
lim-
itation. First, my own professional competence is
in the field of English records; and second, with
only one or two notable exceptions, there has so
far been little use of microforms in making
available
the less extensive yet very considerable archives
of
Scotland, Ireland and Wales. I hope many of the
general points here made in reference to England
will be applicable to the other parts of Britain,
where
micropublishing has hardly started.
One
reason for the enormous potential of the
micropublication of English records is the
records'
immense quantity and quality. The extant English
historical documents are among the most
continuous
and diverse in the world. England is a small
country,
yet a number of pressures made it create and keep
more records than many larger states and empires.
The English have for many centuries depended
heavily on writing, on making records on paper
and
parchment. Their unusual, early established, and
centralized politico-legal system, whose courts
and
departments regulated life through written
processes
from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries,
pro-
duced a vast body of material, most of it still
buried
in obscurity. Likewise, the English landholding
sys-
tem, which has remained intact from the twelfth
to
the twentieth centuries, produced and retained
for
its later use a mass of documentary material. The
political and social forces which led to the
creation
of the documents also contributed to the belief
that
old documents were still relevant to present needs,
hence encouraging preservation.
The
preservation of ancient archives was facili-
tated by other advantageous conditions. England
has never been fought over by large destructive
armies in such a way as to destroy large numbers
of records. Nor have there been violent
revolutions
among whose aims was the destruction of all
records
of the past. Furthermore, the temperate climate
and
the absence of record-destroying termites make
re-
cord preservation moderately easy. It is still
pos-
sible to pick up a parchment or even a paper
sheet
written five hundred years ago and find it in
better
condition than a book printed in the last ten
years.
Partly as a result of this superb survival of
doc-
uments, but also a cause of their survival, is
the
ancient and still active tradition of antiquarian
re-
search. The emphasis on precedent, on the rele-
vance of the past in law and custom, combined
with
curiosity and a love of one's particular comer of
England, led to an intense and early interest in
re-
search into early documents and the physical re-
mains of the past. The presence of a large,
literate,
middling group of professional people--of clergy,
lawyers, minor gentry and others, in London and
throughout the counties-led to the formation of
numerous historical societies. The energies which
in some European countries went into the study of
---------------------
Dr. Alan Macfarlane is Reader in Historical An-
thropology at the University of Cambridge and
Fel-
low of King's College, Cambridge.
75
the material culture and lore of the 'folk' or
peas-
ants, in England went into the study and ordering
of documents, which in time led to the massive
collections no", found in public. local and
private
archives.
Historians
of the future will probably see three
major phases in the technology of making this
mass
of records more widely available. The first phase
lasted roughly from I800 to 1960 and may be
termed
the Print Era. It was a!, the period w hen the
predom-
inant mode of the reproduction of original manu-
scripts and reprint, of earlier books " as
in hardcopy
as published books. It was inaugurated in 1800 by
the establishment of The Historical Manuscripts
Commission. which initiated a systematic survey
of the holdings of public and private
collections.
From 1840 on. this effort was supplemented by the
numerous reports of the Deputy Keeper of the Pub-
lic Record Office and. much later, by the reports
of the National Register of Archives. The great
English libraries then began to issue catalogues
of
their printed book- and manuscript collections.
The
publication of exact transcriptions of original
doc-
uments was largely the work of the various record
societies. Especially notable were the
publications
of the Camden Society (1838-) and those of the
Selden Society ( 1888-). At about the same time.
local record societies were established, the
Surtees
Society ( 1835-) and the Chetham Society ( 1844-)
being two o of the earliest and most
distinguished. In
the decade from 1834 to 1844 alone, the Camden,
Parker, Percy, Shakespeare, Aelfric. Caxton and
Sydenham societies-all devoted to the editing and
publication of historical and literary
manuscripts-
",ere founded. Later, publications by such
distin-
guished bodies as the Early English Text Society
and others made many other works available.
By
about 1960, many thousands of volumes, in-
cluding reprints of some of the early classics
from
printing presses as well as abstracts or full
tran-
scripts of documents, had been published. But
three
things ",ere becoming increasingly apparent.
The
first looks at the very slow pace of publication.
At a
very rough guess, by 1950, of the printed books
produced in Britain or the Empire up to 1800,
less
than one percent were available in modem
editions.
Thus, a library or individual who wanted to build
up a research collection in early books would
have
to spend many years searching for them, and even
then would, in all probability, only be able to
obtain
a small selection. Turning to the publication of
man-
uscript sources in printed for-m, the situation
was
much worse. Probably less than one-tenth of one
percent of the surviving manuscripts for the
period
up to 1850 were in printed form. At that rate of
publication, it would be many centuries before
the
task could be completed. The second obvious fact
was that the production costs would be
prohibitive.
