So far we have examined seven major avenues of subject access to information: controlled vocabulary searches, systematic and focused browsing of full texts shelved in subject-classified order, keyword searches, citation searches, related record searches, searches through published subject bibliographies, and Boolean combination/limitation searches. The eighth major avenue—talking to people—is the one most favored by journalists, but it is also valuable for other researchers.
It is particularly important for academics not to overlook this method, as most academics (especially grad students) have a tendency to develop an overly strong bias toward either Internet sources or—less so today—the printed sources in libraries or archives. A kind of mental “wall” often develops that blocks the perception of information simply because it hasn’t been written down somewhere. The assumption is that “if the information I want is not findable on the Internet or in a library, then it just doesn’t exist.” This usually unconscious belief has the undesirable result of inducing people to change their research questions to fit whatever information they can find online or in print—even if it’s not what they really want—and to diminish the scope of their papers accordingly.
This assumption can be very detrimental to quality research. Even the subscription databases providing full-text access to journals are constrained by the fact that the articles themselves may be several months old, due to the time lag involved in submission, review, acceptance, editing, publication, and embargoes, before they appear online, and many Internet sites, in spite of their impressive immediacy, are often superficial, untrustworthy in authority, and ephemeral in duration (making them undesirable as sources that can be footnoted). Even if these drawbacks did not exist in the alternative sources of information, however, the use of people sources would still be valuable because finding someone who has firsthand experience with a subject can usually provide you not just with information that has never existed in print or online, but also with insight into how you might better frame your questions to begin with.
It may seem obvious to state this, and, indeed, I have found few people who would say they disagree with these observations. Still—and this is the problem—many people who intellectually know that doing good research must take them outside the box of the Internet and outside the walls of libraries will not act as though they know it. When it finally comes to doing research, they are very shy about going beyond online and print sources to find what they want. They will often use friends as sources, because friends won’t make them feel shy about asking what (they think) strangers might regard as “stupid” questions, but that unwarranted shyness can stand in the way of real breakthroughs in research. After 35 years as a reference librarian, helping tens of thousands of students, I think the only element that sometimes approaches “stupidity”—“imprudence” would be a better word—in the equation comes from that very shyness in not speaking up because of an assumption that other people will not respond helpfully.
Part of the difficulty lies in the way that “research methods” or “information literacy” classes are taught in colleges. Very often they are confined exclusively to presentations on “how to do critical thinking about websites”—with the unspoken implication that any of the myriad sources not online aren’t worth talking about, or don’t even exist. (The same classes are also noticeably deficient in another way: they fail to explain the crucial differences between controlled subject terms and keywords—i.e., what words should you type in? Group discussions cannot solve this problem when no one in the group, including the instructor, is aware of the distinction.) Alternatively, the classes are confined to the presentation of a relatively few sources, usually within a particular subject area, from a prescribed bibliography; and correlative assignments are sometimes made with the stipulation that “you should use the sources on this list” coupled with “don’t bother the reference librarians—you should do your research on your own.”
Unfortunately, students tend unwittingly to learn more than they should from such experiences: they learn that doing research equals “playing library games” within only the boundaries of the prescribed list of sources or that it means using the Internet alone, as long as they “think critically” about whatever Google (or Bing or ProQuest or JSTOR) serves up on its first three screens. Coupled with such learning is the message that talking to people is “bothering” them and may even have a faint odor of “cheating” to it because it’s not doing “your own” work. Professors seem unaware of the long-term damage this does, not only to their students’ subsequent academic careers but also to the future satisfaction of their curiosity about topics of personal interest. Being told not to talk to people for purposes of a particular class assignment often produces the kind of result Mark Twain referred to in an anecdote about a cat: “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there, lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but she will also never sit down on a cold one anymore.”1 Reference librarians notice the limiting effect of such “learning” all the time, in the reluctance that students—and their professors, too—display in asking for much-needed reference help in all other situations. The only “bad” question is the one that you stifle and don’t ask to begin with.
