Please do not cite without permission. Contact the author at jfbeatty@gmail.com.

Thanks to my co-panelists, Jon Kukla and Kevin Hardwick; to Del Moore for invaluable research help; and to the Gilder Lehrman Foundation for funding the research trip that made this paper possible.

Abstract: In 1921 the American Historical Review published the journal of a “French traveller” describing his trip to Britain’s North American colonies in 1765. From the West Indies, the traveler sailed north to the North Carolina coast and journeyed overland to New York. Over those nine months he broke bread and drank wine with a cross-section of the colonies’ wealthiest and most powerful men. The journal is unusual in two ways. First, it was written in English and yet found in a French naval archive. With its detailed descriptions of colonial port cities and their defenses, the journal was apparently written by a spy for Britain’s greatest rival. Second, it contains the only extant eyewitness account of the debates in Virginia’s House of Burgesses over the Stamp Act. These debates and the set of resolves that emerged served as a spark for resistance to the Stamp Act throughout Britain’s North American colonies — and yet we know little about the drama played out in the Capitol that day. The traveler never revealed his identity within the pages of the journal. Neither the editor of the AHR copy nor later historians could connect the journal to a known historical figure. This paper, then, will reveal the identity of the “French Traveller,” reevaluate what the journal tells us in light of the author’s identity, and examine the implications on our understanding of how the Virginia House of Burgesses and their resolves ignited colonial resistance to the Stamp Act.

In 1921 the American Historical Review published a recently-discovered document, a traveler’s journal chronicling a 1765 trip through the American colonies. Normally such a document wouldn’t have been considered important enough to warrant sixty pages over two issues in the AHR. But this particular journal had two things going for it. First, it contained the only eyewitness description of the debate over the Virginia Resolves in the House of Burgesses. The Burgesses’ argument over how to respond to the Stamp Act featured Patrick Henry’s star turn and the resulting resolves became a rallying point for the colonists from New Hampshire to Georgia.

Second, the journal was found in a French naval archive and contained evaluations of the defenses of each of the major ports between North Carolina and New York. Combined with the writer’s musings on the colonists’ questionable loyalty to Britain, the implication was clear: the traveller had been a spy in the service of France.

Unfortunately, the journal had no name attached to it — there was no way to determine who the author was. It was assumed by the editor for the AHR transcription that the writer was a Frenchman. And there the matter sat for eighty years or so, until Rhys Isaac pointed out that that did not make a lot of sense, for the simple reason that the journal was in English. Why would a Frenchman be writing this long journal in a second language, especially if it were to be sent back to France? Rhys believed the author was an Irish Catholic, citing certain peculiarities of language that matched up with an Irish accent. But he could not find a matching name either.

Now, the traveller mentions many, many members of the colonial gentry in his journal. Surely it would be possible to find their papers in various archives and search through them for correspondences with the journal? If the “French traveller” listed the people he met at a dinner party, and one of those people mentioned meeting someone at the same party not mentioned by the traveller, and if this coincidence was repeated — surely that would be strong circumstantial evidence for the traveller’s identity?

At the same time Rhys was thinking about this issue I was doing research on the Stamp Act crisis and visiting archives in the same places the traveler had written about. Del Moore of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation had, at Rhys’s request, begun compiling a list of the people mentioned in the journal and where their papers might be archived. I had begun the same research and when I traveled to New York and Philadelphia to do my research I brought both lists with me.

I want to talk about the journal a little more. The traveller began writing in late 1764 in the Caribbean. Embarking from Havana he sailed northwards. Accompanied by one servant, he disembarked at Beaumont, North Carolina. He traveled northward to New York, stopping for extended periods in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. On the way, he described the economies of each town he visited — the main industries of each area, with an eye towards their export trade. He dined with some of the wealthiest merchants of those colonies as well as with governors and lieutenant governors. He gambled with William Byrd III, to whom he took an instant dislike. He attended a ball at the Governor’s Palace in Virginia — sparsely attended due to tensions over the Stamp Act. He made fast friends with the Maryland merchant James Christie and explored much of Virginia with him. In Maryland, he spent two days with the Jesuit Father George Hunter before introducing himself to a circle of Christie’s friends, including Joseph and Samuel Galloway and Charles Carroll of Annapolis (the elder Charles Carroll). The time he spent in Maryland — with fellow Catholics and Catholic sympathizers — was by far the best part of his trip, a seemingly endless round of visiting, dinner parties, and tavern debates with men of similar social status, mercantile expertise, and political/religious sympathies. In particular, he recalled the Galloways’ hospitality as fine: “Nothing can be equal to the Civilities I received from these Gentlemen,” he wrote.

