This book is intended to fill a particular niche. It will answer three questions: First, what is the extent of the significant research resources you will you miss if you confine your research entirely, or even primarily, to sources available on the open Internet? Second, if you are trying to get a reasonably good overview of the literature on a particular topic, rather than just “something quickly” on it, what are the methods of subject searching that are usually much more efficient for that purpose than typing keywords into a blank search box? And third—a concern related to the first two—how do you find the best search terms to use in the first place?
My experience in working with many thousands of researchers convinces me that most people who rely primarily on the Internet have a kind of visceral suspicion that they are not finding everything relevant to their subject interests, and maybe not even the most relevant sources, especially if their primary tools are Web search engines and Wikipedia. Their hunches are usually right if they are pursuing scholarly research rather than simply seeking quick information fixes. Even those who tap into a few popular proprietary sources such as LexisNexis or JSTOR or ProQuest for full-text journal articles are frequently left with the “unscratched itch” that there may be more, and better, information somewhere else. Professors frequently advise or require students to use sources other than just the Web, but the students, and even the professors themselves, usually lack a clear understanding of what research libraries can provide that the Web cannot, and of what steps, exactly, researchers must take to find those additional resources that lie outside the scope of the free Internet.
My daily experience as a reference librarian is that most researchers, especially those moving into a new subject area, are very much in the position of the Six Blind Men of India in the fable, who were asked to describe an elephant. One grabbed a leg and said, “The elephant is like a tree”; one touched the side and said, “The elephant is like a wall”; one found the tail and said, “The elephant is like a rope”; and so on with the tusk (“like a spear”), the trunk (“like a hose”), and the ear (“like a fan”). Everyone latched on to something quickly, and each thought he was perceiving the whole animal. No one grasped the extent of the other parts, and no one perceived how the many parts fit together. Finding “something quickly” in each case proved to be seriously misleading.
This book will show you how to go about gaining an overview of the “whole elephant” of whatever your research topic may be. It will explain the variety of search mechanisms that will give you reasonable confidence that you have not overlooked something important. In presenting search mechanisms it will provide not just lists and descriptions of the databases (and other sources) themselves, but discussions of the ways to search within them: how to find the best search terms, how to combine the terms, and how to make the databases (and other sources) show you relevant material even when you don’t know in advance what, exactly, to type in.
Real bricks-and-mortar research libraries contain vast ranges of printed books, copyrighted materials in a variety of other formats, and hundreds of site-licensed (or password-restricted) subscription databases that are not accessible from anywhere, at any time, by anybody on the open Internet. One can reasonably say that research libraries today routinely include the entire Internet—that is, they will customarily provide terminals allowing free access to all of the open portions of the Net—but that the Internet does not, and cannot, contain more than a small fraction of everything discoverable within a research library’s walls. The major difference is caused by copyright law: in spite of much wishful thinking by Internet enthusiasts, it has not been repealed. Most of the books published in the twentieth century and after are not freely available on the Internet. Moreover, even in the areas of content overlap between the Web and research libraries, finding the best material in websites is often impossible, especially when relevance-ranked keyword searching is the only avenue of access.
If you wish to be a good researcher you have to be aware of unavoidable trade-offs between virtual and real libraries. While the former apparently overcome the where restrictions of bricks-and-mortar facilities, they do so only at the unavoidable cost of imposing other significant and inescapable restrictions of what and who: Internet providers must limit what they make available to begin with (open source or copyright-free material); if they do mount copyrighted sources and hope to profit from them, they must then impose major access restrictions on either who can view them or where the can be viewed. The who are those who pay fees at the point of use or who pay special assessments or taxes to become members of password-restricted user groups. In the case of public libraries, such charges are covered by local property taxes within a defined geographic area; in academia, they are covered by tuition payments. In either case researchers outside those geographic areas or paying communities will not have the same access as those on the inside. Even for insiders the range of databases paid for by their subscription fees can itself vary greatly from one geographic community or school to the next. Further, most students in college environments will find that they lose all remote access to their school’s subscription databases as soon as they graduate. When you don’t pay the tuition, you no longer have the remote access.
In the overall universe of information records, three considerations are inextricably tied together: (1) copyright protection; (2) free “fair use” of the records by everyone; and (3) access limitations of what, who, and where.