Genuine learning should obviously be a broadening rather than a limiting experience; and in doing research the most important lesson to learn is that any source is fair game. (I’ll qualify that by specifying any legally available source.) One should always go to wherever the information needed is most likely to be, and often this will be in someone’s head rather than on a computer screen or in a book. Remember too, however, that you can travel back from talking to an expert into the printed literature, for often the expert will know the best written sources or can offer shortcuts that will make subsequent library or Internet searches more efficient.
Talking to people can provide unanticipated insights into your area of research, feedback on problem points, and a structure or “shape” of perception that written or online sources often cannot match. Conversations can quickly reveal which areas of inquiry are valuable and worth pursuing and which are likely to waste time. People sources can also often identify quickly what are the “crackpot” positions, with concealed propositions and entailed ideologies, which may be very hard to discern otherwise if the subject field you’re exploring is new to you.
Experts, enthusiasts, and buffs are available without direct personal contact—i.e., in ways that circumvent the shyness factor—through social network sites and special interest groups available on the Internet (including Facebook). These links to organizations—some of which will require membership fees—enable you to throw out a question to a wide variety of people interested in a particular subject area. Sometimes you will receive direct replies from anyone interested enough to respond; sometimes your question may initiate a response chain online. As with other people sources, such contacts can provide you with either direct answers or possible leads.
As convenient as Internet sites can be, it is best not to be naïve in using them. One student, for example, sent a request to a Shakespeare discussion group, asking for the sources of such quotes as “Alas, Poor Yorick” and “Double, double, toil and trouble”—and he even gave the group a deadline for responding! Needless to say, such an inquiry evoked several replies that can only be deemed less than charitable. Keep in mind that, while the enthusiasts who populate the various discussion groups are generally very helpful, they are often not kindly disposed toward questions creating the appearance that a student is simply trying to circumvent the work of real engagement with the subject of their interest.
What is even more important to remember is that, right from the start, not every expert is reachable via Internet groups—millions of knowledgeable people in different subject areas simply do not participate at all in such online venues. (This may seem to be a common-sense observation, but the view from a reference desk is that too many researchers are oblivious to it.) Even those who do participate will not choose to respond to every inquiry that gets tossed into their pool. (Most of these people have actual lives outside their online connections.) In other words, there is still a vast ocean of experts who can still be reached only by phone, letter, or direct e-mail—or, sometimes, by just showing up at their office.
I do not mean to minimize the importance of Internet connections, however. For example, I once had to find out if the U.S. Army had ever used the phrase “Certified Disability Discharge” in reference to veterans’ status. At the time I could not find this exact phrase in either online or print sources, but I found a veterans’ information homepage on the Web, and I sent my question to the group’s e-mail address. The experts on the other end found some knowledgeable “old-timers” to talk to who clarified the use of the term.
Talking to people can provide you with a quick overview of a whole field; it can also give you not only the answer to a particular question but also the larger context in which the question should be asked. For example, someone who was once looking for information on the U.S. market for padlocks imported from India first did considerable library research on his own, but only in talking to knowledgeable people in the field did he really get oriented. He was told that there are several different grades of padlocks, which have different markets; that it’s better to concentrate of small areas, as data on large areas are unreliable; that there were forthcoming national standards for padlocks, which imported items might have to meet in another year or two; that he should first have the locks tested for quality (using current military specifications as interim standards, if applicable to the grade of item being imported) and to have a written contract that all other locks will be comparable before paying for any; that he must consider not only the price of the items but also the shipping charges and import duties; and that the big chain stores would certainly be able to buy much more cheaply than he, so his best bet would be to market through independent “Mom and Pop”–type hardware stores.
The experts that this researcher talked to not only provided him with answers, but also alerted him to whole new areas of questions he had to consider, none of which he had thought of on his own. It’s impossible to get this kind of corrective feedback from websites or printed sources that do not allow interaction with their readers and that cannot be modified on the spot to accommodate slightly different inquiries. For this kind of thing you just have to talk to someone who has experience. (Note, too, that an array of concerns such as those listed in this example would not readily be elicited by e-mail correspondence—for the simple reason that few contacts would want to do that much typing! The same information flows much more easily over the phone. That is an important distinction: phone calls work better than e-mails, especially if they have been preceded by e-mails providing a general notion of the problem—and, further, in-person interviews are usually much more productive than phone calls.)