Time in Philadelphia and New York followed, in which he again mixed with merchants and high colonial officials. John Watts of New York and Robert Morris of Philadelphia are of particular note here. The diary’s last entry is on September 7, 1765, merely a note of one more dining engagement.

So, now, two hundred and forty years later here I am in New York trying to suss out the French Traveller’s identity from these clues. The traveler had been treated by a New York doctor, whose record book was held at the New York Historical Society. But the pages on which our traveler would have been listed had been destroyed. The papers of John Watts had, perhaps, a tantalizing clue but no more than that.

On my last day in New York I stopped at the New York Public Library. There was one more set of papers I wanted to examine, those of Maryland’s Samuel Galloway. I was given the box; I opened the folder for 1765 and 1766. And there, on the top of a sheet of paper slightly larger than the others, halfway into the folder, was a name I recognized — a name John Watts had mentioned.

I remember being calm. I read through the documents one by one, in order. I came to that document. It was a letter, written in June 1766, written in Williamsburg and addressed to Samuel Galloway. The writer thanked Galloway for all the hospitality he’d shown him the previous year. He was not stinting in his praise — he acknowledged “the many civilitys & favours I received from you during my stay in your Province,” sentiments echoing those of the French Traveller. And, finally, he was sending the letter to Galloway by way of their “mutual friend” James Christie — a man with whom the French Traveller had become close companions. At this point I knew we had our man.

The name of the writer was not French — Rhys’s intuition there had been correct. Yet it was not Irish, either. Instead, the name was Scottish: Charles Murray.

Charles Murray. So, who was Charles Murray? Why was he traveling through the colonies? And why was a Scotsman spying for France?

Charles Murray was a wine merchant, representing a firm based in London and Madeira. Murray was born in 1733 or 1734, a younger son in an old Borders family. His father, John Murray of Philiphaugh, was a heritable member of Parliament as Sheriff of County Selkirk, while his mother Eleanor was the daughter of Lord Basil Hamilton.

By the time we meet Charles in 1765, he was in his early thirties and employed by Scott, Pringle, Cheap & Co. of London and Madeira, a firm whose named partners were also scions of old Borders families. It was while he was a wine merchant that he traveled through the colonies. This journey through Britain’s North American possessions, making contacts and cementing networks, was a standard part of the career of young Madeira merchants.

In 1771 Charles Murray was named British consul to Madeira. The next year he married Elizabeth Scott, daughter of the recently-deceased head of his firm. And with that joyful union came the 15,000 pounds Elizabeth had recently inherited. The Murrays split their time between Madeira and London. In Madeira Charles Murray built a large mansion house, Quinta do Monte, known for its great terraced gardens. In London the couple lived in a well-appointed house on Bedford Row. Later in his career Murray, though retaining the post of consul, gave over many of his duties to a vice-consul and retired from Madeira to Lisbon. Murray remained consul until 1800 and died in Lisbon eight years later.

There are very few documents by or about Charles Murray in the archives, but from the 1765 journal and what other writings there are we can gain some hints as to his personality, his likes and dislikes, and perhaps begin to understand the motives behind his career as a spy for France.

Murray seems to have been concerned with civility and decorum to an extent unusual for even the eighteenth century. He was protective of — even defensive about — his place in society and the material success he’d earned. In one incident soon after his marriage to Elizabeth Scott, Murray discovered that Elizabeth’s free-spirited younger sister intended to secretly marry an itinerant musician within the hour. He dashed out of the house and ran through the streets of London, arriving in time to stop the wedding — and, one presumes, protecting his family’s honor as well as the 15,000 pounds that was the second daughter’s half of the inheritance.

Murray was a Catholic, and seemingly a devout one, going out of his way while in America to meet with Jesuit priests and other Catholics, and tarrying in Maryland with those of the same creed. He held an affection for the Scotch-Irish settlers of the backcountry counties, while simultaneously disapproving of “presbiterians” — a term that for Murray included both Scotch-Irish self-identifying Presbyterians as well as the Congregationalists of New England. Backsliders from Catholicism came in for particular vitriol, and especially the Maryland proprietors.

