The Responsibility of Open Access
Digitization isn’t about paper—it’s about power.
There is a campaign underway to control the narrative of our past—an agenda that seeks not only to restrict access to historical records, but to reframe, rewrite, and selectively erase the stories that challenge a more convenient version of history. This isn’t an academic debate. It’s a coordinated effort to decide whose voices are preserved and whose are pushed aside. In this climate, the fight to protect access to primary sources is a fight against manipulation and erasure. It’s about resisting efforts to sanitize the historical record and ensuring that all communities—not just the powerful or the privileged—can see themselves in the American story.
Make no mistake: this is a fight—and it’s one that goes far beyond document digitization and databases.
This fight isn’t about safeguarding documents. It’s about ensuring people can access the evidence of their past. When communities are cut off from that access, they lose the ability to understand how we got here—and what can be done about it. They lose the context that gives current events meaning, the clarity that comes from firsthand accounts, and the connection that ties generations together. Without that, what remains is a flattened version of history: easier to distort, harder to challenge, and more convenient to control.
That’s the real danger of erasing access.
Primary sources—local newspapers, photographs, school records, meeting minutes, oral histories, land deeds—these aren’t dusty artifacts. They’re proof. They’re the receipts of lived experience. They allow communities to see themselves in the record, not as footnotes or sidebars, but as central participants in the American story.When that access exists, it empowers. People can trace their lineage, understand the evolution of their neighborhoods, hold local officials accountable, and place their lives in historical context. When that access disappears—through censorship, through budget cuts, or because the tools to digitize no longer exist—so does that power.
Digitization Changes Everything
Digitization is the key to making history consumable. It is the key to removing the barriers that say you have to know the right person, visit the right building, or have the right credentials to learn about your own past. It is the key to turning information into access—and access into action.
When records are online and searchable, they become part of public life again. They’re no longer locked in a filing cabinet or trapped on a reel of microfilm in the back of a rural library. They’re out in the open, where anyone—student, teacher, journalist, researcher, neighbor—can engage with them. That’s where democracy lives.\
Which is exactly why access is being targeted.
The goal isn’t just to remove what’s uncomfortable—it’s to limit who has the tools to challenge it. And right now, access is the tool.
Access Is Power
Public access to digitized local history puts power back where it belongs—in the hands of the people. And that’s precisely what makes it so threatening to those who are trying to reshape the past for political gain.
Because let’s be honest: the truth isn’t always convenient. It’s messy. It’s painful. And it forces a reckoning. But it also builds resilience. And when communities can see the full picture—when they have the freedom to explore, compare, and question the narratives they’ve been given—they become harder to silence.
