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UT has eliminated the access of the general public to microfilms of the Baltimore Sun. Rolls of microfilm of the Baltimore Sun used to be available to the public in the drawers of microfilm in the UT library. They are not in the publicly accessible microfilm drawers any more, but there are microfilms of other papers still available to the general public.

UT did let me photograph original newspapers. As I said earlier, I was just not allowed to publish the images without their permission.

Some libraries require you to be a "qualified" researcher to get access to their original sources. A published author or someone with a history degree or a student in the history department might be able to get to the sources, but an amateur history buff like me might not.

The Rice University Library in Houston has about 100,000 documents and material on Jefferson Davis. I asked them once about getting access to the documents. I found that would not be allowed to photograph or copy anything, but I could write out on a piece of paper any words of a document that I wanted. Rice has slowly published some of the material in volumes edited by library staff.

This reminds me somewhat of the restrictions that were placed for a long time upon access to the Dead Sea Scrolls even to qualified researchers [Link]. A group had control of the scrolls and were the only ones with access to them. They were thus the only ones who could publish much about them. Access to the scrolls has gotten much better over time.

I once requested permission by email to visit a library in Midland, Texas to see a collection of wartime documents written by John Salmon "Rip" Ford, a famous Texas Confederate commander. One of my ancestors served under Ford during the war. The library had a similar "qualified" researcher access requirement. I even used my Dr. title (a Ph.D.) in hopes to get access. They didn't even reply to my inquiries. Well, I won't be sharing with them a copy of the diary my ancestor kept when he served under Rip either.