This identification as Catholic and disdain for ex-Catholics seems to be at the heart of Murray’s self-identity and of his sympathies with France rather than Britain. It seems, perhaps, the fervor of a convert — which would make sense given that his father and older brother, members of Parliament both, were not Catholic.

Scorning Britain and yet journeying through its colonies during an imperial crisis, Murray could not help but listen to complaints about the Stamp Act and its implications. He heard Virginian tavern-goers threatening to rebel, even to ally with France, if the Stamp Act should be enforced. And he saw even moderate Marylanders admit that, if they had to choose sides, they would take up arms against Britain.

Murray envisioned what a revolution might entail. He saw that a foreign power, like France, could not hold the colonies even if they came to the aid of a revolution. But there was a restive population of Irish, German, and Dutch indentured servants throughout the colonies, ethnically distinct from the English majority, who would rise to the banner that offered them freedom. And in a different document, Murray proposed to incite a slave revolt in the Southern colonies with the aid of Maryland’s Catholics and Jacobites. And he believed even the English colonists would follow a strong leader — an “Enterprising man” Murray called him — into independence.

My guess is that Murray, the Catholic convert whose quarrel with England seems a matter of religion, was thinking of a particular person — Charles Edward Stuart.

Now, to say that Murray was a Jacobite is not to imply that there was any particular grand pro-Stuart conspiracy in 1765, merely to say that he was a young man whose imagination may have run away with him. Further, even Charles Stuart had apparently contented himself with a pampered life in exile at this point.

So Charles Murray had an interest in fomenting colonial unrest. He thought that many of the colonists could be turned towards France — in particular his Maryland Catholic friends, but others as well, like the Virginia tavern-goers who said “let the worst Come to the worst we’ll Call the french to our succour.”.

As he traveled through the colonies, he was a man with a tale to tell. And tell it he must have, at taverns and dinner parties. He’d seen that moment when the Virginia House of Burgesses declared opposition to the Stamp Act. He’d heard Patrick Henry walk up to the line of treasonous speech.

And Henry’s behavior echoed stories that the colonists and Murray already knew. That winter, Isaac Barré— a hero of the Seven Years’ War — had spoken against the Stamp Act in Parliament. His impassioned speech was described in newspaper accounts, and one account in particular — published and republished across the colonies — evoked the drama of the moment. Barré spoke “with eyes darting fire, and an outstretched arm, … with a voice somewhat elevated, and with a sternness in his countenance, which express’d, in a most lively manner, the feelings of his heart.” And like Henry, Barré had purposely treaded close to the line of treason before stepping back, saying “prudence forbids me to explain myself any further … The people there are as truly loyal, I believe, as any subjects the King has: But a people jealous of their liberties, and who will vindicate them, if they should be violated; but the subject is too delicate, I will say no more.”

So too Henry: a man portraying himself as reserved, but finally outraged by unconscionable threats to liberty, to the point of breaking the conventions of normal speech. It was a performance in every sense of the word, and like all good performances it drew upon familiar narratives. Those who’d thrilled to newspaper accounts of Barré’s performance would hear its echo in Henry’s.

Now, the stirrings of Revolutionary spirit have been described using a particular medical metaphor. Bernard Bailyn, for example, used the title “The Contagion of Liberty” for one chapter of Ideological Origins. And the colonists used this metaphor as well. For example, a South Carolina writer in December 1765 noted that it was not just in his colony that the public offices and courts were closed: “the Contagion has extended itself to Georgia, so that the whole Continent is now in the same Circumstance…”

Contagions, though, do not spread of themselves. They require an agent to carry and transmit the disease — a vector, in medical terminology. The “contagion” of resistance to the Stamp Act spread, we know, through the dissemination in print of the Virginia Resolves and other documents defending colonists’ rights. But it also was transmitted, like any disease, through face-to-face communication, time spent in shared quarters, communal drinking and feasting.

To return to where we began, with Charles Murray and his journey through the colonies: After visiting Williamsburg he traveled through Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York. He stayed at taverns and drank in their common rooms. He dined and did business with the mercantile and political elites. As Murray conversed, he could say that he himself had seen the great debate in the House of Burgesses. He could have described it in the dramatic terms he used in his journal — recalling the tension between Henry and the Speaker as Henry walked perilously close to treason. These words, these actions — Henry as the sympathetic man, stirred beyond reason to passionate behavior — would have resonated with an eager audience, primed on the stories of Isaac Barré and, later, the words of the Virginia Resolves as printed in the northern newspapers. The French Traveller has always been thought of as an eyewitness to important events. But Charles Murray was far more: he was a participant. By telling his stories of dangerous words and heroic deeds throughout the colonies. Charles Murray was himself the vector of contagion for the colonists’ revolutionary fever.