It is not possible to combine (1) and (2) without restricting at least one element of (3). “Free” Internet access (that is, without point-of-use charges) usually entails barriers to either what is searchable to begin with (exclusively public domain material) or who can view it—i.e., “free” only to those with passwords or free only within the walls of libraries where it can be viewed.The one major exception appears in the provision of access to copyrighted material without point-of-use charges via the imposition of advertisements. This too is a limitation, however, in that it entails the required acceptance of “terms of service”: if you don’t put up with the ads, you don’t get to view the site. This limitation, however, is largely irrelevant to the kinds of scholarly resources that are the focus of this book. These include the many hundreds of databases offered by ProQuest, EBSCOhost, Gale, Thomson Reuters, and many others—databases that are not on the open Internet—for which payment made to their providers through advertising revenues is simply not a workable business model. Advertising aside, the only way to overcome the what and who barriers of cyberspace, and to provide free access to copyrighted sources even to people who don’t pay local taxes or tuition (and who therefore don’t have passwords), is to impose a where restriction within library walls. Within those walls, libraries can make any information records at all, including both copyrighted print sources and expensive subscription databases, freely available to anyone who comes in the door, whether or not those people live in the immediate area and whether or not they pay any monetary support for the library’s operation. Those who regard “access within walls” as the weakness of real libraries have the situation exactly backward: it is precisely this where restriction that enables libraries to make all information, both public domain and copyrighted, available freely to anyone at all who comes in the door. This is something of an oversimplification, but still mainly true: when you are on the Web, you can usually find references that point you to a library’s copyrighted holdings, but Web access to the full texts themselves (especially post-1922 books, which are still protected by copyright) requires you to pull out your credit card. The provision of free access to so much copyrighted material is a genuine strength of real libraries that cannot be matched by the open Internet. (Long-term preservation is another such strength, but that is a concern beyond the scope of this book.)
Printed books and journals, as physical objects in nonbroadcastable formats, have built-in where restrictions that enable them to be offered for free use within library walls. This restriction itself, however, is mitigated by several additional considerations: that much printed material can be checked out and used in other locations at any time of the day or night, that materials unavailable in one library locale may often be freely borrowed from another, and that there are so many publicly accessible libraries dispersed in so many different geographic areas. You cannot get “everything” freely online from your home or office, but most readers of this book will nonetheless have convenient access to local libraries that do indeed provide free access, both onsite and via interlibrary loan, to vast stores of resources not freely accessible via Amazon, Google, Bing, or Yahoo!.
An awareness of format considerations is also necessary to an understanding of the particular function and importance of real research libraries; this entails a further understanding of why it is not possible to convey all of the materials needed for substantive scholarship via the open Internet. Some preliminary considerations must precede this conclusion, however.
The field of library and information science is obviously concerned with “information,” but the discipline has traditionally made finer distinctions within its subject matter, at least roughly, according to a hierarchical ranking such as this:
Wisdom is usually ranked as the topmost level of learning in such a traditional hierarchy; its function lies in assessing the worth of all of these other levels according to ultimate criteria of truth, goodness, and beauty. It accomplishes this assessment within overarching frameworks or philosophies of what counts as evidence, or what counts as an acceptable explanation to begin with. Such frameworks necessarily assume some ultimate stopping point or ground of explanation which, when reached, finally suffices in justifying a sequence of thought. The qualification that prevents wisdom from being considered as simply the top step on the same ladder, however, is that wisdom is not simply cognitive; it also entails ethical virtue in a way that can “surround” (or not) the other steps. (An adequate discussion of these points, however, would take us on paths beyond the present concern; see Appendix A.)
Wisdom, of course, is difficult to come by. We are on simpler and more stable ground with the more hierarchical levels of learning such as knowledge and understanding. The important point here is that these are not generally attainable in high degree by people with short attention spans, especially in the areas of the conventional academic disciplines. Achievement of these higher levels of thought usually requires written texts in narrative or expository formats that are of substantial length, spelling out both the extent of relevant considerations and the complexities of their interrelationships. One does not achieve these levels simply by finding “something quickly”—as did the Six Blind Men.
