All of us are fascinated with objects. We like to investigate them ― by touching, feeling, smelling, hearing, looking, walking around or through or over. And our fascination usually grows with the realization that the object is one of a kind, available for our perusal in this one place, at this one time. Most of all, they are interesting because they provide the most direct learning experience we can have. Descriptions and analyses can take you only so far before you want the "thing" itself, to make up your own mind about how you believe it affects you and the world around you. This is especially important for researchers, scholars, teachers, and learners. A study on the information environment for the humanities notes "the growing importance of primary sources." The problem, however, is in their very nature. As Joseph Sax, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, describes them, "[T]hey almost always exist in only one copy, and that copy rests in one particular institution, and no other. Sometimes even the existence of certain things is difficult to discover, because they may not be cataloged. If the materials are accessible, they may be restricted in a variety of ways." In fact, Sax goes so far as to say "inaccessibility is an even more pervasive problem than destruction or mutilation." That inaccessibility can be due to a number of things ― the object might be geographically far away, it might be extremely fragile, its very existence might be unknown, or it might have access restrictions put upon it. One of RLG's members, the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, has struggled with this problem (as have most institutions). Some of their collections came to them from donors who specified they were "never to be used by women; closed to any individuals of British extraction; closed to Jews, Roman Catholics, and the donor's nephew." Needless to say, all these restrictions are now gone.
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