Another example: I once had to identify, quickly, the company that built a particular bank vault that allegedly survived the collapse of the World Trade Center. The Library of Congress had just been given a special appropriation in the wake of the September 11 attacks—to acquire a super-secure vault for its own treasures—and needed to know what kind of vault to purchase. One of the LC administrators remembered reading a newspaper article about some gold bullion being removed from a vault that had survived the collapse of the Twin Towers and wanted to know the manufacturer of that particular vault. From the ProQuest database of full-text newspapers I could quickly find the article (Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2001) reporting the recovery of the gold; the article identifies the owner of the vault as the trading arm of the Bank of Nova Scotia, specifically its “ScotiaMacotta unit.” Unfortunately, the reporter consistently misspelled the firm’s name, which is actually ScotiaMocatta, and this threw off my keyword searching for the next 20 minutes. In any event I soon found the correct spelling through a printed business directory, which also provided the company’s New York telephone number—which proved to be nonworking. However, since I also had the parent company’s name, Bank of Nova Scotia, I could come at the problem through its office; doing so resulted in several telephone referrals until I finally found a man who knew that the head of all of the company’s security operations, with oversight of all its bank vaults, was situated in Toronto.
When I called this Director of Protective Services, he proved to be very helpful and immediately gave me the name of the bank vault manufacturer and offered to provide further contacts. But he also gave me some other very important information that I hadn’t asked for: the media reports of the vault’s survival were misleading. The vault in question, he told me, was not within the Twin Towers; it was actually located on two levels of 4 World Trade Center, a nine-story building off to the side. This smaller building itself only partially collapsed, and none of the events of that terrible day threatened the structural integrity of the vault. (It was surrounded by an underground parking area at levels 3 and 4 below ground, and the many cars in the area were not damaged either, other than to be covered by layers of dust.) This fact was not at all apparent from the original newspaper article, which did leave the impression that the vault had directly withstood the collapse of the Twin Towers themselves.
The point here, for researchers, is simple but important: even when I had the full resources of the largest library in the world at my disposal, with hundreds of full-text subscription databases freely accessible inside, as well as the entire open Internet (which I also searched), the information that I really needed turned out to be only in the head of someone sitting in a Toronto business office. And not only could he provide the information I specifically asked for, he could also point out an unsuspected problem in the assumptions with which I was working. This kind of thing happens all the time for researchers who go “outside the boxes” of both libraries and the Internet and talk directly to knowledgeable people.
Note also, however, that the library resources were extremely helpful in providing the starting point for the string of telephone calls, especially since the initial Wall Street Journal article was not freely accessible on the open Internet.
No matter what your channel of contacting people, a word of caution is in order: a judicious mixture of personal, print, and online sources is often the ideal in doing good research. Just as academics often overemphasize print or online sources, so journalists sometimes tend to overemphasize people contacts to the outright neglect of relevant print sources. The aims of academics and journalists are not usually the same, of course, but there is enough overlap that each group can learn from the search techniques of the other. And both groups, these days, need to wary of relying too much on blog statements as documentation; these occupy a kind of middle ground between print and people sources.
Contrary to widespread assumptions, you don’t have to have special training or credentials to jump into research by telephone or interview. (This is not to say that the training journalists go through is unnecessary; as with any other research skill, the more experience you get in locating and interviewing people, the better you’ll be at it.) The most important initial factor is your attitude going into the search: don’t be shy! It’s okay to just jump in and do it. All you really have to do is find a good starting-point contact and then be persistent in developing referrals until you find someone who knows what he or she is talking about.
The main stumbling block most researchers have is their own inhibiting belief that other people will not respond. But most interviewees are flattered that you would consider them knowledgeable in some area and will usually respond helpfully. Experience will show that the odds are in your favor—telephone or e-mail or (better) in-person contacts will usually be friendly and will often volunteer much more information than you originally request.
