NSW HSC Online Professional Development Node
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Access to resources
More equitable access
An important feature of the Internet is that students are no longer limited to resources in their immediate environment – they can instantly access information from anywhere in the world. For students in remote or rural areas of Australia or the more economically disadvantaged schools this is especially significant as it means they are no longer limited by the scarce resources in their school or local libraries.
With the new media, any person at any place and any time can use cultural resources that in the past only a select few could use. Before digital technologies, regardless of nominal ideology, those who built and managed collections of books or art, or impresarios of skilled performances, or the makers of very expensive, powerful and dangerous research instruments, had no choice but to limit and control access. To do otherwise would have destroyed the resources through indiscriminate use and subjected novice users sometimes to inordinate risk. The material constraints of the system imposed stringent exclusions on its participation and use. Now, the new media change the constraints of access and participation fundamentally. With the infrastructure in place, all can have digital access as each might wish without damage to self or system. And the access is not simply passive, but interactive, enabling each to participate at will in public communication, to criticize and celebrate achievements as they see fit. The new media open participation in public communication extensively by lowering the capital costs required to send complex messages to select individuals or to large numbers of recipients. (McClintock 2000)
Access to priary documents
Students can also now use the same resources used by working historians, scholars and scientists by going directly to primary documents and archival sources. Primary documents allows students to do the work of scholars and investigate issues from original sources of information rather than having to rely solely on interpretations presented in textbooks.
Examples:
The National Archive of Australia 
University of Sydney library: Rare books & documents in digital form
Contains Australian Federation Debates of the 1890's.
EuroDocs: Primary Historical Documents from Western Europe
Gallica
This is the online library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and has digital texts from a wide range of French libraries. Most of the 80,000 documents are scanned as images and presented as pdf files (you need Adobe Acrobat which is free and often part of your browser package).
Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission: Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Social Justice http://www.hreoc.gov.au/social_justice/index.html
This site has links to a number of primary documents related to the issue.
Repositories of Primary Sources
This page provides links to archives around the world.
Historical Manuscripts Commission
A site which provides access to primary documents related to the UK.
CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet)
This website that has a large number of primary documents related to the Northern Ireland conflict from 1968 to the present.
Institute for Learning Technologies (Columbia University): Digital Texts
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/projects/digitexts/index.html
References:
McClintock, R. 2000. Cities, Youth, and Technology: Toward a Pedagogy of Autonomy. A contribution to the International Symposium, Zukunft der Jugend ORF RadioKulturhaus, Vienna, September 20, 2000 (online)
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/Publications/cities/cyt.html [Accessed 11 October 2001]
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