Rosebud: The Virtual Archive Entry form Simple Search Advanced Search Browse

Why Rosebud?

The 3,000 documents already in the collection and the many more that still await discovery in other archives offer a unique opportunity for testing the value and effect of recent ubiquity of computer networks for historical research and archiving.

Rosebud is the name of the on-line searchable database, that will eventually include all the material in the collection. Rosebud will be a tool for research and teaching. It will service researchers, teachers and students interested in the history of colonial America, early New York, and Seventeenth century religious, economic, social and political history.

Creating a useful database is a complex and costly task. The Leisler collection is well suited for a pioneering effort in the genre because of its substantial yet not overwhelming size and the advanced stage of its cataloguing effort, conducted by Dr. David Voorhees. Also important is the unique interaplay between the collection's diverse sources and the connectivity provided by the focus on a person. This balance may be a key factor in the creation of a service that will be more than the sum of its content.

Implications

We hope that Rosebud will be a part of the changing landscape of scholarship, providing help and stimulus for experimentation. The prospect of on-line archiving holds promises of transforming the writing and perception of history. The speeding up of access to source material and the ease of using database queries to juxtapose textual information will hopefully lead to the formulation of new questions and approaches.

The database itself can move from the domain of purely preparatory research and footnotes to the center of historical representation. As a published form, a database is a representational genre, similar to the chronicle or the monograph, and yet different in ways that only now become discernable. The query can become a form that will supplement the narrative, expanding the scope of and raising fascinating questions about historical knowledge by changing the representational form, the mode of reception and the dynamics of the relationship between source material, academic research, and public consumption.

Human life has a particular affinity with the narrative form. And yet this form has its limitations, which artists often exploited (Citizen Kane comes to mind). Can a life be apprehended through a database? Can a life be, not only told, but also queried? If, "all history is history of the present", will the database be the historical form of the internet age?

Wonder how we got that name?