Doc Searls points to Steve Lewis, who reminds us that as good as the various web resources we have are, there's still a ton of material out there that has never been examined, much less digitized. For instance:

Indeed, much of the history of Iraq and its antecedents ­ as of much of the Mid-East, North Africa, and the Balkans ­ stills lays buried amongst the millions of pre-1923 Ottoman documents stored in the Turkish national archives in Istanbul and Ankara.

That's not even the half of it, apparently. I'm reading "Osman's Dream", by Caroline Finkel - and she notes that those Turkish archives are becoming less accessible even within Turkey. Not for political reasons, simply due to language barriers. From her foreword:

The past is truly another country in Turkey, whose citizens have been deprived of easy access to the literary and historical works of previous eras by the change in alphabet in 1928 from Arabic script to the Roman alphabet familiar to most of the western world. At the same time, an ongoing programme to make the vocabulary more Turkish is expunging words of Arabic and Persian derivation - the other two components of the rich amalgam that was the Ottoman tongue, today in danger of becoming as 'dead' as Latin. On the other hand, works from the Ottoman centuries are now being published in modern script with simplified language, enabling modern readers to gain some understanding of what went before. The situation would otherwise be dire; imagine an English literary canon which lacked anything written before the 1930s!

As much of a "triumphalist" as I've been for things like Wikipedia, the true scholar's work is hardly obsolete.

Technorati Tags: archives, history