Thank you. Very interesting and I can see how it could be a useful
starting point - and I'm sure many of us will experiment further with
Google's beta version search engine.  Indeed this week's New Yorker has a
fascinating article about the copyright/intellectual property issues
inherent in Google's much larger digital library project that is well
worth reading.  But I digress.
    Traditional on-line library catalogues continue to have their merits,
too, however - and resources for full-text searching such as JSTOR or
Project Muse are well worth a trip to a major library.
    In this instance, for example, the Google beta version search engine
turns up many titles that are not very useful for the initial query
about Indian agents and that are of limited use even for the 1768 Fort
Stanwix Conference. (This is not surprising: my research in JSTOR and
other places suggests that sustained scholarship about the Fort
Stanwiz conference is pretty limited, which may be why my short list
had things published almost back to 1900.)
   In this regard, the Google search on "Fort Stanwix Conference 1768" for
which Dr. McDonald provided the link resulted in 189 titles, most of
which had perhaps ONE mention of the conference, and many of which are
passing references......  Conveniently, of course, Google let's you
look at each of these 189 pages - a great boon when away from a good
library - at say a minute or two each, that's about 3 to 6 hours.
  Back when I was gathering information about the conference (among other
things I needed to know exactly when it began and ended because
Jefferson was accused of making advances toward Elizabeth Moore Walker
while her husband was attending it) I found half a dozen useful things
in the net in a regular Google search, but frankly it was traditional
library on-line catalogues and JSTOR that got me most quickly to the
really useful titles that I cited. (BTW I've already done what I needed
on the Stanwix conference, I mentioned it just in recommending titles to
someone else interested in Indian agents as an indication of the period
- 1760s - for which these titles were most useful.)
   At some fundamental level all findings aids, printed or on-line, are a
bit like indexes in one respect: a good index entry is based on
informed judgment and will get you to the select information you're
looking for. A less well edited index may provide dozens or scores of
page numbers for every mention of some term or another (like a
concordance), but those sought-after kernels of information are in
effect buried in so much "chaff" that the result is very cumbersome....
Sometimes, even outside of modern architecture, less is more.

Jon Kukla



> I have found Google's beta version search engine for limited-view and
> full-view books, with their on-line digitized data, to be helpful,
> especially when a large library is not readily accessible.  An example for
> your topic:
> http://books.google.com/books?q=Fort+Stanwix+conference+1768+&as%5fbrr=0
>
> Go to the basic '.com' URL for general info.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Regards,
> Neil McDonald
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jon Kukla" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 3:48 PM
> Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Virginia agents and the Indians
>
>
>> In the context of writing about Thomas Jefferson and Elizabeth Moore
>> Walker, I did some reading about the Fort Stanwix conference of 1768
>> that
>> John Walker attended as secretary for the Virginia delegation headed by
>> his father, Dr. Thomas Walker.
>>  Among the works I found helpful (some old some new and in no particular
>> order) were: <snip>

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