Digital Archives and the Cost of Scholarship

I'm currently working on a section of my dissertation that looks closely at crime ballads. I'm starting with husband-murder . Don't worry, everything between L and I are fine, it's just an easy category to get at, that peaked in popularity between 1600-1630 and therefore relatively manageable to for my first go at the chapter.

One of the things I'm looking at is the kinds of weapons women used to kill their husbands in these sensational stories. Poison was rare, most husband-murders were alcohol-fueled crimes of passion in which the wife's nag-nag-nagging began as a tongue wagging and boiled over into stabbity, stab, stab, stabbing. At the current count, I have 2 instances of using a knife, one of using her husband's chisel, and one of stabbing her husband in the neck with a pair of sheers/scissors. Now, it struck me that the scissors was interesting - is this a woman employing a domestic weapon to quite literally destroy the domestic order? Or is this a woman grabbing an instrument of her paid labour - was she a seamstress? Were the scissors used as part of her trade?- to unravel the male-dominated household? Is it the tools afforded to women's work combined with a woman's passionate and unruly nature that could lob society's metaphorical head off? Or am I dealing with a deeper Renaissance symbolism that I'm not yet aware of? See? Isn't history exciting!?

One of the major resources that is making my dissertation possible is the digital archive Early English Books Online - it's a fantastic resources of digitized printed books from the 15th-18th centuries and my dissertation would not be possible without it. After speaking with some colleagues, one suggested I type in "scissors" and "sheers" into EEBO and see what comes up - try to get more context for my quest to uncover meaning. So I did; and I got nothing. I tried:
sisser/sisers/sissers
sisor/sissor/sisors/sissors
sizer/sizers
scissor/scissors
sheer/sher/shers/sheers
(Early modern English spellings have no consistency)

Again: nothing.

I contact my colleague and she replies "that's odd, I get well over 300 hits for "scissors"". We repeat the experiment with the same results and I half-jokingly say "maybe UCSC didn't pay their bill this month.

I emailed the EEBO team and this is the response I got:

"I think the most likely explanation for the discrepancy between your results and those of your colleague is that the University of California Santa Cruz does not currently provide access to the EEBO Text Creation Partnership (TCP) collection of searchable full text, while your colleague's institution probably does have this add-on module."

So, yes, UCSC doesn't pay for full access and that's why I can't find my search terms. Here's the problem: for scholars like myself, who are not independently wealthy and can only fund short-term research trips to archives, we rely heavily on the promise of digital archives to help fill in the gaps. I, foolishly, assumed that b/c UCSC subscribed to EEBO that I had full access to their records, search functions, etc. Had I not spoken with my colleague, I would not have known 1) that I didn't have access to everything and 2) that there is a volume of material I literally cannot find b/c my uni doesn't subscribe at the same level hers does. In terms of my research, this is a major problem: I am at a major disadvantage compared to someone at an institution that does have full access to these texts. I am making conclusions, but they may be incomplete b/c I don't actually have full access to the data I claim to be working with (and more disturbing, I didn't know I didn't have full access). So I may make conclusions and make claims regarding the sources I found, but those may only be a small portion of the sources that exist. My sample set are defined, not by extant sources, but by the level of subscription to the digital archive that my university is willing to fork over (read: better than some, not as good as those at better-funded institutions).

Wonder why those of us at underfunded public Unis don't do as good work at those at well-funded private institutions? Because of the cost of doing research we are literally excluded from the same sort of access to sources and data. Our access to research is limited b/c most of our funding comes from TAing, which requires keeping our butts in the classroom - a problem if your archives are in Europe, China, or even one state away. We are then further restricted to digital material b/c our unis won't pay for/can't afford full access. Is it any surprise that we publish less and are hence less competitive on the job market?