California Pioneers
Phyllis and I drove across the Bay Bridge to MacWorld at the Moscone Center in San Francisco today. We had six-month-old Mathew with us, so (as three people) we got to use the car pool lane, which was very nice, scooting around all the traffic at the toll Plaza. MacWorld was really hopping with enthusiastic people and great gadgets, but that's not what I want to write about.
Just a block or two from Moscone Center we passed the Society of California Pioneers. Turns out that it has a research library. the Alice Phelan Sullivan library.
Alice's library features diaries from the 1848 Gold Rush, photos, old sheet music, holographic autobiographies of California pioneers, and much more.
Here's where I'm going with this. Google's recent announcement that it will be digitizing portions of the Stanford, Michigan, Oxford and NY Public libraries is just great, and a good start. But what about all the little, specialized archives in the world? There's no research substitute it seems -- at least yet -- to being there in the physical sense. If you want to really look at the primary source material at the California Pioneer Society, you have to go there (and, yes, it is only a couple of blocks from San Francisco's Moscone Center).
Posted by Harold Davis at January 12, 2005 01:48 PM