I wholly agree with Goldstein that universities have become too corporate in their culture, but I don’t agree that libraries are leading the trend. Perhaps we are more so than, say, English departments, but certainly the hard sciences and law, medical, and business schools are in cahoots with the business world much more than we are.

Beyond that I find Goldstein’s examples incomplete or misleading. It’s true that librarians negotiate with corporate database vendors and that these vendors — and the publishing industry in general — have become a terrible problem. The model of renting journals is an awful one. (I’m actually very interested in the history of the process by which these database vendors — EBSCO and their ilk — came to dominate; I don’t think anything has been written on it.)

But librarians are wholly aware of these issues, and do more than anyone else in the academy to devise alternatives. They’re advocates for open access. They build institutional repositories as an alternate means of hosting published work. And I find the accusation that access services librarians are neglecting metadata and declaring incomplete records to be good enough to be, well, bizarre. Cataloguers and metadata specialists are, without exception, detail-oriented and precise people — tending, if anything, to perfectionism rather than the opposite.

Goldstein sees public services as a second problem area. I think he has a point about students’ tendency towards sloppy research. Too often they grab the first few articles they find that seem to be related to their topic. But, really, was there a golden age when the majority of students did their research thoroughly? This summer when I was trying to organize the archives of a professor from the 1930s-60s I found plenty of student research papers. Some were good. But some were crap too, in which the student had clearly just pulled five random books on eastern Europe off the library shelf and paraphrased. The only way to get around the problem is to make sure students only have access to the best sources. And that defeats the point of a research assignment.

Again, librarians are very aware of this problem. He wholly ignores the other half of public services: instruction. Instruction is probably bigger and hotter than reference right now. And instruction librarians are very much focused on concrete issues like helping students find the best possible sources. Some schools have independent one-credit library classes and all do individual instruction sessions for courses across the college. And we try to get the professor to give us a specific assignment to work towards so the students have to do the work themselves rather than just listening and forgetting.

In short, I just don’t think “Library, Inc.” holds up very well in light of actual library practice.

Over the past decade, a vast number of historical materials from the past three centuries have been digitized and placed on the Internet. The majority of these have been printed sources — newspapers and books. Some have been digitized as part of a proprietary system (for example, Readex’s Early American Imprints.) Others have been made publicly accessible (Google Books, or projects from the Library of Congress under American Memory.) The grand hope of all of these was to provide searchable full text online. This would be done through the magic of optical character recognition software. Surely, librarians might have thought ten or fifteen years ago, software quality and processing power would improve rapidly, soon permitting quick and accurate reproduction of any text.

The promise of OCR has gone largely unfulfilled. While modern printed sources are easily read, older ones are not. This should lead us to reconsider how we think about these documents — how we categorize them. In a pre-digital world, there is not much difference between the modern newspaper and the eighteenth-century one. Both are opened and easily skimmed, column by column. Contrast that to a manuscript — a letter or diary — which is much harder to read.

But in the digital age, if images and computer-generated text are available over the web, the older newspapers have more in common with manuscripts than they do with newer printed materials. The latter are searchable; the former are not.

For a researcher, to profitably use a big digital collection of historic materials, he or she needs to be able to search the contents, to winnow down centuries of text. In other words he or she needs either quality OCR or quality metadata. For a large corpus, if you have a collection that is well-OCR’d, then you can get by without robust metadata. But if you have a collection that is poorly OCR’d, text search will not work — you need to have robust metadata for the library to be useful at all.

An example of the latter is the old microprint edition of Early American Imprints. The documents were in physical form and thus, not searchable at all. But the makers had created robust metadata — and this meant that, when libraries began using digital catalogs, the metadata could be ported into that catalog. Early American Imprints would be searchable along with the rest of the library’s holdings.

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Printed materials and manuscript materials should be seen as parts of a larger continuum. Indeed, the major difference is not between manuscript and print, but between modern (post-1950) printed materials on the one hand and pre-modern printed works and manuscripts together on the other. This primary difference is based on the ability to create an accurate OCR text from a high-quality scan of the paper source.

