FEATURE
Preserving Unique Historical Documents: HistoryIT Uses New Technology to Save Old Records
by Terry Ballard
 A dozen years ago, I won a grant from my university to visit Ireland and determine the chances of working with the library system in County Kerry to digitize sections of a massive collection it maintained: The Board of Guardians Minute Books. The library shelves were filled with thousands of bound volumes of handwritten journals. These were the weekly reports from the managers of the workhouses, where indigent citizens were sent to be boarded and repay that “generosity” with labor. Our library had a special collection concerning the Great Famine, so we were most interested in working on the years 1845–1853.
On a beautiful spring day in 2003, I walked to the Tralee branch and visited with the local history librarians. They were very open to working with us to begin a digitization program, but there was one sticking point: The work had to be done in that building. We would need to send equipment and the personnel to set it up and train the library’s people to carry out the work. They showed me the Minute Books room, where I saw floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with bulky volumes. This treasure, preserved for centuries, could be destroyed by one faulty bit of electrical wiring or one careless match.
COMBINING DISCIPLINES
Kristen Gwinn-Becker spent time studying in Ireland and became very attached to the history of that country. She started her career in technology in San Francisco, and she spent time learning computer science there. Then she got her Ph.D. in American history at George Washington University. In 2011, these threads all came together when she founded HistoryIT, a startup made for the purpose of preserving unique historical documents in an electronic format that can then be seen by scholars the world over. From its beginnings as a startup, the company grew to have a team consisting of dozens of IT professionals and history experts.
In 2014, Gwinn-Becker was featured in a TEDx Talk titled “The Future of History.” This brief talk is an exceptionally fine presentation that details the issues at hand for preserving history online. She says that an important audience is people who grew up in the age of the internet—she labels them “Generation Click.” They were raised thinking that any fact in the world can be accessed at a moment’s notice by asking their computer or their phone. The problem is that most historical materials are not found online, and what is there is mostly in summary form. With the actual materials scattered in hundreds of locations, they are in danger of becoming lost in the sea of information. The idea of our cultural identity drowning among floating reality television quotes and sports statistics should give chills to anyone who cares about the future of our society. Gwinn-Becker warns that if our historical foundations are weakly maintained in our digital archives, they are in danger of becoming irrelevant. Worse, it leaves the digital world open to unscrupulous and well-funded sources that can reinvent history to be what they wish it had been. That brings to mind the communist joke:
Question:
What is a historian?
Answer:
Someone who can predict the past.
Gwinn-Becker says in her talk that even when efforts are made to digitize historical records, we are doing it wrong. Text alone will not get the data into search engines in any meaningful way. She brings up the analogy of Velcro. If you look closely at the strips, you see that one side has thousands of loops, and the other side has a similar set of hooks. When the strips are merged, a solid connection is made. If you don’t have both in digitization, you end up with informational mush. Adding more context to the records vastly improves their value.
A CONVERSATION WITH THE FOUNDER
In fall 2024, I had the privilege of participating in a videoconference with Gwinn-Becker. I asked her when she discovered her love for history. She said there was no one moment, but it gradually grew on her. Her mother was part of an old American family going back centuries. Her father was keenly interested in politics and current events, so it was a fertile environment for doing this kind of exploration.
I asked if HistoryIT uses AI, and Gwinn-Becker told me that it is a minor part of her company’s work. The team mainly uses it for organizational efficiency, but not so much for the digitization part of the job. I have seen stability issues in digital operations, so I asked her the degree to which the materials are backed up. She assured me that the images are backed up in real time, and that the long-term work is fully ensured using Amazon S3 Glacier. I wondered if the work is mainly done in company headquarters or if she sends teams out to the sites. She said that the majority of times, the materials are sent to them. I asked how many projects HistoryIT has created in its 13 years. Gwinn-Becker estimated it was about a thousand. I noted that I could not find a comprehensive list on the HistoryIT website, and she confirmed that it isn’t something the company publishes. (If you search for HistoryIT on social media, you can see a selection of its projects.)
I asked Gwinn-Becker if there is a project that she is particularly proud of. The one dearest to her heart is the history of Hog Island. This remote island in Maine evolved from a rustic tourist resort in the early 20th century to an Audubon-sponsored nature preserve. Gwinn-Becker was proud to tell the story of two women on the island who stepped up to preserve its natural heritage. With appealing images, text, and newspaper clippings, visiting the webpage is like walking into a virtual museum.
OTHER EXAMPLES
HistoryIT provided me with other examples of its work to peruse. The first documents the establishment and growth of Unity, a religious movement founded in the late 19th century. It includes a substantial collection of letters, photographs, and notes detailing the church’s early days. The second example is the Delta Gamma Fraternity, founded in 1873. This is a massive collection of digital artifacts, and I was struck by the extremely high quality of the work to make them easily available.
CONCLUSION
It has been an inspiration getting to know Gwinn-Becker and sampling the work her company is doing. I can only hope that others will take up HistoryIT’s cause and use her work as a road map for their own preservation of our culture. |