One tip to be aware of initially: if you are referred to a particular person regarding some subject and that person immediately refers you to a “better” expert—as in, “I’m not the best person to talk to on that—you really need to talk to X”—don’t just drop the first contact immediately. He or she may very well still be a good source.2 You might say something like, “Fine, thanks for that referral and I’ll certainly follow up on it, but let me ask: What is your own take on this? Does it affect you? Do you see anything, or can you recommend anything that you think needs to be [changed, developed, looked at, brought up, etc.]?”; and after that, “Do you have any thoughts about what I questions I should ask X when I’m trying to get better oriented on this? Are there people you know of who would disagree with X?”
If you run into people who have important information but are reluctant to help, there’s a kind of journalists’ trick to get them to be more forthcoming; it’s sometimes called “baiting the hook.” It works as a second stage in the interview process: after your initial interview, write up your account of what was discussed and then ask the person to review your wording for accuracy and completeness. At this point the interviewee will sometimes add a great deal of important information, or clarify important distinctions, that did not surface in the initial contact. I am not, of course, saying that you should allow the contact person to rewrite your paper; its final version remains a matter of your own judgment. But getting feedback at this second stage will often elicit additional information or qualifications, and asking for “a check of my write-up for accuracy” is a good way to get a follow-up interview.
A related problem in some inquiries is that of “shrinkage of testimony.” Private investigators and journalists frequently run into this. Sometimes a source will be very garrulous and free with statements when you first talk to him, but if he is later subject to cross-examination by an unsympathetic interrogator, or if he comes to realize he will somehow be held accountable for his opinions, he may quickly clam up. (The technique of baiting the hook is useful here: ask the person to review your write-up of his comments for accuracy. He may not be able to retreat very far if you are indeed accurate in what you’ve recorded from the prior contact.) This situation points up the advantage of a printed source: it will be the same no matter how often you refer to it. The corresponding disadvantage to a print source is that the situation may have changed substantially since the words, charts, or statistics were printed.
Talking to people, or getting a chain of referrals, also sometimes entails the “jerk problem”—occasionally you may indeed run into someone who is uncooperative, discouraging, or even rude. The solution is twofold: don’t take whatever they say personally, and try to get the names of other people to talk to, even from the jerks. If you encounter rudeness or abruptness, your attitude should be “So what?”—you can usually solve informational problems by getting a chain of enough referrals to work around whoever is the obstacle. You may even find that these same people become more informative once you’ve talked to other sources who do not accept their views or their perspectival “frame”; you may be able to draw out even the jerks if you “bait the hook” by asking them to review or comment on your written account of what the other people have said. Emphasize that you’re trying to be balanced and fair in getting an overview of the situation.
Journalists require multiple sources to verify their information; that same standard may not apply to private researchers who have only personal (not public) uses in mind for the information they seek. Still, depending on the complexity and extent of your area of interest, it is a wise rule not to stop your inquiries with the first person who tells you what you want to hear, especially if you know that alternative viewpoints do exist. Remember the Blind Men of India. Just as you cannot get an overview of a large subject from a single print source or website, you need to be equally careful about relying on any single “people source.”
I’ve known researchers who use fictional heroes for inspiration. When confronted with a puzzle, they would ask themselves questions along the line of “What would [Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Nancy Drew, Emma Peel, Miss Marple] do in this situation?” The detectives we admire so much in novels or on television are not limited by laptops or printed sources in solving their mysteries; neither should we be in solving ours! And, further, going down the “people source” trail sometimes results in adventures that will make your own life more interesting to others when you recount the stories. It’s always worth a try.
Some recalcitrant souls will undoubtedly still be intimidated by their lack of “credentials,” even though lack of training is truly irrelevant to their success. For academics, it is hoped that the obvious will allay their fears: they already have credentials precisely because of their university affiliation. The best way to start a telephone conversation with a potential source is to mention this right up front:
I’m a student/grad student at _____ University, and I’m not sure who to talk to—maybe you could help or direct me to the right person. I’m trying to find information on _____.
