"Useful website selling primary source materials" Topic

Excellent collection of books and CDs, much of it collated and edited by the celebrated historian/re-enactor Don Hagist. Well worth a look (and the odd purchase or three!).

link

Primary sources should be made free, not for sale, IMHO, hence why I support the Project Gutenberg, however thanks for the link shall have a good peruse.

Well, if he did all the work compiling it – including travel costs, etc, I get why a fee.

I suppose you could look at it like this: the sources are free; the researching, locating, collecting, scanning, archiving and production of the discs (and books) are not.

The sources are all listed on each item so one can certainly try and find it on their own. As a test, I picked a disc at random, picked a source and did an internet search. I found at least a portion of it on a blog. It was listed but not available for free on Google books. Print on demand copies were for sale on Amazon, etc. The search took less than a minute.

You could try this with each individual entry under the hope that someone has digitized it and posted it, or you can pay the $25 USD to get it, along with several other sources, on a disc.

Either way, this is a great website and resource. "The Guide to the American Revolutionary War in New Jersey" definitely caught my eye. I bet there's tons of scenario ideas in there…

I can understand charging a fee to cover their costs for locating and compiling all the information together. A researchers fee.

Nothing wrong with a little private enterprise. :-)

Most museums will charge a fee to cover labor. For example, government photographs are in the public domain. You are not suppose to charge for the photograph.

But you can charge for staff time to find it scan it and put it on a disk. If you want prints instead of a digital copy then the cost for labor goes up accordingly. The money is used by the museum to care for the collection. Depending on the size of the staff, size of the order and the number of orders in front of you, it could take a couple of weeks or months to receive your order. Editors and journalist on a deadline need to plan ahead.

Since there are not a lot of photographs from the AWI, the same principle applies to documents, prints, maps and drawings. Although some museums require you be there in person. Scanning or copying of documents may not be allowed owing to the delicate nature of these documents.

Usually there are discounts for non-profits and in some cases a museum may wave the fee altogether for another museum as a professional courtesy.

One of the most useful thing about these versions offered by Don Hagist is that the text is fully searchable. I cannot stress how useful this can be.

Frequently if one is lucky enough to encounter a 'free' version online of a source such as available from Internet Archive or Google books there are poorly scanned/illegible pages or unsearchable text, the illustrations are unscanned and fold out maps ignored. Looking at what is on offer the charge per cd is very modest and I very much doubt Don Hagist is looking to retire the Caymans based on the income from this project.