Books—or book-length texts, whether printed or electronic—are therefore unusually important formats in facilitating learning at the higher levels. The majority of the electronic formats available today have an undeniable bias toward the pictorial, the audio, the colorful, the animated, the instantaneous connection, the quickly updated, and the short verbal text—qualities that most readily engender learning at the levels of data, information, or opinion, and (to some extent) knowledge. The level of understanding, however—which is ultimately inseparable from lengthy verbal narratives and expositions—is still conveyed, and attained, by book formats or electronic equivalents that make lengthy and complex texts comfortable to read.
Contrary to a widespread popular belief, the vast majority of book-length texts in any substantial research library cannot be digitized for free distribution on the open Internet or via handheld readers. The primary reason, again, is that the copyright laws of the United States and the international community will never be repealed to allow the free distribution of protected texts to anyone, anywhere, at any time on the Web. Most of the books in any large library will have been published since 1923, the date from which copyright restrictions take effect. These terms of protection are generally “life of the author plus seventy years.” There are, of course, ongoing efforts to make legally available (on the Web) “orphan” works whose post-’22 copyright status is unclear; Google Books, on its own understanding of the law, is digitizing millions of these post-’22 books along with those that are clearly in the public domain. Google, however, cannot present more than brief, disconnected snippets of the books whose copyright status is in question, and it may wind up being legally enjoined from continuing even that practice. (The courts, as of this writing, have not provided any definitive resolution of this issue.) The Internet Public Library and the Hathi Trust are similarly hamstrung by post-1922 copyright restrictions. Kindle and Nook e-books continue to proliferate, of course, but these are not freely available to anyone, anywhere—they require credit card payments.
What this boils down to is the fact that real (as opposed to virtual) research libraries remain essential to the conveyance of most of the knowledge contained in copyrighted book-length texts, especially if access to that knowledge is to be made freely available—albeit only to those who comes “inside the walls,” even if they then borrow the free library material for use elsewhere. (The what, who, and where distinctions and trade-offs are unavoidable.) The present book will make clear, however, that such libraries make freely available much more than printed book formats alone—i.e., the vast majority of subscription databases (themselves replete with full-text content) are also made freely available only via library subscriptions. Free access to these, however, is itself restricted either by site licenses (a where limit) or by passwords registered only to those who pay (a who limit) to support the library via tuition or local taxes.
If I may anticipate points that will be made throughout this book, real research libraries also offer multiple methods of searching that are not accessible on the open Internet; that enable researchers to recognize, in systematic ways, the range of relevant sources whose keywords cannot be specified in advance; and that enable such recognition within conceptually focused contexts that eliminate the excessive clutter of tens of thousands of “noise” or “junk” retrievals. It would profit scholarship very little to have every book in the world digitized on Kindles or Nooks or iPads if the only mechanism for finding what was needed within those devices were algorithmic relevance-ranked searches on uncontrolled keywords. Kindles and Nooks provide only very narrow means of gaining subject access to their contents; they are wonderful if you have a specific book in mind that you wish to view, but they preclude any ability to see “the shape of the elephant” of the overall range of literature relevant to a topic. They leave users who wish to do extensive subject searching permanently stuck in the situation of the Six Blind Men, with no remedies. (Further, access problems in the future will be greatly exacerbated if these formats cannot be preserved.)
One of the format peculiarities of books produced by reputable publishers (even apart from preservation advantages) is that because of their production costs (including editorial vetting as well as printing and binding), there are necessarily many fewer of them than there are websites. The comparatively smaller number of reputable (vetted) books thus enables libraries to focus cataloging efforts on them, thereby providing standardized conceptual categorizations of these texts within the two complementary systems of subject cataloging in online catalogs and classified shelving in physical bookstacks (see Chapters 2 and 3). The sheer number of websites precludes any such standardizing treatment by library catalogers.
The proliferation of self-published (and unvetted) books is also a growing problem for scholarly researchers—but one that is at least partially solved within libraries by the mechanism of selection by acquisitions professionals, a mechanism not found in Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or Amazon. These professional selection and cataloging operations applied to books provide greatly enhanced means of subject access to a pool of the very formats that most readily convey the highest levels of learning. Conceptual categorization, with search mechanisms promoting easy recognition of relevant sources (no matter what keywords their authors use), is very different from relevance-ranked displays of resources whose terminology must be specified in advance, especially when that terminology can only be guessed at. When cataloging treatment is applied to collections selected by quality considerations to begin with—and including both in- and out-of-print sources, in multiple languages, and in formats that can also be readily preserved—then researchers seeking knowledge or understanding have a powerful mechanism for solving many of the most important discovery problems encountered by the Six Blind Men of India.
