LaborHistory, Vol. 43, No. 3, 2002 Labor Historyon the WorldWide Web: Thoughts onJumping onto a Moving Express Train THOMASDUBLIN The World WideWeb has undergoneremarkable expansionof late andthis growth poseschallenges toall historians. In anarticle publishedrecently in the Journal of AmericanHistory ,Roy Rosenzweigoffered a variety ofmeasures of that growth: the Online ComputerLibrary Center,for instance,reported a vefoldincrease in unique websites between 1997 and2000, estimating some7.1 million sitesin October 2000; theSearch engineGoogle indexed some 1.3 billion webpages, a gure that now exceeds1.6 billion asthis article is being written(November– December 2001); and searchable databaseson the World WideWeb, not accessible to conventional search engines,by someestimates total 550 billion webpages. 1 Ashistorians weare all used tosome version of the information explosion,but this is really toomuch! What sense canlabor historians make ofthevast newresources now accessible on theWorld Wide Web,and how can we best draw on these resources for ourresearch and teaching? It is difcult to climb upona moving train, butclimb onthis expresswe must. And while noone can claim to“ keepup” with therapidly changing stateof the World WideWeb, it is important totake stockof some of the more important resourcesavailable onthe Weband to consider strategies for keeping abreast ofthis information explosion. In this article, Ioffera sketchof resources currently onthe World WideWeb that shouldbe of interest to labor historians. As LaborHistory begins this issuewith new editorsand a newMission Statement, it seemsan opportunemoment for this sortof stock-taking.That statementre ects the ways that the eldof labor history has changed in themore than 40 years sincethis journal rstappeared. Topics that play alarger role in labor history in 2002 than wasthe case in 1960 includethe representation of work andan emphasis onlabor systems.The expanding interestin issuesof gender and the domesticsphere in thesocial reproductionof labor also might surprisethe journal’ s foundinggeneration. The Cultural Turn has had its impact onlabor history, asin all elds,and so thecultural dimensionsof class are increasingly afocus.And nally, the expansionof the geographical range ofthe journal toinclude Canadian and Latin American history reects the increasing importance ofglobal andcomparative approaches within thehistorical discipline.In this surveyof recent developments on the World WideWeb, I will try tocast my netas widely asthe journal’ s newMission Statement. Asa fastmoving target, theweb demands strategies todeal with its constant transformation. Considerthe fate of a survey oftheweb published in this journal alittle more than twoyears ago. JohnH. Summerswrote a neessay exploring “American 1Roy Rosenzweig,“ TheRoad to Xanadu: Public and PrivatePathways on the HistoryWeb,” Journal ofAmerican History 88(2001), 550,552. ISSN0023-656X print/ ISSN1469-9702 online/ 02/030343–14 Ó 2002Taylor & Francis Ltd onbehalfof The Tamiment Institute DOI: 10.1080/0023656022000001823 344 ThomasDublin labor history onthe World WideWeb.” Still, ofabout 50 historical sitesdescribed in thearticle, asearchin theearly fall of2001 foundmore than athird ofthe web links nolonger reachable at theaddresses given in thearticle’ s notes. 2 Siteswere temporarily down,had movedto new addresses, or had simply beendiscontinued in theintervening period.Given the uidity ofsites and the web’ s continualgrowth, historians needto developstrategies to ndsitesthat have movedor appeared sincethe publication ofsite reviewsor review articles. Search strategies are particularly important toolsin keeping abreast ofthe web’ s dynamism. Yetthe commonly employed searchengines can access only atiny fraction ofthe resourcescontained on the web. In his recentarticle Rosenzweigmade two distinctions which are important tokeep in mind whennavigating theWorld WideWeb. He noted thedifferences between the surface web and the deep web, and between the public and private webs. 3 The distinctionsare important ones,and historians will dowell tothink about their implications for their work.The distinctionbetween surface and deep webs islargely thedifference between web sites that consistof searchable pages that are indexedby public, automatedsearch engines such as Google and Altavista andsites that consistof databases searchable only by internal searchengines. For example, the AmericanMemory projectof theLibrary ofCongressconsists (as of November 2001) of more than 100 distinctcollections and more than 7million digitized items. 