Even before the dramatic rise in publishing
costs,
few could afford to publish and few to buy the
products. Publications tended to be issued in
very
small runs and soon went out of print. Even gov-
ernment bodies could only afford to publish very
slowly. In the 1970s, the costs were so high that
many historical societies almost ceased to
publish.
The third fact was the problem of space. Even the
modest results of a century and a half of
publication
more than filled the handsome Selden End of the
Bodleian Library at Oxford. No private individual
could hope to house what was coming out, and
many librarians were running out of space as
well.
Fortunately, it was at this point that the second
major technological phase commenced, partly in
answer to the problems above and partly as a
result
of developments in photography. This phase, which
may be called the Microform Era, started slowly
in
the late 1930s and gathered momentum as the costs
of printing escalated in the 1970s. Although we
are
still in the middle of it, a supplementary phase,
to
which we shall refer later, makes the present an
appropriate time to discuss what has been done
and
what still needs to be done.
The
first achievement of microform technology
(which almost eliminates the problem of space,
dra-
matically lowers the cost of reproduction, and
hence
hastens the process of making materials more
widely
available) was to make early printed books and
pe-
riodicals more accessible. And it will soon be
pos-
sible, through the work of UMI (for all
abbreviations,
see end), to obtain copies of all the early printed
books in the Short Title Catalogue (1475-1640),
of
the immense collection of the Thomason Tracts
(some 22,000 of them), and of many other volumes
printed before 1700. This will shortly be supple-
mented by every item printed in the British
Empire
from 1701 to 1800 (RPI). This is an immense ad-
vance and makes it possible for a scholar in any
major library to have access to all the printed
ma-
terial from much of the English-speaking world up
to 1800. Future developments in technology will
make it possible to extend this coverage to 1950,
an achievement inconceivable just a few years
ago.
76
Such
work involves the photographic reproduc-
tion of the collections of not only the great
libraries
such as the Bodleian or the British but of
smaller
libraries also. For example, the seventeenth
-century
pamphlets of Lincoln Cathedral Library have been
filmed (WMP). Many collections of early periodi-
cals and newspapers have also been reproduced.
Another group of publications which would repay
further investigation is that of printed
ephemera-
the almanacks, chapbooks, broadsheets and bal-
lads-which exist in the hundreds of thousands
from
the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Only, a
small
number of them have been published, in selections
from the Pepys and other collections. As one can
readily see, there is still much to do.
Nevertheless,
more has been made available in the last fifteen
years than in the preceding one hundred fifty.
The
second achievement was to make more widely
available records which had already been printed
but were hard to obtain because of cost. small
print
runs, or the difficulty of storage. Here I am
mainly
thinking of calendars and transcripts of
documents.
One example was the publication of selected doc-
uments from the Public Record Office. Notable are
the republication of the complete Journals of the
House of Lords and the House of Commons from
1509 to the present (P), and of the Parliamentary
Debates of this century, originally published by
Hansard (P). For the study of recent history, the
publication of British Government Serial Publica-
tions (1922-1977) is also important (HDI). A
great
deal still remains to be done. Many of the
calendars
in the Public Record Office, the
nineteenth-century
'Blue Books,' and other government publications
would merit reproduction in microform.
Another
branch of this work is the publication
on microfiche of the more than 1,300 volumes of
the English Record Societies and the Index
Library
(CH). This makes available to researchers
through-
out the world the careful work of a century and a
half of local experts who have transcribed wills,
diaries, manorial accounts, quarter sessions
records
and many other local records. Here, as in the
pre-
vious instances, microform adds its strength to
print
and makes the records much more widely available.
One imagines that this process will expand and
con-
tinue. Particular collections of printed material
will
become available on microform, as have the ar-
chives of the British Liberal Party, the
Independent
Labour Party and the British Conservative Party
(H)
and likewise many of the books and pamphlets con-
cerning the British Trades Union movement (WMP).
At a rough guess, we can estimate that perhaps
five
percent of everything that was published and
still
survives from 1475 to 1950 is now available on
microform. If the present pace and methods are
maintained, we might extrapolate that this
estimate
would rise to 50 percent or more by the end of
the
century, a very major achievement. But what has
been published is only a tip of the iceberg, and
merely by building on the Gutenberg technology,
microform cannot hope to accelerate access to
orig-
inal documentation.
