Most of my friends know that I love to predict the future and study the past. Frankly, it's the present I can't deal with. So it's rewarding to me that there is a situation unfolding where both future and past have blended together to provide a plethora of new goodies for historians.

Anyone who has tried to conduct serious research knows how difficult it is. When I was in college during the 70's, I spent hours in the stacks at the library. It took days, even months, to conduct research that produced good results. Occasionally you had to use interlibrary loan to obtain a book that only a few libraries abound the country had in their possession. Consider the difficulty in trying to locate and use a rare and out of print book.

Back in 1993, a software company called Adobe Systems Inc. released a program called Acrobat. It revolutionized the publishing business. It had me singing praise at my Macintosh computer user group. We Mac elitists already had a fondness for Adobe. They brought us Photoshop, Illustrator, and postscript printing to our first LaserWriter's.

Adobe's Acrobat didn't set the world tumbling at first, but it slowly has grown to become the number one document distribution system on the Internet. There are more than half a billion Acrobat readers on computers worldwide. This neat software allows you to take a desktop published document, or image files, and create a portable, electronic version of the document, book, or whatever it is you created. With the ability to jump to pages, change the viewing size, and print, it has become the distribution option of choice. In fact, many companies don't bother printing a hardcopy of their work; they simply produce a "PDF"(Portable Document File). It saves a few million trees too!

So why would I toss such accolades to a software company when I'm talking about researching history? Because Acrobat has brought back from the dead hundreds of out of print, rare history texts. Making an Acrobat file is easy. You scan in the pages of the book, create your Acrobat file, and distribute it. The free Acrobat reader allows you to view the book online or print a copy and read the old traditional way. In the last few years an explosion in reprinting old history books has occurred, mostly because of the self absorption of the baby boomers.

Yes, we have decided that we want to know our roots and genealogical research has become the biggest use of the Internet other than email. This has created a small cottage industry and computer savvy folks have started to find those old county histories, church records, cemetery records, self published family histories, and other obscure history texts, and turn them into pdfs. Hundreds of genealogy and history CDs are appearing on Internet auction houses and other outlets.

One Long Island fellow has compiled a set of CDs that contain the 19th century histories of most New York State counties. I have the complete set of 5 hard to find documents: Abstracts of Wills of Rensselaer County, NY, from 1791-1850 (1938); a complete list of gravestone inscriptions in the Nassau-Schodack Cemetery in Nassau, (1935); gravestone inscriptions from several unpublished plots (1925); Sylvester's complete History of Rensselaer County (1880); and Francis Broderick's Burial Grounds of Lansingburgh (1965), all on one CD; some 1,497 pages of history. I paid less than $10. There are literally hundreds of disks like this available.

Adobe is not the only contributor either. Apple's QuickTime video standard is also finding its way into preserving history. One example is the early motion pictures of Thomas Edison. The Library of Congress has converted many of these to QuickTime. Simply download and view them on your PC. I have a great one of an Albany Fireman's parade in 1909. One enterprising fellow has taken a bunch of Edison's pictures and now offers them on EBay.

Want to look at the detail of a 1631 original map of the Hudson River? No problem. Again, the Library of Congress has a great software program that allows you to look at a downloaded map, blow it up to original size, or beyond, save a portion, and print it out on your printer.

Ironically, future historians may not be so giddy. While we continue to wish for more treasures to find their way to a digital life, future historians may be complaining of the millions of history related CDs. After all, everyone is going to think his or her history needs to be digitized for posterity. While it seems comforting to me that someone will be reading my columns a hundred years from now, politicians should shudder to realize that bad decisions today could become the jokes of tomorrow.