<em>What seems clear is that the Whitman Archive is one of a group of projects that are demonstrating how the print-based monumental scholarly edition can be reimagined and advanced in the form of an electronic archive.</em>
 
It is similarly true, I would posit, that the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is at the forefront of projects that are demonstrating how <em>bricks and mortar archives</em> can be reimagined and perhaps advanced in the form of a digital archive.  It is precisely this difference of perspectives that drew me to participating in <em>Archive:  A Digital Journal</em> in the first place.  Historians, literary scholars, digital humanists, electronic archive editors (who are one or more of the preceding, as well)<em> and</em> archivists viewing the same program or project through our distinct lenses, but then being encouraged to talk amongst ourselves.  It is a long overdue idea, one whose long-term significance will probably not appear immediately, but Lauren Coats and the others responsible for <em>Archive: A Digital Journal</em> should be congratulated on having given such conversations a beginning.
 
Just how major online “archives” of digital facsimiles built around a single author or event will lead to reconfiguring and reimagining bricks and mortar archives is, I regret to say, beyond my ken at the moment—or perhaps more realistically beyond my ability to give serious and sustained thought to the matter.  But I can limn one possibility, providing, perhaps, sufficient impetus for others to take up study of this matter.  For example, in a 2002 interview Ken Price noted that “Most libraries and other institutions have been supportive and at times quite enthusiastic about our undertaking…. A couple of well-funded private libraries are resistant to having parts of their collections displayed on the web. They are working on a more proprietary and protective model.”<a href="#_ftn1" rel="nofollow">[1]</a>
 
Indeed, Ken here identifies a significant gulf in the archival world, between those archivists and their repositories who are committed to expanding access to and use of their holdings to the widest possible audience on the one hand and those archivists and repositories who hew to an early 20th century notion of the “moral defence” (it comes from a British writer) of archives encompassing a rigorous gatekeeper role for our profession.  It is the same tradition whence derives vestigial but still enforced policies that only “qualified scholars” be permitted to have access to a particular repository.  Where it intersects the digital 21st century universe, this defensive tradition is adamant about not “losing control” of facsimiles of material in its holdings, regardless of whether the copyright in that material expired decades ago.  
 
The practical grounding of such defensiveness is the concern that repositories would otherwise see their on-site visitation gradually drop to zero, since researchers had access to good-quality copies of the material that once made the repository indispensible.  To date statistics suggest just the opposite has been occurring, that the more material is digitized the more on-site statistics increase:  because even when an entire collection is digitized and placed on the web, interested researchers still have (or, likely, have for the first time) reason to visit the repository to take advantage of all the corollary collections that have yet to be scanned.  The “protective” archives are apt to find themselves and their small portions of otherwise digitized collections increasingly ignored by users both on and off line.
 
There are, actually, several factors joining to force “proprietary” repositories to re-examine their philosophy and model,<a href="#_ftn2" rel="nofollow">[2]</a> but the existence of projects such as the <em>Whitman Archive</em> is part of that confluence.  And there are other issues that the <em>Archive</em> will force bricks and mortar repositories to re-examine.  One is the tradition of digitizing “gems” and patron requests versus a growing minority of repositories who are turning to digitizing only entire folders and sometimes full series or even entire collections; the <em>Whitman Archive</em> and others like it suggest powerfully that there is a large “market” for organic collections.  Less clear is the impact of digital archives on internal allocation of repository resources—what is more important now, digitizing entire collections or acquiring new ones, creating curriculum units to help students interpret sources, or improving capabilities to serve on-site patrons?  
 
If we pay close attention to one another—that is, the on-line archives and the earth-bound repositories—we have some interesting discussions ahead of us.  <em>Archive:  A Digital Journal</em> will give us a venue for those discussions.  I look forward to seeing the journal and the conversations evolve.
 





<a href="#_ftnref1" rel="nofollow">[1]</a> See “<a href="http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/history.html" rel="nofollow">History of the Project</a>,” <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, part of the project’s substantial “About the <em>Archive</em>” section.
 


<a href="#_ftnref2" rel="nofollow">[2]</a> See, for example, Mark A. Greene, “Existential Archives: Looking To the Value Propositions of Archives and Special Collections,” paper presented to the joint meeting of the Association of Research Libraries and the Coalition for Networked Information, “An Age of Discovery: Distinctive Collections in the Digital Age, October 2009,” available online at <a href="http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/mm09greeneremarks.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/mm09greeneremarks.pdf</a>. 
 