Here
we may note a further development, which
has occurred only during the last few years-the
harnessing of microform to the computer by way
of COM (computer output microforms). The pos-
sibility of writing directly onto microfiche with
the
computer offers new possibilities for
overcoming the slowness and massive costs of
editing
and typesetting on printing presses. Two experi-
ments may be mentioned: The codebooks to ac-
company the surveys deposited in the Social
Science
Research Council archive have been turned into
COM (OMP). and the more than eight thousand
pages of verbatim transcripts of all the
documents
relating to an English village from 1400-1750
have
been published on COM (CH), as have some of the
records of a Scottish parish (CH). Since I co-di-
rected the English village project, I know that
the
choice was between trying to publish the
documents
at a prohibitive cost or issuing them directly
from
the computer at a cost (and in a reduced form)
that
would make them attractive to libraries. As
histo-
rians and government departments begin to use
computers more, such a technique will undoubtedly
become ever more common.
Probably
less than a one-hundredth part of the
'documents' (interpreted broadly to include
paint-
ings, drawings, and sketches) of the past have
ever
been published. Therefore, if microform is to
con-
tribute seriously to the dissemination of
historical
materials (the problem with which earlier
publishers
grappled), it will need to address the
publication of
original manuscripts. Here it has an immense ad-
vantage. Historians are very eager to see
documents
in the original. The best editors, even if they
can
provide a full transcript, are forced to make
deci-
sions which may inadvertently distort meaning.
Publications of photographic reproductions of
orig-
inal documents have hitherto faced technological
challenges of enormous difficulty, or simply been
77
too expensive. Microform has transformed the sit-
uation, and some indications of what may be
achieved are already appearing.
We may
started chronologically with collections
of medieval manuscripts. Already, the medieval
manuscripts of Trinity College. Cambridge (WMP),
Lincoln Cathedral Library (WMP). Warden and
Fellow's Library of Winchester College (WMP),
and Lambeth Palace Library (WMP) have been pub-
lished on microfilm. But much greater treasures
await us, particularly in the manuscripts of the
three
great libraries-the British Library, and those of
Oxford and Cambridge. Major Treasures in the
Bodleian Library (0MP) has already begun to ex-
plore one of these repositories and has,
incidentally,
helped to confirm the claim that microfiche makes
possible the reproduction of the most delicate
and
beautiful of medieval coloured illuminations in a
way which would be prohibitively difficult and
ex-
pensive for the conventional print publisher. Yet
less than five percent of the pre-1475 material
is
thus far available on microform. To cover the
rest
is no doubt a task to which micropublishers are
present],,, addressing themselves.
The
other major repositories of medieval docu-
ments are the record offices, particularly the
Public
Record Office. Here the work has hardly started.
One exception is the English Legal Manuscripts
project (IDC), which commenced with the manu-
scripts in the Harvard Law School Library. Al-
though this project excludes the record sources
themselves (e.g., the massive plea rolls and
local
court records) it includes the readings, year
books
and early case reports, and hence provides im-
mensely valuable sources from the thirteenth to
eighteenth centuries.
The
bulk of the records themselves increases from
the early sixteenth century, and only a few small
dents have so far been made in the reproduction
of
them. A notable project is to reproduce the
unpub-
lished State Papers of the sixteenth and
seventeenth
centuries. The dimensions of the problem posed by
such a project can be seen by the fact that
fifty-nine
reels of microfilm were needed to cover the State
Papers Domestic for the years 1569-1585 (H) and
another twenty-eight reels for selections from
the
period of the English Civil War and Interregnum
(H). It is an extremely important and useful
project.
Another ambitious project extracted many docu-
ments, particularly Foreign Office material, from
the eighteenth to twentieth centuries for the
study
of World History from British National Archives'
(KTO). Yet another set of records, those from the
India Office Archive and Library dealing with one
part of England's relations with her Empire, has
been photographed. Yet these projects are only
mild
assaults on the problem. A very brief enumeration
of that which has scarcely been touched will give
some idea of the potential.
The
massive records of the central administra-
tion, the charter, patent, close and fine rolls
and
inquisitions post mortem, and many other types of
documents are untouched. The central financial
rec-
ords, the overwhelming records of the Exchequer,
the Treasury and certain parts of the Chancery
are
(with the very slight exception of the extracts
from
the Interregnum state papers already mentioned)
un-
touched. The impressive and intriguing records of
the central courts, the common law courts of
King's
Bench, Common Pleas, the equity courts, the cen-
tral prerogative courts (for example, Star
Chamber
and Requests) are totally untouched. Most of
these
records have not been examined since they were
first set down, and they were often written in
huge
volumes, which are extremely difficult to handle.
