First off, I think that it is extremely important to grind through primary sources. You really can’t replace the experience of slowly reading a minute book or a journal cover to cover. There are insights, questions, and observations that will not arise in any other way. That being said, technology allows for research that would not otherwise be possible. Here I’m going to review the state of one particular art, in the form of a case study.

Back in 2008 Kris Wright and I published an article on baptism for health among the Latter-day Saints. This was a healing ritual that was, for a time, extremely common, but ended in the early 1920s. In order to understand the ritual we needed examples of people participating in the practice and discussing it. Searching for “baptism” doesn’t get you very far on this topic because other forms of baptism are far more frequent in the archives. In this case, and others like it, key phrase searches go along way to narrowing in on examples. At the time we searched in various locations for:

“baptism for health”
“baptized for my/his/her/their health”
“baptised for my/his/her/their health”
“baptized me/him/her/them for my/his/her/their health”
“baptised me/him/her/them for my/his/her/their health”

Spelling variants are important along with phrase construction. For example people frequently spell anoint/s/ed/ing/ings as annoint/s/ed/ing/ings. There are seventeen different searches there, each of which might yield hundreds of hits. Back before 2008, there was Google Books, BYU, and the UU digital collections. Even a straight up google search on the right phrase will yield fruit.

There was also infobase collections like the New Mormon Studies CD-ROM and the Utah History Suite. At the time many of these allowed for proximity and wild card searches, that is searching for two words withing a specific range of words. For example, you could search for bapt* and heal* within ten words of each other. Proximity and wild card search is extremely powerful, but is no longer available in a lot of cases. Universities have shifted platforms. In the end we found hundreds of examples of baptism for health this way, and it allowed for an expansive analysis of religious practice.

The New Mormon Studies CD-ROM is still functional, but the other infobase products don’t work on newer PCs. Ancestry.com purchased a lot of the content from those, which is now available through their website.

Archive.org
Back in 2008 this wasn’t an option, and since that time many different groups have put up content including BYU, the CHL, BYU-H&I, Signature Books, and Others. Be sure to “Search text contents.” This has been particularly amazing for periodical access. I remember photocopying hundreds of pages of periodicals with Kris back in the day.

Utah Digital Newspapers
Back in 2008 BYU had the Deseret News and the UU had started this project, but there weren’t many papers digitized. Now we have seemingly endless local papers with advanced search that allows for proximity searching!

BYU Digital Collections
Back in 2008 the content for Family Search books was hosted here among the other digital content like the missionary diaries programs. BYU has continued to add lots of content, however the search functionality has really dwindled, so it is a lot more difficult to find things.

UU Digital Collections
Advanced search allows for proximity searching!

USU Digital Collections

Utah State Historical Society Digital collection

Pioneer Database

Saints by Seas
Baptism for health while on a boat in the ocean? It happened.

Family Search Books
As mentioned above, this was hosted by BYU, then it moved to the CHL. Now it’s here with one of the worst search capabilities of the bunch. There are also a lot more access restriction due to copyright than there were before. Still I’ve found this to be a very important source of twentieth-century lived religion.

Family Search Memories
A newish resource with fairly terrible search functionality, but really useful—in fact I almost hate to highlight it, because I don’t want the PTB to remove it. This could be one of the most important databases of lived religion moving forward.

The Church Historian’s Press
The Church Historian’s Press has a number of digital history projects like the GQC and GFR diaries, the ERS sermons (which just yesterday dropped another 70K words), and others. And let’s not forget the Joseph Smith Papers Project. In the past the search functionality has been pretty rough, but they’ve done a good job at improving this and it works quite well.

Google Books and Hathi Trust are also still very useful. I often limit my searches by publication date.

So there you go. I keep addenda files for publications I have authored or co-authored.  Occasionally I go back and run searches to check for new sources. Between these searches and other instances found when reading primary sources, the baptism for health file has probably doubled since publication. It is a great time to be researching.

Now, go create some key phrases and rock and roll.