Getting started with online historical research

First off, it's official that I'm a PhD and I have a two year fellowship at the USDA's Climate Change Program Office! I'm moving from Arizona to Virginia and I couldn't be happier.

In the course of my dissertation research I utilized many online databases and archives. Some of these were through my library, so they required a university login and password, but many are freely available to anyone. I thought I'd list some of these resources.

Universally helpful:

• Google n-gram viewer. When I'm learning about a new historical topic, this is one of the first places I turn to, especially when I want to know about the etymology of a specific phrase or word. I can then click on the link to Google books from specific time frames and check out how the word is used, in what contexts, etc. 
• WorldCat.org. WorldCat is a database of virtually all published (and some unpublished) materials. While no website has a universally perfect search function, typing keywords or authors into WorldCat's search usually turns up a relevant list of publications. WorldCat is helpful because it lists the complete biographical information and what libraries hold a specific item. If it is available online, it will often link to it.
• Hathi Trust and Archive.org. These sites contain thousands of open-access digitized texts. You may have to refine your search terms to find relevant texts. (FYI "hathi" is Hindi/Urdu/Bengali for elephant, so it's pronounced with a hard aspirated "t". Listen here!)
• Google.com and Google Scholar. I'm not an expert at database querying so I spend a lot of time trying out different keywords and strings of words in Google and G-Scholar. Google often leads me to documents that I wouldn't have been able to find even within an institution's website. For example I find a lot of documents scanned and uploaded on USAID's website (because USAID funded many of the projects I studied), but there was not a good way to access these through USAID and there is no hierarchy or organization of the information, so it's just random.

International agricultural research history:

• CIMMYT Repository and University of Florida Digital Collections. CIMMYT's repository has been organized by topic, the link provided is for "wheat" but there is a sidebar on the left titled "Collections." In this case I sorted the repository by year. This repository contains published materials as well as a large amount of published and unpublished CIMMYT reports and conferences. UF's Digital Collections has a repository called "International Farming Systems" that is a collection of materials donated by Peter Hildebrand, an agricultural economist. I'm not sure what his professional affiliations were, but this repository has over 2000 international agricultural reports, some in English and some in Spanish, from roughly the 1950s onwards.
• University of Minnesota Library's digital collections. There is a large amount of scanned materials deposited here. The green revolution collection (no link, just cntl-F it on the homepage) hosts correspondences, diary notes, and biographical details of Norman Borlaug, John Gibler, and Elvin Stakman among others. It takes a while to load each scanned page, but if you're interested in finding the "raw" archival data, this is it. Borlaug's oral history is included here, so if you can't make it to the Rockefeller Archive Center but still want to read it, find it here!

Foreign policy history, Cold War era-specific:

• US State Department Historical Documents. This repository spans from 1945 to 1980 and the archivists here have helpfully separated various documents (memo's, correspondence, etc.) by date, topic, and region. All materials are transcribed so it is easy to read and to copy-paste exact quotes.
• Harry S. Truman Library & Museum. I haven't browsed this fully, but it has a collection of digital material from Truman and his cabinet, advisors, and other policy-related people. It has a large collection of oral histories.

Countdown to India + semester accomplishments

(In Uttarakhand, India, this September, hiking down to visit some farmers)

While I've been neglecting this blog for a while, I'll be back blogging soon about a major project in my life-- my 6-month journey to India for my research. I'm leaving January 5th, 2013, bound for New Delhi. I'll use this blog to update my friends, family, and internet-friends from afar about my personal journey as well as my research-related insights and experiences.

In related updates, this semester has been full of ups and downs with stress/anxiety and progress/excitement over my research. And although I'm a somewhat modest person, I'd like to take a moment to recognize that I've accomplished a lot-- in fact looking at the list, more than I would expect anyone else to accomplish and still maintain sanity (which might explain some things...).

1. Successfully defended my research prospectus and passed without edits! This makes me an official PhD candidate and also a very happy person.
2. Went on a 75-mile victory bike ride!
3. Spent 2 weeks travelling in northern India, meeting international scientists and my host organization in Delhi.
4. Co-coordinated 400-ish volunteers for the Tempe Tour de Fat and raised around $72,000 for local bike-related non-profits. Also led the largest team of beer-pourers.
5. Co-directed GISER, a interdisciplinary graduate student organization at ASU.
6. Ran a 5K to support Arijit and the Poop Strong crew.
7. Learned to edit articles for the Embryo Project.
8. Started to learn हिन्दी
9. Took a weekend vacation in Austin to visit my former roommate.
10. Hosted my mom and explored Tempe for a week.
11. Spent time with my lovely friends in Tempe.
12. Stayed on top of the research and logistics details necessary for a 6-month trip to India (of course, I'll find out soon enough whether I am truly prepared...).

So right now I'm finishing up my semester and prepping for India. Moving out is going to be a pain, but packing shouldn't be too difficult since I know the essentials from my 3-months in Bangladesh several years ago. In India I'll wear mostly Indian-style clothes, which are long shirts called a kameez and scarfs with mostly Western-style pants. I hope to look professional, although fashion won't be a priority for me in the next few months. My goal is to look professional and to be respectful towards the culture.

Research note: In an effort to alert my non-academic followers to parts they can skip, I'll mark my research-related updates like this. So for those interested (academic or not) in what my research actually is, I'll be doing a mostly historical study of wheat research in northern India. I'm taking the time period of 1965 to present and I'm tracing the major themes in wheat research during this period. The mechanics of this will involve spending time in several agricultural research libraries around Delhi and the adjacent state of Haryana and interviewing key administrators, scientists, extension offices, and farmers. I'll also likely be doing a survey of plant breeders. The specific topics I'm interested in are the connections between wheat breeding, the adaptation of wheat varieties to different climates and agroecological conditions in India, and farmers' adoption of such varieties. Obviously I hope to connect all of this to climate change, and I have more than a few hunches that I'm on the right track to look at the history of climate/plant breeding connections. In particular, I'm wondering whether breeding crops for wide geographic areas makes them more or less likely to be adopted, and what role farmers play in the process of plant breeding. I'm also interested in what drives scientists towards certain paradigms of plant breeding for "wide" versus "specific" locations/climates, and how these themes are playing out in discussions of climate change.