A few special types of resources contain an incredible wealth of information in all subject areas, but they are often overlooked because their content is not indexed by most conventional databases or catalogs. Discovering any of them, however, can provide you with the reader’s equivalent of tapping into Alaska’s north shore oil reserves. These resources are:
Materials in these collections have certain features in common:
It takes extra steps to get into these materials, in other words, and few people take them because to those lacking prior experience in these areas the paths are obscure and the destinations are not foreseeable. Most people tend to settle for whatever they can find quickly and easily; it’s not that they are “lazy” so much as that they don’t perceive the range of options available to them outside the horizon of their previous experience. In seeking special collections, government documents, or manuscript materials, it is especially important to ask for help from people who have more experience with them because frequently the best initial access comes through a custodian’s or librarian’s greater knowledge of what is likely to be found in them and of which particular databases (or other finding guides) provide the best access.
The ways to identify special collections that are not online or in microform have been discussed in Chapter 11.
Thousands of large, prepackaged research collections exist in a bewildering variety of subject areas; they are in subscription databases available only through research libraries. Of the many that are available let me provide a sample of three, and a listing of some of the others.
The Making of the Modern World (Gale Cengage): This is a huge full-text database of more than 60,000 books published between 1460 and 1850 in the range of European languages; it also includes serial literature (466 titles) whose publication began prior to 1850. (Entire runs of serials are covered even when they extend after 1850.) It is the digitized version of a prepackaged microfilm library (which may still be available in that format in many research libraries), the Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature. The collection is a treasure trove for any research on the history of business or economics—but “economics” is interpreted very broadly, and so the database provides much material on the more general social and political history of these centuries. Among the topics covered are mercantilism, agriculture and agricultural innovation, European colonial expansion (with early histories of the various geographical areas), accounting practices, slavery, demography in eighteenth-century England, the textile industry, socialism prior to Marx, trade unionism, Indians of North and South America, debtor/creditor relations, piracy, smuggling, dietary habits in various European countries, early business and technical education, commerce in Italy, penology, trade manuals, numismatics, the economy of eighteenth-century Scandinavia, Irish–English relations, social conditions, population, transport and transport technology, and even theology (with digitized works by Thomas Aquinas and Cotton Mather, among others). More than just books and serials are included: pamphlets, broadsides, proclamations, and government documents are also well represented. All are cataloged using Library of Congress Subject Headings. There is also a second database, The Making of the Modern World Part II, 1851–1914, that includes another 5,000 titles.
North American Women’s Letters and Diaries, Colonial to 1950 (Alexander Street Press): This subscription database provides full texts of diaries, journals, and letters written by more than 1,300 women who either lived in or visited North America. Biographies are provided where available, and annotated bibliographies of sources are given. Searches can be done via all of the following categorizations:
It is the capacity to limit by these specific criteria that gets lost in almost all federated or “discovery” searches of multiple databases at the same time. A partial exception is the separate database Social and Cultural History: Letter and Diaries Online (also from Alexander Street Press) that serves as a cumulative index not just to this collection but to several others as well: British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries; North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories; The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries; Black Thought and Culture; Oral History Online; and Manuscript Women’s Letters and Diaries from the American Antiquarian Society. Each collection is expanded as new material is found, and still other separate collections are planned. Currently the Social and Cultural History cumulative index covers more than 650,000 pages of letters, diaries, and journals written by 8,000 individuals since 1675; full texts of the indexed items are available only to those libraries subscribing to the individual databases. It also indexes another 4,000 English-language collections that are freely available on the Web. This latter material contains 700,000 pages from the 1550s to the present; pointers are also given to 4,300 audio and visual files on the open Web. The freely accessible websites are indexed at the same level of detail as the material that is available only to subscribers. (Note that the several proprietary databases have indexing tailored to their own individual fields; the categories listed above for the North American Women’s Diaries database overlap, but are not identical to, the categories created for the other files—in other words, even here there is some loss of indexing specificity when all of the databases are simultaneously cross-searched via the Social and Cultural History index.)
eHRAF World Cultures (Human Relations Area Files): This database is an ongoing compilation of hundreds of thousands of pages of primary and secondary sources on about 280 cultural groups worldwide. The database is useful to students of anthropology, sociology, psychology, politics, literature, linguistics, history, comparative religion, art, and agricultural development—and for anyone else who wishes to compare the perceptions, customs, social institutions, values, beliefs, and daily life of all peoples of the world, past and present. The documentation for each culture is indexed, at the paragraph level, in about 750 subject categorizations provide by the database’s “Outline of Cultural Materials.” These categories include such topics as mortality, recorded history, food production, architecture for various functions, humor, entertainment, trial procedures, recruitment of armed forces, old-age dependency, sexual practices and norms, views on abortion, drug use, division of labor by sex, sanitary facilities, power development, interpersonal relations, art, religion, political organization, etc. Within each category is found the full-text documentation from books, articles, unpublished manuscripts, and field reports. Foreign language material is not always translated into English. Keyword searching is also possible.
