The Importance of BCHS in an Electronic Age

Why should I become a member of the Bradford County Historical Society, or any historical society for that matter, if I can use online resources for my research?

It's interesting how this topic has become a part of our daily lives here in the 21st century. The answer to a question like that would have been obvious 10 or 15 years ago. In fact, the question wouldn't have been asked. Online resources were not as plentiful as they are today.

Sometime when boredom strikes, visit The Way Back Machine website and type in "ancestry.com" to see what that now popular site looked like in 1996. The site we all know today wasn't much of anything back then.

Today it's different though and it's not just Ancestry.com that made it that way. Look at Google Book Search for example. Google has digitized thousands of rare books and made them available online free of charge or through limited access. I have used this resource a lot myself recently and have found references to Bradford County in hundreds of books.

Google has a special arrangement with the nations foremost libraries to make this material available. These libraries, however, face the same issues that the Bradford County Historical Society research library faces. There has to be a place where historical records are preserved for future generations. If all material is made available for free online, there is little reason to use research libraries. If no one used research libraries, then the revenue that is used to maintain a safe storage environment for these original records would not exist.

We are committed to improving the options available for records access in our research library, whether for walk-in visitors or researchers across the nation. We are currently discussing the possibilities here at BCHS with a goal of starting to implement some of these improvements before the end of the year. Send an email to bchscurator@epix.net and tell me what improvements you would like to see for researchers.