askSam at the Department of History

University of Copenhagen

By Professor Gunner Lind

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The University of Copenhagen has the largest History Department in Scandinavia: about 30 full-time and 30 part-time teachers and 1500 students. Here, askSam has been used for years as a support tool for research, and is taught to all students.

Among the staff, askSam use has spread gradually since the DOS days – from one man to an estimated third or half of the staff. (Mostly the junior staff – old historians tend to be conservative, and the last typewriter user only surrendered last year.)  The department maintains a site license, but otherwise the spread of askSam has been by attraction, not because of prodding from above. The dominant use is for the handling of private working bibliographies with notes on the books and articles, using template files with appropriate Entry Forms and Reports, developed at the Department.

Why askSam, instead of dedicated bibliographical software, such as Endnote or Citation? Mainly because writing bibliographies is the least of the job in historical research. The main problem is handling information connected with the titles of books and articles: Notes from reading, quotes, increasingly text coming from the Net, such as book reviews distributed by discussion lists. It is quite common that pages of text form part of the askSam document describing a single book or article. Fast and efficient search and appropriate presentation of what is found is crucial. Here askSam outperforms dedicated bibliographical software. Using askSam instead of dedicated bibliographical software makes it slightly harder to produce the final bibliography and narrows the range of available bibliographical formats. But in our experience, this is more than offset by faster data input and vastly superior data retrieval.

[Editor's Note from Phil: askSam Systems is acquiring the bibliographical software application, Citation. We believe that by integrating the products, we'll be able to provide researchers with the best of both worlds - a flexible research tool with powerful search capabilities and easily formatted bibliographical output.]

This is most of all the case where askSam has been used to store intermediate material for PhD thesis or other large projects. A historian may go through some yards of books, systematically noting or quoting everything related to a specific subject. Half a century of a few medical journals, for example, searching for everything on child care. After that, you want to retrieve what they wrote on breast feeding, or the role of fathers, or any other theme. Quoting the journal issues is trivial in comparison.

We also like the ease with which askSam adapts to other uses than handling stuff from books. If you have a file with your notes from reading in the archives, askSam can write you an appropriately formatted archival sources list. (We have constructed reports which do that.) An archive list is hierarchical, not linear, so the approach is quite different from that used for bibliographies. askSam has also been used for transcribed interviews and for scanned source material – whole books – at our department.

Illustrations:

Screenshot 1:

The current version of our bibliographical file format is an adaption of an askSam template. The text on the Entry Form is in Danish. Some of the notes on the book too. Quotes in English have been input with an IrisPen pen-shaped OCR scanner. The whole document is 13 pages long.

Screenshot 2:

An askSam report does the formatting for a bibliography.

Since 2000, askSam has been a part of the curriculum of the course Bibliography and Information Handling which is compulsory for all history students. Using askSam for your own bibliographies and notes is taught along with the use of research libraries, printed and online bibliographies etc. This course is currently under revision. We want to split it into a basic course for new students, and a more advanced course later in the study plan. But we do still think that all historians must be able to make appropriate use of information technology, and that askSam is a remarkably flexible and powerful tool for the historian.

Gunner Lind, Professor, Dr. Phil

email: lind@hum.ku.dk    

http://www.staff.hum.ku.dk/lind

Dept. of History   *   University of Copenhagen

Njalsgade 102   *   DK 2300 Copenhagen S  *  Denmark

tel. (+45) 3532 8303