The standardization of topical categories under each culture allows for ready comparisons of information, which in many cases can be statistically significant. (Not every category is filled in for every culture, however—the creation of the system is an ongoing process.) This database is an extension of an older microfiche set of documents, the Human Relations Area Files, containing comparable data on 350 cultures analyzed into about 600 topical categories (not all of which correspond to the 750 in the database). Although some of the texts on the 280 cultures in the database version come from this microfiche set, much of this earlier material has not been incorporated into the online version, but the latter has additional material not in the microfiche. About 400 cultures are covered if both the online and the microfiche sets are searched. (There is also another, similar database called eHRAF Archaeology, which enables cross-cultural comparisons of archaeological studies worldwide. It uses the same lists of cultures and topical categories, but also allows keyword searching.)
The above three online collections represent but the tip of a very large iceberg of full-text collections. Additional, comparable subscription databases include the following; this list is only a sampling of what is available:
Alexander Street Press Collections: Full Text, Audio, and Video
Full descriptions of these databases are available at http://alexanderstreet.com/products.
Gale Digital Collections
Full descriptions are available at http://gdc.gale.com/products-by-name/.
ProQuest Chadwyck-Healey Digital Collections
Descriptions of these collections are available at www.proquest.com/en-US/products/default.shtml.
ProQuest History Vault: This is a new project intended to digitize dozens of microfilm collections originally published by University Publications of American (UPA) (see Microform Special Collections, below). An overview of the modules being made available can be found by searching “ProQuest History Vault” in Google or Bing. Current online collections include:
Library of Congress American Memory —the Library of Congress is one of the largest providers of free, full-text content on the Internet. More than 140 of its collections on American history are available, including pamphlets, maps, photos, manuscripts, sound recordings, and motion pictures; full descriptions of all the collections are online at www.loc.gov (click on the American Memory icon). Note, however, that the digitized sources consist of only of copyright-free materials; in most cases this means they were produced or published prior to 1923.
Library of Congress E-Resources Online Catalog is a listing of (as of this writing) nearly 400 websites selected by LC experts, in all subject areas; these are freely available full-text collections mounted by institutions other than LC itself. The list is maintained at http://eresources.loc.gov/search~S9/m?SEARCH=Free. It can also be found via http://eresources.loc.gov/under the heading “ALL Free Resources.”
OAIster is a subscription database available in the OCLC FirstSearch system; it is a listing of freely available full-text sources from more than 1,100 open archive collections. Direct links to the sources are given. More than 23,000,000 items are cataloged, including digitized books and articles, images, audio files, born digital texts, and films.
The European Library website at www.theeuropeanlibrary.org provides links to free digital collections mounted by dozens of European national libraries.
Of the high-quality, commercially available special collections—which are often prepackaged whole libraries on particular subjects—many more exist in microformats than can be found online. (“Microformat” can refer either to microfilm, which is spooled on reels, or to microfiche, which are separate sheets, each containing dozens of miniaturized text pages.) Frequently these sets include thousands of individual books, journals, government documents, archival records, or other primary sources. In most cases there is a printed (or online) guide to the individual items within the set, and the guide itself may be discoverable as a cataloged record in the library’s OPAC—but the thousands of items within the collection will not be individually listed in the OPAC. You usually have to find the guide to gain any overview of what lies within the microform collection. Often such guides are cataloged under the LCSH forms [Subject]—Microform catalogs or [Subject]—Bibliography.
A helpful solution to this problem—i.e., that the guide to a set may appear in your OPAC, but not the individual titles it lists—is sometimes available through the WorldCat database. If you already know an individual title that you want, a WorldCat search will often turn it up even if it appears within a large microform collection—and the WorldCat record, further, will provide the specific reel number (or fiche number) for that title within the collection that contains it.
