A lifelong stamp collector as well as a professional historian, Dane Claussen hopes the embrace of eBay among many scholars may encourage historians to seek out private collectors for research assistance. Claussen thinks academics tend to be too arrogant or reticent when it comes to seeking out the assistance of layfolk. Scholars need to start doing their own detective work and seek out collectors and ask to see their collections. Because eBay provides e-mail addresses for all its sellers and bidders, it has never been easier to reach out to collectors who may share a historical interest. While some historians complain that they cannot compete with collectors' passions and deep pockets, others realize that they don't necessarily need to own an item to use it for their research.
E-mail the winning bidder.
She might invite you to view her collection or perhaps even borrow an item or two. Instead, Franklin now counts on the business of a nation full of addicts . . . I was introduced to eBay in the summer of 1999 by a retired manuscripts curator who heard me deliver a paper at the Berkshire Women's History Conference. The paper was on nineteenth-century commercial pocket diaries, a chunk of my dissertation on the evolution of the daily diary in America. Before my talk, I apologized to the small crowd because I didn't have a pocket diary to pass around the audience.