Modern printed materials can be easily transformed into accurate, searchable text. Twentieth-century printing methods produced a clear, precise, and, importantly, regular type. A computer can convert those shapes into text with little trouble.

An example is the work done on the George Washington papers by the Library of Congress. Many of Washington’s letters and papers had been transcribed and printed. These included works printed in the years 1898, 1931–1944, and 1976–1979.  Even in 1998–2000, when OCR technology was significantly less powerful than it is today, librarians were able to achieve high accuracy rates — they claim 99.95%, or one error in every 2000 characters. It is a measure of the advancement of the technology that today a measure of 99.98% — sixty percent fewer errors than the George Washington Papers project — is considered a bar for high accuracy.

On the other hand, handwriting recognition is still fraught with problems and errors, even when done with software designed to learn a particular person’s script. As a result, it isn’t currently possible for a computer to transcribe a historical manuscript into searchable text.

The category in the middle — pre-modern printed materials — is deceptive. To a human eye, it is very similar to modern print. But for the OCR program, it is much more like handwriting. The deficiency of current OCR capabilities when applied to older print sources are illustrated by a series of rigorous tests performed on the Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Project. This recent study found that character accuracy was 83.6 percent. Already this is alarming. But the corpus is searched not by character, but by word. And the word accuracy was significantly worse — 78% percent. Further, proper nouns — the names and places beginning with capital letters, and those words that a researcher would be most likely to search for — were recognized only 63.4% of the time.

Other researchers have found similarly appalling accuracy rates. A 2007 study by the Dutch National Library of the results produced by several OCR contractors found a significant amount of variance “…the rates respondents gave for newspaper digitisation projects vary from 99.8% for 700,000 newspaper pages (word accuracy, manually corrected) to 68% (character accuracy, no correction) for 350,000 pages of early 20th century newspapers.” Another study, this one by the Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program, found similar variance: “In a sample of 45 pages to be representative of the libraries digitised newspaper collection 1803-1954, we found that raw OCR accuracy varied from 71% to 98.02% (character confidence, no correction).”

Clearly a raw character accuracy of 68 to 71% renders the resulting text useless for searching. Higher rates are more useful — yet even the 98% character accuracy at the high end of the Australian study will result in many missed words. If the British finding that proper nouns are recognized significantly less than their common-noun counterparts holds true here as well, then the power of full-text search is hampered even more. In sum, the researchers found that in their corpus of nineteenth-century newspapers, recall was high, precision was relatively low, and fallout was high.

This can be contrasted to a pre-digital form of searching: the index. An example is the comprehensive index to the Virginia Gazette from 1737 to 1790, prepared by historians at Colonial Williamsburg in 1950. In this index are contained references to proper names (people and places) and subject terms. (Colonial newspapers generally were populated by anonymous or pseudonymous pieces, so no authors.) An index like this, rigorously compiled and checked, provides a very different profile: very high precision, moderate to good recall, depending on the rigor, and low fallout.

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What the Virginia Gazette index provides, in essence, is metadata. In a pre-digital world, this was the only way of “searching” the corpus. But in a world of digital libraries, such an index would seem unnecessary. And perhaps it would be, were the online text of newspapers acceptably accurate.

When digitizing the eighteenth-century run of the Virginia Gazette, the digital humanities specialists did not even seriously consider putting searchable text online. OCR was quickly found not to work well on the microfilm versions of the newspaper, and costs to have the text inputted manually were far beyond their budget. Instead they went through a laborious process of scanning and OCRing the index (which, typeset in Courier in the mid-twentieth century, could be done with high accuracy). They then placed the index online in HTML format, with links leading to the scanned images of newspaper pages. In this they were helped by another feature of the print index: it listed not just the issue date, but the page and column of the entry.

The creators envisioned a workflow that took advantage of the diligent labor of the mid-century index compilers and married it to the speed and convenience of the digital library. When working with the digital Virginia Gazette, a researcher would first search the index web page for a relevant term. Then he or she could tab back and forth between the index and a set of open images, quickly running through a list of results. All in all, the technique was successful; the disadvantage, of course, is that it is not so easy to read a run of consecutive issues, or even consecutive pages.

Yet not every old newspaper was printed in a town that had been bought by the scions of a Gilded Age dynasty. The money that John D. Rockefeller pumped into Colonial Williamsburg for restoration of the colonial city, and the research to make that possible, was not present everywhere. Thus, most eighteenth and nineteenth century newspapers do not have detailed, proofread indexes waiting as a gateway to a digital edition. Another source of metadata must be found.