Many researchers are initially deterred from using microforms because they mistakenly assume that photocopies on paper cannot be made from them; such copies, however, are easy to make—and many libraries now also have machines that enable you to digitally scan images directly to a flash drive. It is unfortunately becoming more common for students who are accustomed to nothing but digital formats to simply disregard resources that are available only in microform sets due to the relative inconvenience of viewing them. But graduate students, in particular, who look for and exploit these resources will often have a major advantage in doing their dissertations for two reasons: they will probably be finding relevant sources overlooked by others in their field, and the assemblage of thousands of relevant records in one collection, often including primary sources or ephemera not otherwise accessible, can greatly speed and deepen their research. In Chapter 9 I discussed the great advantage that accrues to one’s research if a published subject bibliography can be found; all the greater is that advantage if the bibliography is accompanied by the actual texts of the items it cites, assembled all in one place. There are a great many dissertations waiting to be done using these microform collections.
Let me just mention details of four such sets before providing larger lists of comparable titles:
Many other microfom collectons exist; in what follows I have categorized them by their publishers.
Primary Source Media (a subsidiary of Gale) offers more than 430 microform sets, each containing hundreds or thousands of sources on its particular topic. A small sample of the titles of these sets will indicate their range and importance:
The full list of all the Primary Source microform collections, with descriptions and downloadable copies of their individual Guides, is online at http://microformguides.gale.com/GuideLst.html. Note the “Browse by Subject” option.
UMI (formerly University Microfilms International) is a subsidiary of ProQuest that offers hundreds of microfilm collections: some are topically arranged libraries or compilations of sources; others are collections of the papers or writings of particular individuals or corporate bodies. More than 450 alphabetical listings are given on the UMI Research Collections at www.proquest.com/products-services/; type “UMI research collections” in the search box. Among these are the following:
Chadwyck-Healey , another ProQuest subsidiary, offers 170 similar microform collections, among them:
Further listings can be found within the ProQuest.com website.
UPA , yet another subsidiary of ProQuest, offers more than a thousand microform collections; you can readily skim the whole list online—with full texts of their finding aids—if you Google the phrase “UPA Microform Collection Guides”; here is only a tiny sampling of these collections:
Further information on all these collections is available at the “Collection Guides” website mentioned above.
Although there is a trend to digitize sets that already exist in microformats, the vast majority of these sets do not have full-text online counterparts (although many of their Guides are online). The annual Guide to Microforms in Print (De Gruyter Saur) lists all microforms, but the large prepackaged collections, such as those just sampled, get buried within its listings for hundreds of thousands of individual titles of books, journals, government documents, and newspapers that are also available in microform. The two best ways into these collections, in terms of identifying which ones exist, are to look at the various vendors’ websites given above and to consult these printed volumes:
Both volumes identify many collections that are now out of print, often because their microfilm publishers have gone out of business—in many cases without being bought out by any larger company intent on digitizing the collections. These older “out-of-print” microfilm collections are just sitting in large research libraries, waiting to be rediscovered by enterprising grad students who can think outside the box of the digital world.
The best way to find out which ones are available to you locally is to talk to the librarians or curators at your research institution. You can also search the names of collections within the WorldCat database, but you have to be careful: some libraries will own the printed guides to collections without owning the microforms themselves. For the libraries that actually own the latter, however, the WorldCat record shows a little icon representing a microfiche card.
One additional microform set that is not generally regarded as a separate collection is the aggregate of American and Canadian doctoral dissertations (and some master’s theses) available from ProQuest/UMI. More than 2 million of these works are available for sale from the vendor. The Library of Congress is the only institution that owns nearly all of the American (not Canadian) dissertations on microfilm or microfiche; all of them can be read there for free. Some researchers have justified trips to the Library just to use this collection, as the cost of ordering many individual titles from ProQuest/UMI may be greater than that of a plane ticket to Washington. (It is a very common misconception to believe that most dissertations are subsequently published as books; copies of the vast majority are available only from ProQuest UMI.) The company has, however, digitized the texts of most of the works since 1997, and offers downloadable (but not e-mail-able) PDFs to any libraries that subscribe at the full-text level.
Another equally amazing set not usually regarded as one aggregation is the collection of National Technical Information Service (NTIS) reports on microfiche. These are millions of research studies funded by the U.S. government. Again, the Library of Congress is the only facility that owns all of them, for free reading onsite; however, about 700,000 are now available online through the subscription database National Technical Reports Library (see next section).
The term “document” is synonymous with “publication”; it can refer to just about any format, including books, magazines, newsletters, reports, pamphlets, broadsides, hearings, maps, prints, photographs, posters, kits, and websites. Also included are many finding aids and reference sources such as catalogs, indexes, directories, dictionaries, and bibliographies.
The United States federal government—with whose publications this section is primarily concerned—also produces films, sound recordings, and microforms. Today many federal agencies produce postings on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and send out e-mail alerts, RSS feeds, and e-newsletters.
