Hi Steven, thanks  much for your comments. I truly believe in this project,
and could accomplish so much more if the people who are constantly telling
me that my project will change the way researchers can accomplish their
search for documents would, in fact, contribute monthly a minimal $15 that
I was charging, but instead complain of the cost.
And, yest, I totally agree with the deplorable disrespect for Fort Monroe.
The greenback is much more valuable than preserving our history.  And so
many of the records I have been digitizing are either from or to Fort
Monroe.

Many academians have absolutely no idea of the cost involved with digital
projects.  They are professors who receive grant monies, and most still do
not utilize the digital projects, but instead either use previous records
over and over again, or do physically go to the Archives and spend hours
looking through non-indexed boxes of records, which soak up so much time.

So I will continue doing what I am doing a little at a time.  But the cost
to have the website live, and not bringing in any income from this project
makes it more and more difficult to keep it online.  I have poured over 10
years of hard work into this, and just don't know how to get the support
that I need.  And I worry that because my project is not associated with an
academic institution, it is considered by the academic world as "unworthy"
of acknowledgment.
Karen


On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Steven T. Corneliussen <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Thanks, Karen Needles, for emphasizing that free online access doesn't
> mean costless access. In the thread that has been progressing under the
> subject line "Research in the Digital Age," you wrote that "people expect
> to have everything on the Internet free." Then you carefully explained what
> the Lincoln Archives Digital Project has been doing, and what those efforts
> inescapably cost.
>
> Though this is a humanities forum, it might be useful to report from the
> world of science--another part of academe, after all--that the same dynamic
> now challenges scientific publishing, the basis and medium for scientific
> advance since shortly after Gutenberg. Science too sees a widespread urge,
> a compulsion, for information to be free--and scientific publishers too see
> something that calls to mind the belief of teenagers that money grows on
> trees in the backyard.
>
> Now, it is true that a scientist can simply publish her raw manuscript
> online for very little cost. It is also true that scientists themselves
> inherently desire information to be freely available--and that's including
> the scientists who operate not-for-profit scientific societies' publishing
> operations. And it is true that the Internet deletes portions of the cost
> of the scientific publishing enterprise.
>
> But it is also true that it's easy to find journals whose quality rests
> on, for example, the presence of Ph.D.-level scientists serving as editors.
> These editors--who obviously cannot work for free--manage the extensive,
> complicated process of peer review and the transformation of raw
> manuscripts into archived permanent products in something that also has
> costs: science's evolving system for ensuring precise retrievability not
> only of papers but of data sets from inside the annually accumulating
> tsunami of work.
>
> In other words, even in the digital age, and in some ways especially in
> the digital age, publishers add value. But a few voices in science have
> been extremely harsh and insistent that the added-value argument is bogus.
>
> I've oversimplified much and I've omitted much, but the underlying dynamic
> seems to me to correspond. So this note seemed to merit sending (even
> though it affords not a single opportunity to mention yet again Virginia's
> deplorable disrespect for sense of place at a certain historic landscape
> overlooking Hampton Roads and the lower Cheasapeake Bay, and figuring at or
> above the level of Monticello itself in American history).
>
> Thanks.
>
> Steven T. Corneliussen
> http://www.physicstoday.org/daily_edition/science_and_the_media
> Poquoson, Virginia
>
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