Nonacademics can say something similar:
My name is _____ and I’m with _____, although I’m not calling in that connection. I’m trying to find information on _____; you may not know much about this yourself, but can you point me to someone there who might be able to get me started on this?
In obtaining information from people, the “secret” that is so hard for so many people to believe is precisely this: there is no secret. Just make the call anyway and be honest about your reasons. It’s okay to ask for help. The odds are that you will succeed if you are simply persistent in developing a chain of referrals.
When interviewing someone you should keep several specific things in mind. First, if the nature of your inquiry is particularly complex, do some prior homework. At least talk to the reference librarians of your local library to see if they can suggest some overview or orientation sources. An expert will be more helpful if you convey the impression that you’ve already done some work on your own and are willing to do more—and that you’re not simply dumping the whole problem (especially a class assignment) into his or her lap to solve for you. (This applies to Internet inquiries and e-mails as well as to direct interviews or phone calls.)
Second, it usually works better if you are talking with the person face to face, maybe over a cup of coffee. Remember, you will also have the opportunity for follow-up contact.
Third, explain the purpose of your research—that is, what you’re ultimately trying to do and what you’ll use the information for (e.g., personal curiosity, term paper, dissertation, publication, broadcast). Be open and honest. It will help here if you can say which sources you have already tried and why you thought the present contact was necessary to get beyond their inadequacies.
Fourth, tell them if you have a publication deadline; but do not make your own procrastination their problem. Don’t wait until the last minute to tell an expert you need an answer immediately.
Fifth, try to be as specific as you can—if, of course, the nature of your inquiry allows for specificity. Basically, if you ask specific questions then you’re likely to get on-target answers, but if you ask only vague, general questions, you’re likely to get only vague, general answers.
Sixth, respect the expert’s intellectual property rights. Don’t simply “milk” a person for information and then pass it off as your own—be careful not to infringe on your source’s own potential use of the information. People who burn their sources in this way not only ruin their chances for productive follow-up contacts, they also make the sources hesitant about helping other researchers. Anyone who uses “the network” should leave it in as good, or better, shape for the next person.
Seventh, when you talk to people about a subject that you’re not familiar with, it is very important to ask for more contacts. Just as few researchers will rely exclusively on any one printed source if the topic at hand is of any importance, it is similarly unwise to rely on only one spoken (or social networked/e-mailed) viewpoint. People’s memories of events, and their opinions, tend to be self-serving; it is therefore advisable to seek a balance of perspectives if the topic is such that it can be framed or “shaped” differently by different people.
Eighth, after you have talked to someone who has been helpful—especially if the person has gone out of his or her way for you—it is very important to write a thank-you note or email. There are several reasons for this:
When you are paying someone to help you, you can call that person at any time. But when you are getting information for free, you must at all costs avoid the impression of being thankless or pushy. It is therefore advisable to consider the sending of timely thank-you notes not simply as a nice thing to do, but rather as an integral part of the research process. If you haven’t put words of thanks in writing, you have not finished your contact with that source.
The problem remains, then, that even if you do want to talk to someone who knows about your subject, how do you find that person? Where do you start? If your own circle of acquaintances (including Facebook or LinkedIn) doesn’t get you far enough, you can try several sources available through libraries that may work better.
The printed version of this set will likely be found in any public library; a subscription online version is also available. The subtitle of the print copy is noteworthy: “A Guide to More Than 23,000 National and International Organizations, Including: Trade, Business, and Commercial; Environmental and Agricultural; Legal, Governmental, Public Administration, and Military; Engineering, Technological, and Natural and Social Sciences; Educational; Cultural; Social Welfare: Health and Medical; Public Affairs; Fraternal, Nationality, and Ethnic; Religious; Veterans’, Hereditary, and Patriotic; Hobby and Avocational; Athletic and Sports; Labor Unions, Associations, and Federations; Chambers of Commerce and Trade and Tourism; Greek Letter and Related Organizations; and Fan Clubs.”