The range, variety, and depth of coverage of these materials are amazing. They are particularly thorough in scientific and technological areas, and in all of the social sciences, especially regarding issues of public policy. Agriculture, business, commerce, communications, culture, economics, education, employment, energy, environment, foreign affairs, health, history, homeland security, housing, law, military affairs, politics, social services, and transportation are all very well covered. (You can browse publications in a wide variety of subject areas at http://bookstore.gpo.gov/subjects/index.jsp.) In using government documents, you can ask almost the same questions—and expect to find answers—as you can in using the more well-known research resources.
The main publisher of U.S. government documents is the Government Printing Office (GPO). In recent years, however, this agency has made a concerted effort to produce fewer materials in paper format and to publish most of its output directly on the Web. In addition, in those cases in which the GPO formerly published printed materials for other federal agencies, it now encourages those agencies to publish their own offerings directly on their own websites.
In looking for current information from the U.S. government, then, the Web is the first place to check, at the following sites.
USA.gov is the government’s official Web portal. It provides direct access to many thousands of government titles, full text, and links to further information on individual agencies’ own websites:
This is always the first place to look. Search.USA.gov provides a search box that indexes millions of government web pages.
FDsys (Federal Digital System) is a major source for current online government publications: www.gpo.gov/fdsys.
An important point is that the government’s electronic archives, in most cases, do not nearly cover the range of its older paper publications that have never been digitized. These latter hard copies are nonetheless freely available at nearly 1,250 Selective and Regional government depository libraries located around the country. (These are all listed at USA.gov.) The 49 Regional depository libraries essentially contain full retrospective sets of all federal publications from the GPO. The Selective depositories, as their name indicates, can pick and choose which publications they wish to receive; they can also choose, individually, how long they will retain what they receive. (Continued funding for depository libraries is very much at issue, but one or another government website will provide current information.)
FedStats (www.fedstats.gov) provides direct links to statistical data from more than 100 agencies.
U.S. Census Bureau (www.census.gov) is particularly valuable for its “Subjects A–Z” listing of live links to statistical publications: www.census.gov/main/www/a2z.
NTIS National Technical Information Service (www.ntis.gov/search/index.aspx) searches 2 million bibliographic records for nonclassified federally funded research studies, copies of which can be ordered through the website. (These are generally non-GPO publications.)
Since it is almost impossible to speak systematically of the subjects of government documents, let me offer only a brief menu of titles, simply to suggest how surprising their range and variety is. A recent trip to the GPO bookstore in Washington found these titles on display, many of which are hardcover books of hundreds of pages:
A good site for browsing the range of current publications, arranged in more than 140 subject categories, is http://bookstore.gpo.gov/subjects/index.jsp. Beneath the tip of this iceberg of current publications, however, lies a vast array of older titles such as the following:
Many of these publications are themselves but the tip of a subject iceberg—whenever you find one document on a subject that interests you, you can usually assume that there are many others waiting to be discovered. The Government Printing Office and other federal agencies publish thousands of titles each year. Most, however, do not stay in print indefinitely—as with commercial publications, many are for sale only for a few years, after which they can be found only in libraries’ collections of government documents.
If you have not used government documents before, you almost have to make a leap of faith to start looking for them, but the probability is that you will be pleasantly surprised. (Students who use documents will almost invariably find that none of their classmates has found the same sources.)
A number of reasons account for the general neglect of government publications by academic and other researchers; let me extend a few points made at the beginning of this chapter:
For those who wish to undertake systematic research in U.S. government documents, there are a variety of databases and printed indexes that have different strengths and weaknesses and that must therefore be used in combination.
Catalog of U.S. Government Publications is searchable at http://catalog.gpo.gov; it includes entries for publications going back to 1976, with hotlinks to full texts (when available). The pre-1976 records will be entered eventually. The same site includes a link to MetaLib , which searches additional publications from many other agencies’ own websites. The corresponding printed index is the Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications, sets of which are still required for searches of the pre-1976 documents. In either format, this is the “umbrella” index to government publications, excluding NTIS reports (for which, see below). For earlier decades of coverage you will want to use the Cumulative Subject Index to the Monthly Catalog of United States Government Publications 1900–1971 (15 vols., Carrollton Press, 1973–1975) and the Cumulative Subject Index to United States Government Publications 1895–1899 (2 vols., Carrollton Press, 1977). There is also a Cumulative Title Index to United States Public Documents 1789–1976 (16 vols., U.S. Historical Documents Institute, 1971–1979) and a United States Government Publications Monthly Catalog: Cumulative Personal Author Index 1941–1975 (5 vols., Pierian Press, 1971–1979). A cumulative approach through corporate author or agency name is provided by volumes 606–624 of the National Union Catalog: Pre-1956 Imprints, which segment has also been republished as a separate set. The Public Documents Masterfile from Paratext (below) is particularly good in searching material from these early decades. The WorldCat database is also useful, but it does not supersede the printed sources in either coverage or accuracy—the database has some very sloppy, inconsistent, and duplicative records and cannot be relied on for complete coverage of documents. Several other indexes and catalogs for historical approaches are ably discussed in Joe Morehead’s Introduction to United States Government Information Sources (Libraries Unlimited, 1999), which, admittedly, is becoming dated but which remains the bible for historical searches in documents. A good companion volume is Jean L. Sears and Marilyn K. Moody’s Using Government Information Sources: Electronic and Print, 3rd ed. (Oryx Press, 2001).
