Over the past week or so, I’ve been watching my daughter, who is a high school sophomore, doing research for a history paper on Danton and the French Revolution. The teacher told the kids to find, as sources, at least two books, two arcticles, and two reputable website (which, by his definition, doesn’t include wikipedia). I don’t know how or where she found the articles. I heard lots and lots of grumbling about how to figure out whether or not a website is “reputable. But what I’ve found most interesting has been her experience with the books.

Living with me, her first reaction was to get books from Project Gutenberg. We found one of Danton’s famous speeches, translated into English, in a book of speeches, as well as several other useful books about the French Revolution that included nice sections on Danton. When she mentioned this to her teacher, he insisted that there must be recent work on this subject and that she should find it. Our local library and her school library have quite limited collections, but she did eventually identify a couple of recent books that the local library supposedly had, only one of which was available.

One final piece of background is that my daughter, who loves to read, does so fairly slowly and it is very difficult for her to skim printed text. Working with etexts is much easier for her since she can use search functions to help her spot what she needs. Trying to find useful pieces of information in a large, paper book is always an exercise in frustration for her.

What really struck me is the contrast between how easy it was to find public domain etexts and how difficult it was to find, using local public resources, relevant modern material in paper form and that modern, citable, content (books) simply wasn’t available in electronic form. Or rather, it might be available if we were willing to pay for an entire book, but that seemed like overkill for a homework assignment so we didn’t pursue that path. I suppose what we really wanted was the equivalent of the local public library, but for electronic texts. She had no desire or need to “own” the book and I didn’t want to buy one or more books (although I would have been willing to spend a few dollars to “rent” access for a time).

 Despite knowing all the reasons why setting up the ebook equivalent of the local library is hard, it just seems like a shame to me that modern analyses of Danton in electronic form either don’t exist, weren’t easily found, or are out of our reach.

Posted: 12|13|07 at 12:04 pm. Filed under: Digital Libraries, IP Rights, Publishing, Repositories, Retailing, eBooks. New here? Follow this entry via RSS 2.0. Comments and pings are currently closed.