Enter the smartphone, and cheap digital photography. Instead of reading papers during an archival visit, historians can snap pictures of the documents and then look at them later. Ian Milligan, a historian at the University of Waterloo, noticed the trend among his colleagues and surveyed 250 historians, about half of them tenured or tenure-track, and half in other positions, about their work in the archives. The results quantified the new normal. While a subset of researchers (about 23 percent) took few (fewer than 200) photos, the plurality (about 40 percent) took more than 2,000 photographs for their “last substantive project.”

The driving force here is simple enough. Digital photos drive down the cost of archival research, allowing an individual to capture far more documents per hour. So an archival visit becomes a process of standing over documents, snapping pictures as quickly as possible. Some researchers organize their photos swiping on an iPhone, or with an open-source tool named Tropy; some, like Alex Wellerstein, a historian at Stevens Institute of Technology, have special digital-camera setups, and a standardized method. In my own work, I used Dropbox’s photo tools, which I used to output PDFs, which I dropped into Scrivener, my preferred writing software.

These practices might seem like a subtle shift—researchers are still going to collections and requesting boxes and reading papers—but the ways that information is collected and managed transmute what historians can learn from it. There has been, as Milligan put it, a “dramatic reshaping of historical practice.” Different histories will be written because the tools of the discipline are changing.

I’ve spent a lot of time in archives. They make me feel like a pilgrim of a very obscure religion, and the process shares the features of other sacred journeys. You put your things in a special locker, keeping only laptop, phone, pencil. You’re inspected for purity on the way into the sanctum and instructed in a series of obscure rights and responsibilities that attend to touching this very special paper. The rooms are beautiful. No one talks. Everyone is on a secret mission, just like you. Sometimes you’re handed white gloves. They don’t smell of old books—that’s the glue, a part of publishing—but sometimes, when you catch a whiff of perfume, lead, ink, chemicals, it seems as if a box exhales the very air of the past. On the way out, you must prove that you’ve stolen nothing from the boxes kept in the vaults. Paper more valuable than gold! (Inhales dust.)

But this sort of rarified “archive mysticism,” which, Wellerstein says, “literally goes back to Ranke”—Leopold von Ranke, the celebrated 19th-century historian—is more romantic than analytical. For historians who need grant funding and child care, or life support from their families and partners, the ideal “that to be a historian is to find the right archive and go inhale its dust” can be unachievable. Shorter trips mean cheaper trips, which, Milligan predicts, will make archival work more accessible.