Public Documents Masterfile is a subscription database from Paratext; it indexes the vast majority of U.S. government documents from 1774 to date. It incorporates many of the print sources mentioned above, along with a variety of others:
Though it is not itself a full-text database, Public Documents Masterfile includes links to full texts in Open URLs and in Google Books, as well as links to the Readex subscription database for the full text of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set (1817–1994).
ProQuest Congressional : ProQuest now owns Congressional Information Service (CIS), and this database includes all of the CIS indexing of U.S. congressional publications:
Statutes at Large (public laws), the United States Code, and the Code of Federal Regulations are also searchable, as are campaign finance reports, financial disclosures, and personal profiles of Members of Congress. This database, while adding much additional material, is also a cumulation of a variety of print indexes which are likely to be available in many libraries that may not have the online versions:
CIS Index. This is the best index to U.S. congressional publications—House and Senate hearings, committee prints, reports, and documents—as well as legislative histories for all Public Laws from 1969 forward.
CIS US Congressional Committee Hearings Index , providing coverage for the years 1833–1969.
CIS Index to Unpublished US House of Representatives Committee Hearings , providing coverage for the years 1833–1968.
CIS Index to Unpublished US Senate Committee Hearings , providing coverage for the years 1823–1976.
CIS US Congressional Committee Prints Index , providing coverage from the early 1800s to 1969.
CIS US Serial Set Index , providing coverage for tens of thousands of miscellaneous congressional reports and documents from 1789 to 1969.
CIS Index to US Senate Executive Documents and Reports , providing coverage from 1817 to 1969.
The database version is configured in a way that does not provide a one-to-one correspondence to all of these print indexes, but all of their contents are indeed accessible through one or another of the subscription modules. All of these print indexes are also keyed to microfiche sets of the actual documents, and the full texts of these same documents are also now available in the ProQuest Congressional database if libraries choose to subscribe to the full-text modules. (For example, the texts of congressional hearings are in a separate database, ProQuest Congressional Hearings Digital Collection [1824–present], and full texts of Congressional Research Service reports are also separate, in ProQuest Congressional Research Digital Collection [1830–present]). Remember that not all library subscriptions are identical. But also remember that the printed indexes and microfiche sets of documents are probably still available in libraries that don’t have full online access.
ProQuest provides a separate but related database in ProQuest Legislative Insight . This is a legislative history source for U.S. public laws at the federal level; its coverage goes far beyond the “Legislative histories” component of ProQuest Congressional. It provides full texts of the laws themselves as well as all related documents: related bills, Congressional Record sections, hearings, reports, documents, prints, CRS reports, and presidential signing statements (even though courts ignore the latter). About 18,000 histories covering laws as far back as 1929 are included at present; additions will be made both prospectively and retrospectively.
Printed indexes to executive branch publications, with corresponding sets of microfiche documents, are also available:
These two indexes (with microfiche) are not yet digitized.
It will be useful to step back a moment and focus specifically on U.S. congressional committee hearings, because they are very rich sources of information for those researchers who have the initiative to seek them out. The U.S. Congress has an astonishing range of oversight interests and responsibilities that generate detailed inquiries; these investigations monitor all areas of U.S. society and world relations. Most people are aware, simply from newspaper and Web coverage, of Congress’s investigations of such specific matters as the Madoff financial scandal, the 2009 Fort Hood shootings, or the BP oil spill and, more generally, hearings held on the progress of various wars, on the federal deficit, Social Security, dependency on foreign oil suppliers, climate change, drug abuse in sports, nuclear plant safety, foreign policy directions, veterans’ affairs, and so on; however, the many hearings it conducts on smaller issues are underpublicized and underutilized.
