Footnote.com presents itself as an online archive, geared towards helping people discover documents that one may otherwise have to visit College Park, Maryland to examine. Many of the National Archives Record Administration’s record holdings are becoming available online via Footnote, which could be a great thing to those who cannot afford to physically travel to NARA. To view such collections you can either pay a membership fee to gain access to everything, or take the free route and risk not getting access to the files you want. At first that sounds like great news for a historian. After perusing the Footnote site, however, one should be hit with the thought, why is there a fee attached to some of the record groups? Additionally, I do not recall having to pay for my NARA researchers card, so why pay to view the same files now? If this is truly about making more files readily available for historians, then they should follow the same practices as a National Archive’s facility and not charge a membership fee.
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Synopsis
The purpose of Thompson Werk is to present the musings of a US War and Society doctoral student. Discussion topics principally center around the World Wars and Vietnam.
The opinions expressed on this site are not be confused with those of my colleagues, employers, friends, family, and/or anyone else associated with me.
Contact me with any comments, complaints, and/or questions.
Responses
- Robert: Everyone needs to see Vietnam,
- Ross Mahoney: Sounds like it is another
- Robert: My original post omitted the
- Robert: Hey Ross, Vietnam is a
- Ross Mahoney: Robert it looks like a
