BYU Studies appears to be full open access now.

But it seems like more and more Mormon history is being published at the main non-Mormon journals and thus available via JSTOR and Muse.

I think this problem (such as it is) will reduce as we get more information digitized. With information online, we should get to the point where the footnotes are links to original sources, so anyone can easily go back and forth at will.

Is there a process like this in, say, Mormon Studies?

As to scans, having been involved in that industry that’s just nonsense. I’m sure they said that but it’s just not true. I’ll lay good odds that most of that $100,000 was wages. But the technology to automate most of this this is there. Further that’s dealing with old text. I’m talking about new papers where you don’t need to scan at all merely save relatively small pdfs. Look at the typical JSTOR paper. Most are 100-300K in size. A paper with many illustrations is maybe 1MB-2MB. I can buy a 5 terabyte hard drive for $100. The software to distribute loads across servers is free and very mature. And that assumes you handle your own server rather than simply using AWS or a similar service. Again note that scihub for free hosts every JSTOR and Muse paper.

Clark, since Mormon-related topics call squarely under the humanities, you can see the problem. Not much NSF funding for Mormon Studies. Humanities research is typically supported with little or no grant funding, and a lot of universities won’t have funding for page fees in the humanities. So the choice often comes down to publishing in a well-known, high-prestige traditional journal, or funding open-access publication in a low-prestige unknown journal out of your own pocket. As for expenses, not long ago the director of a major research library in Europe was showing off their digitalization program and mentioned that their server costs (for many high-resolution scans of primary sources) ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

MH, what an odd comment. Taking my a blog post as a guide to the health of Mormon Studies is completely misplaced, since I’m hardly involved in the field. This is a blog post reminding everyone to do their homework – so if you need examples, you’ll need to look through the archives or at the old FARMS reviews. While that’s a style of review I usually don’t care for, they knew how to dissect a footnote.

But a good example of questionable footnotes might be Compton’s review of Nibley’s World of the Jaredites

I do remember a post a while ago here or at Wheat and Tares or BCC (or somewhere – see me not citing anything ;) ) that have examples of bad footnotes in the Presidents of the Church series. Not academia, but interesting, and an example.

NSF grants typically pay for those rather easily. There are public repositories for the social sciences as well. It’s the humanities that are the big standout. The problem is more getting people to use them. Server costs these days are extremely cheap. That’s why there can be multiple pirate full mirrors of all the journals that Muse and JSTOR provide with free access.

Ardis, I was going to say just from your description I had a pretty good idea of the book — a major work on Mormonism in the 90’s where I’d looked up a bunch of the footnotes to find selective quotations that often were undermined by sentences mere inches away. However then I realized that is probably far more common than I want to believe. I suspect in the 90’s the sources were much harder to look up. Now that they are easy to look up a lot of works that still get regularly cited should be used with caution. (Like Jonathan I’m not sure I want to name names – especially not without first spending the time to relook up all the footnotes!)

James, thanks for that bit of history of ArXiv. I also agree with you on the danger of citing papers rather than original sources. Secondary cites are always dangerous.

In ultimate principle a footnote should tell you where you can get your hands on the physical evidence to see for yourself, but scholars’ lives are so much easier if we all agree to accept the Wikipedia standard, by which anything published counts as authority, no matter how great an idiot the author was. If your subject is literary enough that its physical evidence actually consists of books, then tracking down the raw evidence may be easier than hiking to an archaeological dig, but reading original sources is still tedious. They’re usually way too long, and by the time they finally get around to coughing out the soundbite you want, they’ve probably surrounded it with so much weird old-fashioned context that it doesn’t really mean anything like what it sounds like. It’s much handier to treat the citations themselves as authoritative, regardless of what the cited sources actually say. As long as everyone agrees to play like this, we can all have wonderful scholarly debates with a whole lot less trouble.

[I do not want the gold standard for money. Clark, ArXiv moved from Los Alamos to Cornell with Paul Ginsparg.]

I worked with someone a year or three ago who *did* want to track everything back to the source, rather than merely repeating the citations that appeared in earlier studies of the topic (say, 6 or 8 earlier studies). What we found included: (1) an error in the citation of the first historian to refer to one event … with the erroneous citation repeated in every subsequent study, indicating that every last one of them had merely quoted the first author as if they had actually seen the original, when they had not. (2) An error in the citation of the second historian to refer to another event … with some of the later scholars reproducing the error, while others reproduced the original citation. No way to know if those who repeated the original citation had actually seen it, but certainly the ones repeating the erroneous citation had not. (3) A very important document was correctly cited by the first and all subsequent historians … but when my man went back to the original document, he discovered an unnoticed, not previously reported, highly significant bit of data appearing in another paragraph on the same page, which had been overlooked or unrecognized by the original historian, and which, apparently, nobody else had seen because presumably they hadn’t looked again at the original.

Does that fit what you’re faulting? It’s primary rather than secondary sources, but I hope it still fits.

And again the problem is not with things (rumor, blog posts, conference addresses) that don’t typically present themselves as academic works with scholarly apparatuses; each makes its own kind of claim and requires its own kind of analysis. The problem is with relatively recent peer reviewed books from reputable presses and articles published in respected journals, formatted according to proper Chicago style and strewn with things that look, at a glance, like footnotes. I’m heartened by Wally’s comment that people do sometimes double-check the footnotes, but sometimes things slip through – both on the apologetic and the antagonistic side, and from established scholars and amateur outsiders.

I’m sure I’ve done the same kind of thing before. It’s difficult and time-consuming to trace every well-known fact back to its source, so you just throw in a reference to a page in a recent article that says the same thing, and no one thinks twice about it. Then later you start poking around in the place where the well-known fact was first stated, and it’s not nearly as clear-cut as everyone has been treating it. You’re more cautious the next time around.

It should be getting easier to track down sources, and in some ways it is. We have unprecedented ease of access…to 19th-century (and earlier) books and journals, thanks to Google Books. Everything later than that is hit and miss, mostly miss, due to copyright laws intended to help Disney being equally applied to Archiv für niederrheinische Kirchengeschichte (3. Reihe) 37 (1921). Open access sounds good, but it turns out that it’s extraordinarily expensive; someone has to pay for those servers, and page fees for good open-access journals run into the hundreds of dollars. So advancements in scholarship end up behind commercial paywalls instead. I do think university libraries should try to accommodate community members, but it’s hard to make the case that the university should pay, say, $10,000 more per year for a license that is not strictly limited to faculty, staff, and students. I wish I had a solution.

But of course JSTOR is just one of the databases that the typical university library offers. And it is, from what I can tell, the most progressive in terms of public access. Muse doesn’t have any public offerings that I can see for instance. However according to their FAQ, the Muse license applies to alumni but BYU doesn’t offer it to alumni that I can see.