Both levels of learning, on the one hand, and formats of materials, on the other, thus remain crucial considerations in justifying the maintenance of real research libraries. A concern for this maintenance is not in the least “sentimental”; rather, it reflects a justifiable and serious concern that our culture not lose its higher levels of thought. We continue to need—perhaps more than ever—free access (without point-of-use charges) to vast amounts of lengthy texts that cannot be put on the open Internet because of copyright, monopolistic, and contractual legal considerations. And we also need the variety of search mechanisms accessible via libraries that cannot be duplicated by Web or Amazon-type searches. The latter—while immensely useful within their own niches—cannot show all of the parts of “the elephant,” display all of the relations of those parts, or segregate them from the clutter of too many unwanted irrelevancies.
For three decades it has been fashionable in the library profession to assert that “we need to think outside the box of brick-and-mortar libraries.” While that is wholly true, it is not the whole of the truth: we equally need to think outside the box of the open Internet itself because it has major boundaries and limitations of its own.
Most guides to research are organized either by subject resources (for education, for history, for nursing, and so on) or by type of literature (atlases, directories, encyclopedias, handbooks, websites, commercial databases, etc.). Such guides continue to be both important and useful. This one, however, is different. Although it makes use of both these traditional schemes, this book is primarily structured around an outline of nine different methods of subject searching:
Each of these methods is potentially applicable in any subject area; each has both strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages; and each is capable of turning up information that cannot be reached by the other eight. Information that lies in a blind spot to any one method of searching, however, is usually discoverable by changing the search method. This outline forms the overall schema of this book, and I hope it will remain noticeable within the welter of specific details—and a few sidetrack excursions (Chapters 11, 13, and 14). Note especially that keyword searching, which most students resort to in most situations, is only one approach among many others; its weaknesses (and strengths) will be clearly spelled out in subsequent chapters.
I have found through experience that this scheme simply works better as an overall model than the traditional alternatives. (It does not abandon them, however; rather, it encompasses them.) A major point of this book is that since the various search techniques cannot be used simultaneously, most serious research cannot be accomplished by “one-stop shopping” via any single source or any single search box. A variety of approaches, coming at the same subject from multiple angles and providing feedback to direct necessarily subsequent search steps, usually works much better.
My own background includes work as an academic researcher at the doctoral level, as a private investigator with a detective agency, as a graduate student in library science, as a freelance researcher, as a reference librarian at two university libraries, and as a general reference librarian for more than 30 years at the largest library in the world. A second formative element derives from my having worked with and closely observed tens of thousands of other researchers pursuing their own interests in all subject areas. Taken as a whole, this experience has taught me that most people unconsciously work within a framework of very limited assumptions about the extent of information that is easily and freely available to them, especially in large research libraries; indeed, most researchers, nowadays, have only very hazy notions of anything beyond Web search engines and Wikipedia articles.
It strikes me, too, that previous writers on this “research” subject who are not librarians tend to overlook some fundamentally important steps and distinctions in telling their audiences how to proceed; many have even perpetuated harmful notions. (One such notion is that copyright law can be swept under the rug.) On the other hand, some librarians who have written on the subject have not placed the weight and emphasis on certain matters that scholars and other investigators require; indeed, many research guides offer little more than lists of individual printed and electronic sources with no overall perspective on methods or techniques of using them—as though there were no more to it than just typing in a few keywords in the first blank search box that comes up.
The proliferation of published guides to research as well as “information literacy” classes that are focused exclusively on the Internet also tends to dumb down the whole process by suggesting, or even stating, that “everything” is now freely available on the open Web and that the only learning required concerns how to do critical thinking about it. This view confines researchers’ purview, right from the start, to only one galaxy of sources within an information universe that is truly much larger. Moreover, critical thinking about the websites does not solve the blind men problem: when the under-the-hood programming of search engines fails to disclose the remarkable range of other relevant sources that have not been found to begin with, one cannot do any critical thinking about them. Reliance on “black box” algorithms to decide what is relevant to begin with may be acceptable if one needs only to find something quickly, but it does not provide the overview required by scholarship (see Appendix B). In this regard, no computer program is an adequate substitute for education. And education itself is ineffective if it stays at the level of general precepts without concrete examples of what to do—or of what not to do, which may be the more instructive.
