Tales from the Internet

Montgomery Blair

Research requests received electronically by the Special Collections Division are now averaging more than 40 per month. Consider the following:

11/18/97 9.28am. E-mail received from the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities requesting permission to copy an image from a book about Yiddish author/actress Anzia Yezierska; the original photo in our Quigley Photographic Archives, the copy to be reproduced in the Bulletin of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo. We respond favorably and offer to scan the original and send the resulting file over the Internet. Answer received near noon, photo pulled from file, scanned, and sent within the hour. File then forwarded electronically from Israel to the typesetter, possibly in Cairo. Acknowledgement of successful transfer received the following day at 9.01am. Time invested by Special Collections staff: about 15 minutes, or less than what it would have taken to pull the photo and deliver it to our photo lab for copying.

12/18/97 1.10pm. Phone call received from a researcher at E! Entertainment Channel in Los Angeles. Their office had requested a copy of a photo of former congressman Montgomery Blair from the Library of Congress; the order could be filled "within six to ten weeks." Checking the Internet, the researcher found a photo of Blair in our Barnes Collection. Since they needed hard copy, and needed it yesterday, we used our Polaroid 8x11 photographic copier to make a two-minute color reproduction and dispatched it via Federal Express. Blair was apparently an ancestor of Montgomery Clift, and the photo will be used in a special presently filming. Any E! watchers are invited to let us know if they give us credit.

We are already promised a gift of letters because the donor discovered her correspondent's papers at Georgetown via the Internet; another gentleman discovered an ancestor's will here without knowing that said ancestor had anything to do with Georgetown. Conclusion: ignore negative media coverage of the Internet and the World Wide Web. These are the most significant developments for information exchange since movable type. And please visit us electronically at:
http://gulib.lausun.georgetown.edu/dept/speccoll/