Associations, professional societies, amateur hobby groups, and nonprofit organizations are excellent switchboards for connecting researchers with highly qualified sources. They are used by journalists all the time. The very purpose of most societies is to disseminate information on their subjects and to provide a means for people with common interests to interact with each other. They usually welcome inquiries that enable them to tell you more about their field of interest. This annual Encyclopedia from Gale Cengage, whether print or online, is the single best listing of such groups. Each entry provides the name of the organization, its address, telephone numbers (including toll-free ones) and e-mail addresses, the name of a contact person, the number of members, and a description of the organization’s purposes, activities, publications, and conventions or meetings. The organization’s website will always be specified, too. The printed volumes have detailed indexes by keywords, by geographical areas, and by executives’ names. Finding organizations through this directory eliminates, right from the start, a lot of misdirection to questionable or unvetted sites; the fact that an organization is listed within is a very good indication that it is not “crackpot.”
There is a society for everything under the sun. The following brief list gives only the slightest hint of the range and diversity of such groups:
The Encyclopedia of Associations is a publication everyone should browse through; it’s of interest not only for research but also for finding people who have the same hobby as you. Two other complementary sets (and subscription databases) are also published by Gale Cengage: Encyclopedia of Associations: International Organizations, listing 32,000 groups, and Encyclopedia of Associations: State, Regional, and Local Organizations, listing more than 100,000. An additional useful source from CDB Research Ltd. is the Directory of British Associations & Associations in Ireland.
Writers who have published something on a particular subject often keep up to date on new developments in the field. It is usually not difficult these days to reach authors via Web connections. One particularly useful source is the Web of Science database (see Chapter 6), which indexes more than 13,500 high-quality academic journals in all subject areas (including social sciences and humanities). What is significant is that the database’s citation to each article provides not just the institutional address of its author(s) but usually their direct e-mail address as well. If the e-mail information is lacking, it is usually a simple matter to find it via the institution’s website. Many authors also have their own websites, which can be found either through a Google search or often by links from their publisher’s website.
This is a subscription database providing information on more than a million scholars at four-year universities all over the world. It’s a kind of international faculty directory. You can search by individuals’ names, by subjects, and by institutions and their departments. Each entry provides contact information and a description of the scholar’s research interests; usually there will also be a verified list of the person’s publications and co-authors (where appropriate) and departmental colleagues. The range of disciplines is covered: Agriculture, Applied Health, Applied Science, Architecture, Arts, Business, Education, Engineering, Environmental Science, Humanities, Law, Natural Science, Social Sciences, and Theology. (I once had an e-mail from a professional translator in Amsterdam who was having trouble rendering Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh into Dutch. Through this COS Scholar database I identified two academic specialists in Butler studies and forwarded their contact information to her. She wrote back that they turned out to be “tremendously helpful.”)
This source has the subtitle “A Descriptive Guide to Print and Non-Print Directories, Buyer’s Guides, Rosters and Other Address Lists of All Kinds.” It covers more than 16,000 publications worldwide. It provides a description of the coverage of each directory and phone, e-mail, and website contacts for their publishers; it also provides separate “Subject” and “Title and Keyword” indexes. Just as there is often an association for everything, so there is frequently a published directory of contacts for every area of interest. While it is certainly true that most directory-type questions for information on specific organizations are now best handled by going directly to the organizations’ websites, the problem remains of how to get overview information on the range of organizations that may be relevant to your inquiry. Directories in Print is a good source; the following is just a brief sampling of available published directories:
Directories in Print also lists local directories for specific areas under names of countries, regions, states, and cities in its Subject Index.
The professors at institutions of higher learning are experts in an astonishing variety of topics, and most maintain regular office hours in which they are available for consultation or simply “chewing the fat.” An advantage to researchers here is that there is no problem getting past secretaries during these office hours—the scholars are there to be available to all comers.
This is a subscription database with the full texts of sixteen directories, including Encyclopedia of Associations and Directories in Print. It also includes Consultants and Consulting Directory, Directory of Special Libraries and Information Centers, Encyclopedia of Business Information Sources, Encyclopedia of Government Advisory Organizations, Gale Directory of Databases, Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media, Government Research Directory, International Research Centers Directory, National Directory of Nonprofit Organizations, Publishers Directory, Research Centers Directory, and Ward’s Business Directory of U.S. Private and Public Companies.