OCR might be one option: it can read article titles with a moderate degree of accuracy, and, if it could pick out proper nouns with any consistency whatsoever, could index those. But, given the poor quality of the microfilm that is used to make scans of newspaper pages, OCR simply can’t cope with the demands. The amount of cleanup required would mean that librarians might as well just read the articles and index the text themselves. At least in this way they could index concepts and make a true subject index — not something that literal OCR software can do.

A workaround, tried by the Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program, is to correct the OCR version of only the headline and the first several lines of text, in hopes that this would catch the most significant aspects of the article. But in practice this still takes a great deal of time. And, from the historical point of view, another problem emerges. The standard journalist’s model of writing in the present day — in which a story begins with a lead paragraph containing a summary and essential details — was simply not part of the eighteenth or nineteenth-century repertoire. Articles from those periods are just as likely to unfold slowly — like an oration rather than a summary of facts.

To recap: for most old newspapers no preexisting metadata exists, the software to correctly create that metadata is similarly absent, and the costs in time and money for librarians to create the metadata on their own are unworkable. Yet the quality of OCR means that, without metadata, the digital text itself is an imperfect and unreliable reflection of the actual content of the newspaper.

What is to be done? The Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program came up with an innovative solution: crowdsourcing. They made it possible for users to “view, edit, correct and save OCR text on whatever article they happened to be looking at.” Knowing that particular documents had unusually bad OCR, they highlighted those images to encourage patrons to improve them. The crowdsourcing was an instant success. Within three months of the project’s launch 1200 individuals had edited “700,000 lines of text within 50,000 articles.” Further, the volunteer correctors were — based on information from that two-thirds who had registered for accounts rather than working anonymously — largely experts in the places and time period covered in the newspapers. This meant they were better able to use context to puzzle out difficult words.

As the project progressed, more and more users began to edit the newspaper text. They also developed elements of a community. Since the interface was very basic and there was no forum area, they took to using the comment mechanism as a way to interact with their fellow correctors. To their infinite credit, the Australian Newspaper Digital Project has not tried to exert particular control over user activities. Realizing that they’ve got a good thing going — valuable work being performed by a vibrant community — they have instead stood back and watched that community develop. They found that “having no moderation and being open and free like the internet has raised many questions but has so far resulted in bringing more advantages than issues to the program.”

This is the sort of project over which librarians in the United States seem to drag their feet, unwilling to give up control. The best example of crowdsourced editing of historical newspapers I know of in this country is that put together by University of Virginia history professor Ed Ayres (now president of the University of Richmond). Ayers had his lecture classes — often several hundred students — go through nineteenth-century Virginia newspapers and cull local news to be put into a database by county. This is, of course, a different kind of project — the intent is to produce a refined database rather than improve the primary sources. But, once again, hundreds or thousands of people working on small bits of a project produced usable data far superior to what modern software would have come up with.

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So in at least two cases crowdsourcing has worked as a way to produce usable, index-ready text from image files and low-quality OCR. Old newspapers are but one source for which this technique has potential. Other printed materials could be made accessible, and beyond print is manuscript. Historical archives in the United States and elsewhere are notoriously conservative institutions. But it would take relatively little effort and not much more in the way of resources for them to provide the materials that could generate their own online community of researchers. It would be enough to provide a digital library of reasonably decent image files of manuscripts, and a web interface that allowed researchers to transcribe the material for their own use while also saving the transcription for other patron’s benefit. Allow users to create tags for the material — as the Australian project does — and you also have the beginnings of a robust set of metadata.

Since graduating college in 1995 I’ve been an archaeologist, an architectural historian, and a historian. My advisor at William and Mary, Jim Whittenburg, would point out that those are more shadings of grey than categorical distinctions: any study of the past should use whatever sources are available.

While studying in my Ph.D program I realized that, though I liked the problem-solving aspect of history, I wasn’t satisfied by the solitary, secretive nature of humanities scholarship. I much preferred collaborating on projects and working across disciplines to only doing my own narrow research. Problem-solving and helping others advance their projects: the decision to become a reference librarian was surprisingly easy.

I am looking for work in academic libraries; I want to focus on reference and instruction, though my historical background has kept me interested in archives and in digital libraries, especially those (real and virtual) repositories collecting historical documents.

Here is my curriculum vitae. I’ll post a portfolio of my work soon; if you have any questions, though, please ask!