To search them is beyond the ability of the
present-
day historian. A project to reproduce them photo-
graphically would be an immeasurable service to
historians and would open up possibilities for
re-
search only vaguely dreamed of by the great Vic-
torians. But even the advances of contemporary
microform technology are hardly up to this task,
because of the prohibitive cost of the camera
work,
all of which must be done manually.
Then
there are the many smaller but still impor-
tant repositories which hold other types of
records.
There are the records of businesses, companies
and
guilds, as yet scarcely touched. There are the
ar-
chives of church authorities. Here a start has
been
made by the micropublication of the records at
Lam-
beth Palace (WMP) and of the Court of Arches
(CH). Specific religious bodies-for example, the
English Benedictine Congregation (OMI)-have also
been covered. But most of the episcopal, archidi-
aconal and parish records, as well as the records
of
religious organizations such as the major Noncon-
formist groups, the Missionary societies, and the
like, still await publication. There are the
archives
produced by the manorial jurisdictions. There are
the court rolls, deeds, rentals, surveys and
maps,
which are scattered in public and private
reposito-
ries all over the country. They are so extensive
that
78
it has not been possible to publish all the
surviving
documents from one well-documented manor. But
microform techniques could transform this
situation.
Finally, we may turn to the archives created by
individuals. Of course. the most personal of
these
,archives' are diaries and autobiographies, only
a
few of which have been published in microform;
the complete diaries of Beatrice Webb (CH), for
example. Many other as-yet-unpublished diaries
ex-
ist, as do many hundreds of thousands of letters.
The letter books of Charles James Blomfield,
Bishop
of London (M), are an example of a use of micro-
fiche which could be much more extensive. There
are also numerous travellers' narratives, account
books, and other personal papers which merit pub-
lication. Some individuals own collections of
pho-
tographs and other mementoes which microform
can capture. If those individuals also happen to
be
major landowners, businessmen, or important
professional figures, there may be ",hole
collections
of family papers. Many private families or record
offices have important family archives which
cannot
be made available in published form and yet
deserve
wider attention. There is scarcely an,,,
microform
publication of estate or public office papers of
individuals.
Mention
has been made of old photographs. Mi-
croform, as was forcibly pointed out in a
previous
issue of this magazine (Vol.8, No.3), is turning
out
to be an ideal medium in which to make available
visual materials which conventional publishing
finds
too expensive to reproduce. Early maps, surveys
and tithe awards could be reproduced, as well as
the extensive materials of the ordnance survey.
Al-
ready the possibilities of the publication of
early
musical scores are being explored through the mi-
crofilm publication of the Oxford Music School
Collections at the Bodleian (H). And the
seventeen
thousand satirical prints in the British Library
are
now on microfilm (CH). Many exciting extensions
of this approach remain to be explored. For ex-
ample, the aerial photographic surveys of England
made at various times might one day be suited for
microform, if a technique can be developed for
rendering low-contrast materials. Likewise, the
very
large collections of material objects from the
past,
whether relics of the earlier culture of Britain
in
museums of rural, industrial or upper-class life,
or
trophies of the Empire in the ethnographic mu-
seums, would translate excellently onto
microform.
We have
surveyed a few of the potentials. It
would now be wise to look at some of the
remaining
problems of current microfilm and microfiche
tech-
nology, as far as the practicing historian is
con-
cerned. First, there remains the problem of cost.
Although microform reduces the cost of publica-
tion, often by a factor of ten or more, this
saving
is partly offset by the increase in the scale of
the
projects undertaken. Although it is usually
possible
to buy one or two reels or some fiches at a small
cost, the person who wishes to have the whole of
an English village's documents or the medieval
manuscripts of Lincoln Cathedral Library at his
fin-
gertips will have to pay hundreds, if not
thousands.
of pounds. Most of the microforms, therefore,
tend
to remain in a few big libraries. Nowadays,
record
offices and town libraries cannot easily buy
some-
thing costing a thousand pounds. Even the price
of
a microfiche/microfilm reader is enough to daunt
some smaller institutions and private
individuals.
A
second problem lies in the use of microforms.
