HISTORIANS NOW HAVE, as close as their campus library, a valuable new research tool, one which allows scholars to participate in the benefits of the electronic age-computer assisted searching of major bibliographies of the social sciences and humanities. Paradoxically, the same historians who eagerly study the forces of change, analyze revolutions, try to decipher the changing winds of international relations, and report vast technological changes, have been slow, indeed, to discover and use these new techniques in their own discipline. As long ago as 1959, Jesse H. Shera noted that the enormous growth of literature rendered many traditional library and bibliographic resources obsolete. He warned that if historians failed to take advantage of the emerging technology of computerrecords.1 When historians met at the Belmont Conference on Bibliographical Services to History in 1967, it was evident that not all scholars were oblivious to the implications of technological change. At this conference Melville J. Ruggles pointed out that "the quantity of recorded information produced annually grows inexorably and pours into already flooded reservoirs-the libraries-creating a problem generally believed to be solvable only by application of modern technological means."2 Of the 50 persons (out of 300) who returned the Belmont committee's questionnaire, however, only one-third were favorably disposed toward the use of computers for storage and retrieval of bibliographical information.3 More than a decade later, in November of 1981, members of the American Association for the Advancement of the Humanities heard themselves