Much of what I’ve learned over the past few decades I have had to learn the hard way, and I especially hope to save readers from some of the more egregious mistakes and omissions I’ve been guilty of myself at one time or another. Although it has frequently been a humbling experience, I have had the good fortune of gaining feedback from these mistakes due to the several shifting professional perspectives I’ve had in repeated involvements with the same types of problems. Without that substantial feedback it would have been very easy to regard as “experience” a long continuation of making the same mistakes (and especially omissions) without ever discovering there are better ways to do things. When one does research only for oneself, there is always a tendency to be satisfied with whatever one can succeed in finding on one’s own—as with the Six Blind Men. We trim our assessments of success to the level of research skills we already have, and we all too readily assume our own personal limits are shared by everyone else. Further, we especially let the tools we are familiar with—nowadays, Web engines, Wikipedia, and social media—define the boundaries of the information universe we assume to exist. The many thousands of researchers I’ve worked with, however, have forced me to realize that the limits I once would have accepted for myself were not adequate for answering their questions—i.e., I could not comfortably stop with what I would have accepted as sufficient for my own information needs on any particular subject when the feedback I received so often told me that my personal view of what would’ve been “enough” for me was not enough for their purposes.
When I got my own Ph.D. (in English) before I became a librarian, I thought I was a pretty good researcher, and so did my professors. But I thought so only because neither I nor my teachers realized how much I was missing. When I had difficult questions to pursue, I can see now that I usually fell prey to that strong human propensity toward “least effort”—I’d stop researching when I found only the few things that I could find on my own, and then I’d hide the problem by changing the scope of the papers I was working on: instead of discussing what I really wanted, I’d restrict the analyses to make them cover only the limited information I could actually find.
It was only when I started working as a reference librarian in university libraries that I began to see two things clearly: how vast is the range of subjects people are interested in that I would never have had any questions about myself, and how little I knew about finding anything beyond my own academic subject area. I was myself one of the blind men without realizing it. Having to help so many people whose interests lay so far outside my own personal knowledge boundaries, however, has been a genuinely stretching experience. The insight of “Oh! There’s a way to do that!—I wish I’d known that before!” has come to me many times, in many unexpected ways over the decades, especially since many types of questions come back repeatedly and enable changed approaches or new resources to be tried. Such repetitions have made certain patterns in the orientations of other researchers more evident to me, specifically:
Viewed collectively, these patterns suggest the areas in which most people need the most help, and it is on this group of concerns that I wish to concentrate. I hope especially to give readers a sense of the principles and rules involved that are applicable in any situation, not just an annotated list of sources relevant to certain subjects. In terms of the above list of levels of learning, I hope to get readers to that of understanding.
Three overall points to keep in mind, right up front, are these:
Many specific sources, both electronic and print (as well as microform), will be discussed in this book, and many will probably not be locally accessible to you, even in university or research libraries themselves. Indeed, not all of the sources covered here are available even at the Library of Congress, where I work. I hope, however, that in bringing their existence to researchers’ attention, more scholars will ask for—even demand—them at their local libraries. Collection development librarians are always on the lookout to obtain sources needed by their users; even in selecting basic library catalog systems library administrators often make decisions about which to purchase for economic or prestige reasons, in the absence of any significant personal experience in using those catalogs themselves for scholarly research. (Inadequate catalogs are then maintained because “no one has complained” about them.) If, then, your own library lacks something you believe it needs, by all means let the librarians know. Persistence on the part of researchers—especially faculty library committees—does lead to improvements in library offerings.
While there are thus implications in this book for the kind of service that I think librarians should provide, the audience I most hope to reach is that of the researchers “on the other side of the desk” who use research libraries, either professionally or for personal projects. Many, many more options exist for gaining efficient access to the stored records of our culture “than are dreamt of in their philosophy.” I hope this volume will serve as a road map, a menu of options, and a catalyst for their broader, deeper, and more efficient use of those libraries.
T. M.