Their 14 print directories are all available as online subscriptions, individually or cumulatively; they include Federal Yellow Book, Federal Regional Yellow Book, Congressional Yellow Book, State Yellow Book, Municipal Yellow Book, Government Affairs Yellow Book, Corporate Yellow Book, Financial Yellow Book, News Media Yellow Book, Foreign Representatives in the U.S. Yellow Book, Judicial Yellow Book, Law Firms Yellow Book, Associations Yellow Book, and Nonprofit Sector Yellow Book. These sources are much more detailed than the Washington Information Directory—they provide contact information down to the level of individual bureaucrats, editors, administrators, local officials, and scholars. 700,000 individuals in thousands of organizations can be pinpointed. (A good overview of coverage can be found online at www.leadershipdirectories.com/About/CriteriaforInclusion-OnlineDirectories.aspx. The database version, under its “Explore People” link leading to “Explore the Experts Network,” provides hundreds of categorizations of experts from “Administration” and “Advertising” through “Mathematics” and “Medical Professional Training” to “Western States,” “White House,” and “Women’s Issues”—each category having scores of further topical subdivisions down to the level of individuals. Searches “by Alma Mater” are also possible.)
These are like those from Leadership Library; they include Carroll’s Federal Directory, Carroll’s Federal Regional Directory, Carroll’s State Directory, Carroll’s Municipal Directory, and Carroll’s County Directory. The company also provides separate Organizations Charts publications and database: Federal, Defense and Defense Industry.
This is a subject guide to U.S. government agencies in the executive branch, to Congress and its committees and subcommittees, and to private and nongovernmental organizations—e.g., embassies think tanks, associations—in the Washington, DC, area. It describes each organization, gives a summary of its area of interest, and provides specific phone numbers, addresses, and websites. Chapters include sources in 19 broad categories:
Appendices provide detailed information on the current U.S. Congress, its members and committees, and ready reference information on government websites, governors and state officials, foreign embassies and ambassadors, and on the Freedom of Information Act. Detailed indexes are by Name, Organization, and Subject.
The value of having this information network at your call (and it is available to anyone) in incalculable. The U.S. federal government is an especially good place to begin looking for subject experts, as it employs thousands of them in mid-level positions. These people spend their careers keeping abreast of information in narrow areas, and all of these subject specialists can be reached by phone or e-mail. (A tip: you should first seek the specialists themselves in the department or agency, rather than the librarians in the agency library [although they may be useful, too].) They are quite helpful—and, in fact, you are helpful to them, since in answering questions from the public they justify their jobs, programs, and salaries. These are important considerations in an era of downsizing. They can also refer you to excellent private and nongovernmental contacts. The researcher mentioned above who was working on padlocks started out with the Washington Information Directory and then just followed a chain of referrals from the Commerce Department to various private sources.
This subject directory of the resources in your own area is often overlooked by those who think everything is on craigslist (www.craigslist.org), which is indeed another great source for local contacts of all kinds. In using Yellow Pages, especially in a thick edition—there are still a few left—be sure to consult the index section at the back, as it will lead you to the best search terms used in the subject-heading system. A website covering both white and yellow pages, both domestic and international, is Infobel, at www.infobel.com (although many of its links are to sites requiring fees). A subscription database providing comprehensive access to both yellow and white pages is ReferenceUSAGov from InfoGroup; another is Mergent Intellect (Mergent). Both allow “criss-cross” searches: if you have a landline telephone number or a street mailing address they will tell you who is connected to them.
These resources that are not on the open Internet—over and above the social media websites that are much more widely known—should be adequate for leading you to knowledgeable people in any field. Two additional sources with “how-to” tips that don’t go out of date are John Brady’s classic The Craft of Interviewing (Vintage Books, 1977) and Risa Sacks’s Super Searchers Go to the Source: The Interviewing and Hands-On Information Strategies of Top Primary Researchers—Online, On the Phone, and In Person (CyberAge Books, 2001).