The value of hearings is that they assemble experts and interested parties on all sides of an issue to testify on the current state of the problem and to recommend specific courses of action. (Of course, they can also be manipulated for political purposes. One is reminded of the famous line spoken by Claude Rains in Casablanca: “I’m shocked, shocked. . . . ”) Moreover, Congress has the power of subpoena to compel witnesses to appear—a very powerful investigative tool not available to newspaper and media reporters. Hearings frequently include extensive documentary material in appendices in support of witness’s testimony—documents that themselves may have been subpoenaed.
The overviews provided by hearings are often not available anywhere else. Some examples of recent hearings include:
Hearings from earlier years include:
As should be obvious from even these very brief lists, congressional committee hearings provide rich materials for both advanced scholarship and student term papers. Researchers who browse through the listings in either ProQuest Congressional or the printed CIS indexes will have an advantage in covering topics that their classmates will overlook entirely. Thousands of topics are covered by hearings every year.
ProQuest Statistical Insight. The U.S. federal government is also one of the best sources for statistics on any subject imaginable; even better, ProQuest has combined a thorough index to federal statistics with two other indexes that cover statistics from nonfederal U.S. sources and international organizations. The combined database is ProQuest Statistical Insight; it is a merger (and continuation) of three different indexes from CIS:
These three titles can still be found in print format in many libraries, and they are keyed to microfiche sets of the actual documents they index (not all of which are online). Both the combined database version and the individual print indexes enable you to search by a variety of very useful category indexes (e.g., By Age, By City, By Country, By Disease, By Educational Attainment, By Income, By Individual Company or Institution, By Industry, By Marital Status, By Occupation, By Race and Ethnic Group, By Sex, By State, By ZIP Code), which greatly facilitates finding comparative figures. Through these sources you can find answers to such questions as “What value do consumers place on local newspaper websites?”; “How many Americans use Twitter or other social media sites for political information?”; “What is the level of tomato production in Chile, Italy, or Mexico?”; “How many hours per day do Americans devote to various activities (By Age, By Sex, etc.)?”; “What are the operating performance rankings of the top power plants in the U.S.?”; or “What are the causes of homelessness in various geographical areas?”
ProQuest Government Periodicals Index provides ongoing coverage of more than 160 federal periodicals back to 1988; most of these are not indexed elsewhere. These various Bulletins, Digests, Journals, Reviews, and Quarterlies provide a good window into the concerns of scores of agencies.
Data-Planet Statistical Datasets is a subscription database that enables users to merge various statistical datasets and interactively create tables, charts, or maps to order. It covers governmental, public domain, and licensed commercial sources. Graphical displays showing such things as these can be created “on the fly” (some of these examples come from the company’s promotional material):
No other database allows so many different data sets (5,000 and growing) to be crossed, mapped, charted, or graphed against each other.
Statistical Abstract of the United States , an annual volume, is a smorgasbord of statistical information on thousands of subjects—population, births and deaths, marriages, health, education, law, geography, elections, finances and employment, veterans affairs, labor and employment, income, prices, science, agriculture and forestry, environment, energy, construction, trade, transportation, banking, arts and recreation, foreign commerce and aid, and international statistics, all of which topics are but the tips of icebergs of data. From 1878 through 2012 it was published by the U.S. Census Bureau; from 2013 forward, by ProQuest (both print and online via subscription).
NTIS Database (National Technical Information Service) : The National Technical Information Service (NTIS) is a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce; its function is to systematically round up and make available to the public all nonclassified federally funded research reports and studies. Most of the studies are not free however; they must be purchased because NTIS works on a cost-recovery basis. A free index to NTIS products is available at www.ntis.gov/search/index.aspx; ProQuest offers the NTIS Database, a subscription service for libraries with different indexing capabilities. These indexes cover 2 million research studies in 350 subject areas back to 1946. About 30,000 new reports are added every year.
NTIS studies cover virtually all subject areas in science, technology, and social sciences; there is even surprising coverage in the humanities as well. You can expect to find a government-funded research report on just about anything. There are studies of air pollution, anchor chains, astronomy, chemistry, drug abuse, educational philosophy, environment, energy, food contamination, foreign military forces, Greenland’s ice cap, health care, junction transistors, leadership, macaque monkeys, military sciences, money laundering, personnel management, poisonous animals and insects, quark models, rape in the military services, seafloor spreading, sex behavior, terrorism, and garbage collection in Machala, Ecuador. There is even a study of one of Lord Byron’s poems—it was done as a master’s thesis at one of the military service academies. All master’s theses from these academies are included since federal money paid for them. (Studies of Shakespeare and Dickens can also be found here.)