Some of the difficulties of access, such as
having
to wind through a reel, were overcome with mi-
crofiche. But the historian who wishes to move
quickly, from place to place still faces some
diffi-
culties and prefers to use the familiar sheets of
pa-
per. Another advantage of print publication is
that
one can consult several pages or passages more or
less simultaneously-an index and a text, for ex-
ample. One partial solution to this problem has
been
to provide dual texts in hardcopy and fiche. This
is
especially important when a guide and an index to
the records are provided, since they must be con-
sulted while searching through the microform. But
this solution has created a new problem for the
librarian. To illustrate from my own experience:
The British Library stores fiches and booklets in
separate places, and it was only a chance
encounter
with the librarian which brought the two
together,
at least in my case. Another problem came to
light
when a student arrived who had had to spend weeks
searching sequentially through some microfiches
because the accompanying hardcopy booklets had
been stolen. It is clear, therefore, that it
would be
worthwhile to produce both a hardcopy and a mi-
croform version of any introductory material .
Such
introductory material and finding aids become
more
and more important as microforms are increasingly
used to access original documents. Many of these
documents are strangely organized, written in
dif-
ficult script, and produced by little-known
institu-
tional processes. Merely to reproduce them
without
79
a careful introduction describing how they were
selected, how they were produced. and their pa-
laeographic and other problems. is to undermine
their value.
On the
positive side, one problem microforms
have effectively eliminated is that of space. All
the
microfiches and microfilms yet produced would not
cause a librarian of historical materials great
prob-
lems to store. And microfiche is especially
efficient,
in that it allows random access also.
Thus,
the present situation is that a good deal has
been done to make much of the early printed ma-
terials of English history available, but that
only a
fraction of the unprinted material is as yet in
mi-
croform. Scarcely an,,- of the unprinted sources
from
other parts of Britain . tain have been touched.
If a way
could be found to make microform readers
available
to all institutions and the general public, and
to bring
down the price of microform still further, the
me-
dium's already very great potential would
increase
enormously, It does seem that at least partial
an-
swers to these problems are almost upon us, and
we may, in 1983, be moving into the third major
technological phase of the reproduction and
dissem-
ination of historical materials-that of the
conflu-
ence of microform publishing, videodisc and
computers. It is now possible to envisage that in
a
few years private individuals will be able to
pur-
chase very large collections of books, historical
documents, pictures of various kinds, and so on,
to
keep in their homes and to view on their
television
screens. They will be able to access the material
almost instantaneously by means of microcompu-
ters. Such a situation would very much alter the
nature of historical research. For example, the
his-
torian would be able to access a far greater
amount
of material, much more quickly. But the resultant
images would be electronic facsimiles. This is
not
something new. Already many record offices are
trying to protect original documents by
persuading
researchers to look at microfilm copies. But in
the
future, instead of travelling to central London
to
gaze into a reader at a microfilm of the 1851
census,
it will be possible either to buy part of it for
oneself
or see it in a local library. No doubt this will
lead
to very considerable political and legal (copyright)
problems as the scramble for rich deposits of ma-
terial intensifies. It will also lead to other
difficul-
ties, as inexperienced or unprepared users stare
at
screensful of medieval Latin. Yet, having been
part
of the earlier technological revolution which,
through
microfilm, made new kinds of local history possi-
ble, and having watched with amazement as the
past swam up onto my bedroom wall when I first
focused my 35mm slide projector and brought a
sixteenth-century will into focus, I feel that
the ben-
efits will outweigh the difficulties. I look
forward
to having the Douce apocalypse in my drawing room
and to witnessing the as-yet-unviewed social
dramas
of the seventeenth-century law courts via my new
time machine.
Abbreviations
CH Chadwyck-Healey
Ltd.
20
Newmarket Road
Cambridge
CB5 8DT
England
H Harvester
Press Microform Publications
Ltd.
17
Ship Street
Brighton,
Sussex
BNI
IAD, England
HDI The
U.S. Historical Documents Institute
4600
Lee Highway
Suite
238
Arlington,
VA 22207
IDC Inter
Documentation Company AG
Postrasse
14
6300
Zug
Switzerland
KTO KTO
Microform
Kraus
Thomson Organization Limited
Route
100
Millwood,
NY 10546
M Mansell
Publishing
3
Bloomsbury Place
London
WCIA 2QA
England
OMP Oxford
Microform Publications Ltd.
19a
Paradise Street
Oxford
OXI ILD
England
80
p Microforms
International Marketing
Corporation
Pergamon
Press, Inc.
Maxwell
House
Fairview
Park
Elmsford,
NY 10523
RPI Research
Publications, Inc.
12
Lunar Drive
Drawer
AB
Woodbridge,
CT 06525
UMI University
Microfilms International
300
N. Zeeb Road
Ann
Arbor, MI 48106
WMP World
Microfilms Publications Ltd.
62
Queen's Grove
London
NW8 6ER
England