A further word of advice has to do specifically with talking to reference librarians. Just as it is useful to match your book-retrieval techniques to the library’s cataloging and storage techniques, so it is often advisable to match the way you ask questions to the way librarians think (and any group that can put books on “moonshining” under Distilling, Illicit obviously does not think like most people).
Actually, it is the librarian’s responsibility to find out what you’re ultimately looking for—which may not be what you request initially—through a reference interview, so if you wind up being directed to inappropriate sources, it may be more the librarian’s fault than your own. Still, whatever the reason for any misdirection, you will nevertheless want to avoid it, and if you can make the librarian’s job a little easier by knowing the sort of information he or she is listening for, then you will be the one to benefit. Going with the grain is more efficient than going against it.
Here are three examples of what to be aware of:
In each of these cases—librarians could cite tens of thousands more—the inquirers asked not for what they really wanted but for what they thought the library could provide. The problem is that most people have grossly inadequate assumptions about what can and cannot be found in a library and phrase their questions only in the most general terms because they don’t expect to find much. Others tend to think that the few resources or databases they’ve used in the past—LexisNexis, JSTOR, ProQuest (not realizing how very different libraries’ subscriptions to ProQuest can be)—are essentially all there is, beyond whatever turns up in Google and Wikipedia. As I hope this book has made clear by now, such assumptions are very badly mistaken.
Frequently professors and graduate students are more inefficient than anyone else. This hearkens back to a point made earlier, that a large number of them have never done any critical thinking about the dictum passed on to generation after generation of graduates students all over the country: “You shouldn’t have to ask a librarian for help; if you can’t find it on your own, you’re no scholar.” Researchers who have less “learning” and more common sense will not thus cut themselves off from a major source of help. Even apart from the complexities of finding the right subject headings to use in OPACs—which is almost never taught—there are hundreds of subscription databases available in academic libraries that few academics have ever heard of; and many more are produced every year. Moreover, it is frequently the case that excellent sources turn up in searches of databases that are not at all discipline-specific. For the “Peloponnesian Tribute” question (above) some of the best sources came out of Web of Science, Bibliographic Index, Periodicals Index Online, Dissertations, and WilsonWeb (now merged into EBSCO, but at the time including Humanities Full Text, Humanities & Social Sciences Retrospective, Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, and Readers’ Guide Retrospective). Often Academic Search Complete, IBZ, ArticleFirst, General OneFile, or Academic OneFile are relevant, no matter the subject area.
The “find it on your own” dictum is bad advice. Phrased positively, however—and understood positively—it is good advice: “The more you learn, yourself, about library sources and retrieval systems, the better your research will be.” To the extent that you learn something of the range and depth of what you can expect from a library that you cannot expect from the Internet, you will allow yourself to ask more questions—and especially specific questions—that you would otherwise think could not be answered efficiently, or at all. You will then find yourself asking, “Where can I find biographical information on my ancestor Samuel Earnshaw, who lived in nineteenth-century England?” rather than “Where are your books on nineteenth-century English history?” You will ask “What can I find about tribute payments in the Peloponnesian War?” rather than “Where are your book on Greek history?” And you’ll ask for “the immigration of blacks from St. Domingue to Baltimore from 1790 to 1810” instead of “U.S. relations with St. Domingue.”
What is always most useful to a reference librarian is to know what you are ultimately trying to find. A good way to clarify your thoughts is to ask yourself, “If there were an absolutely perfect article already written on my subject, what would the title of that article be?” (And ask yourself the same question before using any online source. Most people type the same very general phrasings into search boxes that they use when talking to reference librarians—and, again, they then miss all of the best material.)
In going outside the library to talk to people, however, you will often find that directories—either subscription databases or printed formats—available within libraries are often the best starting points in that they are capable of connecting you to whole ranges of people whom you would not find through Internet sources.
The rule to remember in all of this is that somewhere along the line in your research you should ask yourself, “Who would be likely to know about this subject? Whose business is it to know? In whose interest would it be?” These questions, plus a browsing familiarity with the resources listed above, can get you started on some very valuable pathways and lead you to important information not recorded in any print or online source.