Annual Report 1997
Research Division
The Research Division (RD) has had an active year doing all of
the sorts of things that have customarily formed the primary responsibilities
of the division.
In many ways our most important responsibility is oversight of the
American Historical Review. This has been a pleasure, thanks to
the superb management of the journal under its editor, Michael Grossberg.
The RD's task is general oversight and consultation, since the AHR
has its own editorial board to deal with the substantive side of
editing. The editor consults with us on appointments to the editorial
board, on occasional business matters, and on anything else that
relates to the journal’s relationship to the Association.
This year our most important discussions have concerned the possible
transition to electronic publication. It is inevitable that such
a transition will take place in the not-too-distant future, although
none of us can imagine termination of the print version. In all
likelihood there will be simultaneous electronic and print versions
of the AHR. But before that can take place, Mike Grossberg (and
the RD) must ponder difficult questions of technology, economics,
copyright law, and scholarly impact. The first step was the conference
on the electronic publication of history journals that the AHR and
the Journal of American History held last summer in Bloomington—a
landmark event. The RD has proposed, and the Council has accepted,
that an ad hoc committee on the electronic future of the AHR should
be appointed to advise the editor and the Association on this important
and complicated matter.
The RD continued to supervise the advocacy activities of the Association.
In doing so we worked closely, as ever, with Page Miller of the
NCC. Our concerns covered such diverse agencies as the National
Archives, the National Historic Records and Publications Commission,
the State Department, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
We see our role as acting to promote and defend the interests of
historians in public institutions and public policies of concern
to the profession. For instance, we supported the formulation of
new standards for electronic records at the National Archives, and
the establishment of new legal rules regarding historians’
access to historic grand jury records. Alas, we seem to spend more
time trying to assure that our interests are not harmed than in
opening up new opportunities.
The RD is the division with oversight responsibility for the program
of the annual meeting of the Association. We help to nominate the
Program Committee chairs, and work with them to ensure competent
and representative Program Committee members. We discuss with them
general plans for the meetings, and serve as a listening post for
the Association when members have suggestions or criticisms of the
programming. It seems clear that the annual meeting program is necessarily
a work in progress, and the division will devote more time next
year to consideration of the broader issues regarding the nature
of the program.
Finally, the RD has supervision of certain aspects of prizes and
fellowships. The division has for years actually served as the selection
committee for the Beveridge, Kraus, Littleton-Griswold, and Schmitt
awards. My predecessor, William Rosenberg, had suggested that the
RD delegate this responsibility to independent committees, and the
Council accepted our recommendation to do that. This will free us
to spend more time in deliberating on the issues of general research
policy, which should be our dominant concern. We are also responsible
for recommending general policy with respect to book prizes, and
this year the Council accepted our suggestion that potential donors
of new prizes consider dedicating these prizes to the subvention
of publications, rather than monetary awards to individual authors.
We hope that a successful program of this sort will enable the Association
to be of substantial assistance in assisting the publication of
worthy manuscripts.
I have made it my commitment as vice president for research to focus
the energies of the division on the problems and opportunities of
the impact of information technology on research in history. Clearly
the potential conversion of the AHR to online electronic publication
is the most important of these. But there are many related problems,
such as the use of information technology in teaching history, in
monograph publication, in communication among historians around
the world, in access to library and archival material, and many
more. But none of these problems is so urgent as the ongoing transformation
of intellectual property law (primarily the law of copyright). Information
technology is forcing a worldwide as well as domestic debate on
the property rights of the creators of literary (and other) works,
on the problems of new forms of transmission of and access to these
works, and the like. The danger is that the political and economic
forces driving the debate will produce international treaties and
domestic legislation for the electronic era that will destroy the
careful balance between the rights of creators and the rights of
users (especially the concept of “fair use”) that have
been established in the current print environment. In my judgment,
this is the most important policy issue facing us as a profession
of teachers and authors, a profession responsible for the preservation
of culture and the transmission of culture to democratic society.
The division will continue to devote as much time as possible to
these issues over the next two years, and will bring recommendations
for action to the Council.
Our plate is quite full.
Stanley N. Katz (Princeton University) is
Vice President of the Research Division
