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Constant Aims, Changing Technologies: Photostat and Microfilm Publishing at the Massachusetts Historical Society

Microfilming, as a technology, came into its own shortly before World War II, but as a tool for the preservation of research collections and the diffusion of information it had long antecedents. At the Massachusetts Historical Society, a pioneering institution in the preparation and distribution of microfilms of research collections, starting in the late eighteenth century generations of historians drew on earlier technologies for many of the same reasons that repositories later turned to microform. An account of the Society's program of microfilming properly begins at the beginning of the M.H.S. in 1791. When the Reverend Jeremy Belknap established the Massachusetts Historical Society with nine colleagues in 1791 he had two purposes in mind. The author of an on-going, multi-volume history of New Hampshire, Belknap had grown concerned in the course of his research about the fate of early American documentary sources. The mildewed and mouse-eaten condition of many of the texts he was using betrayed the neglect they had suffered. Belknap realized that if no-one took time to collect and preserve the records of the new nation's past, future generations of scholars would lack crucial historical evidence. One of his objectives, then, was to create a repository for important historical documents. Based on recent experience, however, Belknap knew that no repository could offer the degree of security that the most significant texts deserved. Archives were subject to natural disasters and civil disturbances: fire had destroyed Harvard's library in 1764, two years after Belknap's graduation from the college, and during the American Revolution patriot rioters and British Regulars had each ravaged important collections of historical documents. Belknap's solution for this problem, his second objective in establishing the Massachusetts Historical Society, was to "multiply the copies." Through publication with wide circulation, Belknap proposed to ensure the survival of important historical texts. An original document might be lost through mishap, but if it had already been published, the information it contained would not be. Less than a year after the establishment of the Society, it issued its first publication, a series of correspondence concerning the successful Massachusetts expedition in 1745 to capture the French fortress at Louisbourg. With the Louisbourg letters, the Society began a program of scholarly publication comprising monographs, catalogues, and periodicals as well as edited documents — that continues to this day and has produced hundreds of volumes over the past two centuries. In the space of a year, the founders of the Massachusetts Historical Society had recorded two "firsts:" theirs was the first repository for Americana anywhere and their publications program, devoted as it was to American history, was the first of its kind.'