The vast majority of these millions of NTIS reports are not depository items in documents collections. Copies of all documents can be ordered from NTIS. (The Library of Congress is the only library that owns a full set of virtually all NTIS reports, which onsite researchers can read for free.) The National Technical Reports Library is a separate subscription database from the NTIS itself; as described earlier, it indexes the same reports but also contains the full texts of more than 700,000 of them.
Digital National Security Archive (ProQuest) is a collection of more than 100,000 declassified documents relating to U.S. foreign and military policy from World War II to the present. The documents are grouped in 40 collections—more are planned—assembled by teams of scholars and experts. The Archive’s website lists its current topics of interest:
The individual collections usually contain thousands of pages of primary source material obtained from the federal government through Freedom of Information requests. The National Security Archive itself is a nongovernmental organization with offices in Washington, DC; it has much more material available to onsite researchers than is available digitally. Further information is available at its website, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/index.html.
Declassified Documents Reference System (Gale) is a subscription database with full texts of more than 75,000 previously classified government documents obtained from presidential libraries. Coverage is primarily from post–World War II through the 1970s—i.e., the Cold War and Vietnam War eras—but there is also some earlier and later material. Foreign and domestic events (e.g., the civil rights and anti-war movements) are covered. The database’s self-description lists the following types of material covered:
Maps, charts, and aerial photographs: the federal government produces thousands of such materials; the best overview is the website www.usa.gov/Topics/Maps.shtml. (See also Chapter 14.)
Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1974–1996 (ProQuest) and Dialog Professional (ProQuest), which includes the former World News Connection (1994– ), are two full-text subscription databases providing English language translations of foreign newspapers, periodicals, and broadcast media.
How to Get It: A Guide to Defense-Related Information Sources is a 500-page directory last published in print in 1998; it is freely available online at www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a346513.pdf. It is occasionally extremely useful if you need to identify and locate old federal documents. It is especially good at explaining report numbers—if all you have is a citation with such a number, this guide will tell you what the number means, which agency produced it, and whom to contact for a copy of the report. The contacts listed in a 1998 volume are, of course, frequently outdated, but if you have the name of the older agency you can often find its current incarnation via the Web.
Index to Current Urban Documents (ILM Corporation) is, according to its website www.urbdocs.com, a subscription database that “contains more than 31,000 reports generated by local government agencies, civic organizations, academic and research organizations, public libraries, and metropolitan and regional planning agencies from more than 500 major cities in the United States and Canada.” The core collection is made up of fiscal (budget and financial reports) and architecture and planning documents at the city, county, and regional levels. The Index also provides information for “all urban-related issues, from hazardous waste disposal to arts in the community.” The database currently includes indexing and full texts from 2000 forward; retrospective coverage back to 1972 is provide by the printed Index to Current Urban Documents; the corresponding documents are in a microfiche set.
The Complete Guide to Citing Government Information Resources , 3rd ed. (Congressional Information Service, 2002), is a useful supplement to the standard style manuals, many of which do not adequately deal with government documents.
All in all, documents are much like other special collections in that, usually, you just have to make a leap of faith into the various sources that index them. If you lack prior experience in this area, it probably won’t occur to you to think of such sources at all, and yet they cover as many subjects, in as much depth, as the more widely known databases and indexes. Most researchers who venture into this territory are surprisingly well rewarded for their efforts.
Unpublished primary sources fall into two classes: archives or manuscript collections that have been assembled in special historical repositories, and sources that are still with the people or agencies that originally created or received the records. Many primary sources, including manuscripts, have now been published and can be identified through the usual library search mechanisms for published material, whether in printed, microform, or online formats. Many “documentary editions” of important American individuals and organizations published by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and others are listed at:
The focus of this section, however, will be primarily on identifying unpublished sources.
Research in archives or historical manuscript collections is, in several important ways, unlike research in books or journals in libraries (although databases containing previously unpublished manuscripts tend to blur the lines). Sources within conventional libraries—e.g., books—are comparatively well cataloged and indexed, and there is subject access to each individual item. This is usually not the case with unpublished manuscript or archival sources—there may be broad subject access (via a “finding aid” to a collection) to boxes or folders of items, but not specific subject access to the individual papers or documents within the containers. One reason for this is that many unpublished sources are meaningful only within the context of the other items in the group in which they are stored. Another reason is that the preparation of finding aids to manuscript collections is very labor intensive—the basic sorting of an individual’s papers may take months in itself—and so archivists cannot spend the time needed to describe and catalog each of the individual letters, notes, or other papers within a collection.
The strategy for working with such materials involves, broadly speaking, three levels of searching:
At the first level of searching, several specific free websites, subscription databases, and printed guides will help you to identify which collections exist, and where they are located.
