The McStorian

Obviously, I’m pretty new to the history profession, and much of the reading for this week went over my head or was highly theoretical, but from my limited knowledge, it seems that one reason why historians don’t share more information is because we feel like we have some kind of ownership over it.  Even if I’m working with unpublished primary sources, the idea of many other using those sources at the same time seems very foreign to me.  I do work for a government history agency however (which today included playing Frisbee outside for about a half hour.  Seriously, gov’t history work is where it’s at), so I can see this being somehow helpful for my work if I understood more of it and had some more concrete examples of what it all means.  The one article by Miller mentioned the idea that users might feel ownership over their information and I’m not sure how to break the historian of such a belief, but then I’m not sure about what kind of scale we’re talking about.  But I’m not going to go out and bust my hump for 40 hours per week at an archive to do specific research and then just upload it in order to give thousands of others the opportunity to take advantage of what I just took days or weeks to find, collect, and upload.  Or should I?  I do think historians should collaborate more with one another and with those in other disciplines, but I don’t know yet how I feel about sharing all my research with the world.