This paper will present a midterm report on the progress of a research project designed to use new information and communications technologies to expand the way historians of technology relate to their research subjects. Specifically, with outside support from a major philanthropic foundation, we created a website intended to allow actors to contribute their own writings, artifacts and ideas to the historical record. At the same time, we aimed to use our web presence to plumb the level of lay interest in the history of recent technology. In effect, we have tried both to expand the "stuff of history" and to test the market for this new type of historical product.

Our target audience was the community of electric vehicle drivers, owners and enthusiasts: a group that was reasonably well known to one of the authors by virtue of prior historical research. This community exhibited certain characteristics that we believed would enable us to connect directly with them via the web. They were motivated, self-identified, technological enthusiasts whom we knew to be relatively sophisticated users of electronic communication tools.

In this paper, we present some initial results based on our experience running the website. We briefly summarize how we expected to establish the connection between researcher and subject community, and then we describe the actual process by which we developed relationships with that community. Despite the evident "technophilia" of our target audience, we discovered that a "broadcast" model of recruitment was less effective than we anticipated. Rather, a more specific campaign, focusing on person-to-person contact even when employing electronic means, or taking advantage of more traditional communication networks, elicited a much more enthusiastic response from our target community.

We then conclude by trying to identify some of the reasons for this unexpected behavior and possible means for overcoming these barriers. In part, we argue, our broadcast model did not work because members of the electric vehicle user community do not consider themselves historical actors. In some sense, this communitys interest in electric vehicles is just that: they tend to be far more interested in the cars themselves than in their potential or eventual importance for future historians. Personal appeals made it easier for our target community to believe that their artifacts and ideas matter to us, the researchers.