That’s an intensely exciting question, but I think the answer lies in something fundamentally different between the two—how we’re accessing each group of information or group of texts, or however you want to define both pieces of work we’ve been striving towards. It’s important to contextualize that while we are reviewing Hane’s work through hard copy, through the archive, and the large amount of resources it provides, I think we are, or at least I am, mainly viewing the information for the Bibliography through what resources I have online. Therein lies a, honestly, a massive difference. This is also why I don’t think that, personally, the archival work changed how I went about looking for sources – I think it did make me more conscious of reviewing what I’m looking at – looking at who the writer was, what they were writing about, overviewing what journal it might be for, or stuff like that. Still, it didn’t fundamentally change how I searched. If I had gone about my research on hard copy, something that Mikiso might have told me to do if he was still around, I do think it would have a larger impact, but that’s just not how our learning institution operates, largely.
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You’re right to point out the difference between research done physically in special collections and online! It is a very different experience, some of which translates (e.g. paying attention to the bibliographical information or how a collection might be organized) and some of which very much does not (word search capabilities). It’s also changing the shape of the field–in the past, historians who didn’t focus on the US often had to spend significant time in the place they studied not just to learn about the language or culture, but to physically access the archives. Now, many of those archives are online and accessible anywhere. Research that was impossible even 5 years ago is now possible, but how long will grant organizations continue to pay graduate students to go to the in-person archives? And what will we lose if they stop?