4 To access thedepths of these digitized collections,one needs to search through databasescreated by staffat theLibrary ofCongress. Butbeyond the surface and the deep webs, which together comprise thepublic web, thereis also theprivate web.Resources on the private webare available tothose who are willing andable topay for access.Online journalsare among themost important scholarly resourcesin theprivate web.Students and teachers at collegesand universities that subscribeto JSTOR, ProQuestDirect , or Expanded Academic ASAP have the capability ofsearching extensiveruns of current and historical newspapersand period- icals.5 Recently,more focusedresearch collections, such as the GerritsenCollection— Women’s HistoryOnline, 1543–1945 and NorthAmerican Women’ s Lettersand Diaries , have appeared onthe World WideWeb, offering studentsand faculty at subscribing collegesand universities remarkable opportunitiesto conduct full-text searchesof an astonishing array ofprinted primary sources. 6 The private web,according toRosen- zweig,now accounts for some20% ofcontenton the World WideWeb, and its share 2John H.Summers, “TheFuture of Labor’ s Past: AmericanLabor Historyon the WorldWide Web,” LaborHistory 40(1999), 69–79; for an earlieroverview of American history on the web, seeMichael O’Malleyand Roy Rosenzweig,“ BraveNew World or Blind Alley? AmericanHistory on the WorldWide Web,” Journal ofAmerican History 83(1997), 132–155. 3Rosenzweig,“ Road to Xanadu,”552. 4American Memory:Historical Collections ofthe National Digital Library ,http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ ammemhome.html. Following currentpractice, I italicizeall names ofweb sites and usequotation marks fordocuments, articlesor subsections on awebsite– as onewould do with articlesin ajournal orchapters within apublished book. 5Itis not possible to provide staticweb addresses (URLs) forthese three resources. I have accessedall ofthem through the library webpages at the State Universityof New York at Binghamton and readers will needto accessthem through similar pagesat academicinstitutions orlibraries with which they are afliated. Accessto theseprivate websites is by institutional subscription only. 6Both ofthese databases areavailable by subscription only, but readerscan nd out moreabout their resourcesat the webpages of the companies that have developedand marketedthem: ProQuest (http://www.umi.com/products/pd-product-gerritsen.shtml)and AlexanderStreet Press (h ttp://www. alexanderst.com/PSNAWLD.htm). Essay Reviews 345 is growing. Clearly, theability toconduct pointed, effective searches in thedeep web andthe private webwill becrucial for labor historians. Aftertreating valuable sitesfor labor historians accessibleon the public web,in the nal sectionof this article Idiscuss strategies for accessingresources in thedeep and private portionsof the web. Oneof the rstways to begin exploring labor history onthe World WideWeb is to examine theextensive bibliographies ofweb sites that have emerged:webographies, in thenew terminology. HistoryMatters ,awebsite maintained jointly by theAmerican Social History Projectat City University ofNew York andthe Center for History and NewMedia at GeorgeMason University, is aparticularly goodplace tobegin. 7 At this sprawling website, the “ WWW.History”section offers lists ofannotated American history sites.More than 30 categories ofsites—organized by time period,topical focus, andregion— offer groupings ofweb resources. Employing thesite’ s full-search capa- bility, underthe heading “Labor &labor movements,”for instance,the webography lists 245 sitesof possible interest. If weadd “ Women”to our search and limit thetime period to1890–1930, we ndthat thesearch returns 31 possibleweb sites. Among the more usefulsites that comeup in thecomprehensive listing are the AmericanMemory projectof the Library ofCongress, the New DealNetwork ,with its rich holdings of photographs andtexts, and the Dramasof Haymarket ,aChicago Historical Society projectexploring theHaymarket Affair ofMay 1886, its aftermath, andlegacy. 8 History Matters is ever expanding andis currently adding aseriesof online essays with interactive examples in anewsection entitled “ Making senseof evidence.” Learners’ guideswill explore theuse of photographs, oral history, andquantitative evidence, along with avariety ofother kindsof evidence. The sitealso offersnumerous sets of resourcesespecially aimed at contributing tothe teaching ofhistory. The “Digital blackboard”provides teaching assignmentsthat utilize theWorld WideWeb; “ Students asteachers” offers examples ofstudent work on the web; and “ Syllabus central” presentssyllabi for U.S.history or American studiessurvey courses. The searchability ofthe site makes it particularly valuable for teachersof labor history. Anotherresource with broad coverage is theweb site of the Gilder LehrmanInstitute ofAmerican History .The resourcessection of this siteincludes annotated documents, links toaudio and visual resourceson