Michael Hill: Reflections from the Reading Room

How has the experience of archival research changed? What has been gained in efficiency and accessibility - and what, if anything, has been lost in the shift from physical to digital discovery?

What better person to reflect on these questions than Historiq Advisor, Michael Hill. Across decades of work, Hill has witnessed firsthand how the practice of archival research has evolved. He began his career in an era of handwritten call slips, card catalogs, and weeks-long research trips planned around limited access to physical collections.

Today, researchers navigate digital finding aids, high-resolution scans, and online databases that place vast amounts of material just a few clicks away. In the following paragraphs, Hill draws on a lifetime spent in archives to consider how the researcher's craft has transformed and what the future may hold for those who seek to understand the past using original records.

In reflecting back on the nearly 45 years I've been doing archival research - both in the States and abroad - it's astounding to look back and see how the process, mechanics, and technology of archival research has changed so dramatically. Back then only the most basic computers were available to do typescripts of historical correspondence or diary entries from various archival collections, and then anything you typed out had to be backed up with a small floppy disc - there was no "cloud" then. There was no internet; no cellphones to take images of archival material you could later download onto a laptop; no scanners to copy original documents; and, much like computers, there were only basic dot matrix printers.

And even with the most basic computer, there was still the long, hard, sometimes frustrating, work of manually keyboarding any material you found. Transcribing quotes from correspondence or a journal from the 18th or early 19th century - whether it be the original document or a microfilm copy - could take up to an hour or more for a particularly long letter or diary entry. And then, there was the inevitable original letter you'd encounter in which the ink had "bled" through from the front to the back of the letter. An archival nightmare!

But collecting the archival research wasn't the end of the process; getting the material to the historian I happen to be working with was the next step. Since there was no internet or FedEx back then, the only way to send the research was to print it out on my matrix printer and fax it (the inevitable jamming nightmares still haunt me) or to send it by snail mail, which could take a week or more - all delaying an author's ongoing writing process. If all this sounds like a tale from back in the archival Stone Age, well, it kind of is.

Fortunately, the technology to speed up the archival retrieval process has come a long way and now, in 2026, I'm excited and delighted to know that there is innovative AI technology being developed by Historiq, which will expedite and transform every aspect of archival work. The potential to speed up and clear archival backlogs at historical institutions everywhere will soon be available, providing digital transcripts to historians and researchers, all making the process of collecting research more accessible and more efficient.