National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) (pronounced “nuckmuck” by librarians) began in 1959 as an ongoing set of printed volumes, published by the Library of Congress, identifying whose unpublished papers are located in which repositories in the United States. The printed set of 29 volumes ceased publication in 1993; it lists approximately 72,300 collections in more than 1,400 repositories. Entries after 1993 were folded into the WorldCat database—but WorldCat extended its coverage of NUCMC entries retrospectively back to 1986. Thus, the NUCMC entries from 1959 through 1985 are not digitized in WorldCat (although they are in Archive Finder). Manuscript records in WorldCat are not confined to those reported by repositories in the United States; coverage now extends throughout the world, although North American collections predominate. The NUCMC database (a subset of WorldCat) can be searched freely at www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc/oclcsearch.html; this online version includes approximately 116,000 collections in 1,800 repositories.
Chadwyck-Healey has published two cumulative printed indexes to most of the older, printed NUCMC volumes: Index to Personal Names in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, 1959–1984 (2 vols., 1988) and Index to Subjects and Corporate Names in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, 1959–1984 (3 vols., 1994).
Archive Finder is a subscription database from ProQuest; it is an index to well over 200,000 collections of manuscripts and primary source materials in more than 5,600 repositories in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. The database includes all the entries in the printed NUCMC back to 1959. (It does not have all of the additional OCLC coverage, however.) In addition, it provides name and subject indexing of 72,000 collections whose finding aids are published in a separate, ongoing microfiche set, the National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States; and also indexing of the 47,000 collections whose finding aids appear in another ongoing microfiche set, the National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United Kingdom and Ireland (see below for descriptions). Links to the full texts of more than 6,000 finding aids are included. Additional reports of collections are included insofar as repositories choose to send them in.
ArchiveGrid is a subscription database available from OCLC; its contents are not included in WorldCat. It is an index to nearly a million collections of personal papers, historical collections, and family histories held in thousands of repositories around the world. It includes the texts of about 50,000 finding aids from about 200 of the contributing institutions. Its coverage overlaps with Archive Finder, but ArchiveGrid covers additional collections and also provides those full texts of finding aids.
Repositories of Primary Sources is a free website maintained by the University of Idaho. (Its URL has changed over the years, but it can be found easily via Google or Bing by typing its name in quotation marks.) It is a listing of 5,000 websites that describe holdings of archives, manuscripts, historical photographs, and primary sources from all over the world. It is arranged (and searchable) only by geographical location, not by subjects or individuals’ names—i.e., you cannot search all 5,000 collections simultaneously, looking for a particular needle in the haystack.
Archives Library Information Center is a free website maintained by the National Archives at www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/state-archives.html. It provides directory information with links and other contact information for all state-level archives in the United States.
SearchSystems Free Public Records (http://publicrecords.searchsystems.net/) is a listing of 55,000 websites for public records from U.S., Canadian, and some other countries’ agencies. (You have to be careful here—there are many advertisement links to fee-based sites. But the original website at least provides direct contact information for the various records offices.)
Although Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Wikipedia are not the emphasis of this book, they are all sometimes very useful for finding locations for manuscript collections of either individuals or organizations (e.g., search for “Firstname Lastname” and “archives” or “papers” or “collection”).
In addition to websites and subscription databases, a number of printed sources are often quite useful in manuscript or archival sleuthing; some have online subscription versions. Several relevant printed directories have been mentioned already in the section in Chapter 11 on “Determining Which Libraries Have Special Collections on Your Subject.” (Clear lines cannot be drawn regarding libraries’ special collections: they may be composed primarily of books or manuscripts—or other formats [maps, photographs, etc.]—or they may include multiple forms, both published and unpublished).
If you are trying to locate someone’s unpublished papers and you cannot find them in NUCMC or WorldCat or Archive Finder, you still have several other sources to check—sources that usually work. American National Biography, both in print and in a subscription database (Oxford University Press; www.anb.org), is the standard biographical encyclopedia for prominent deceased Americans; its individual articles always contain a bibliography of sources on the person, and these bibliographies will identify where the person’s papers are located (if they exist). (A major collection of the papers of Member of Congress Edith Green [1910–1987], for example, is recorded in American National Biography but is not listed in either NUCMC or Archive Finder.) A similar situation exists with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, www.oxforddnb.com), also available in print or online; it covers British and Canadian individuals and others connected to the British Empire.
Another excellent source for locating the papers of individuals (and some corporate bodies) is the ongoing Dictionary of Literary Biography (Gale). It currently has more than 370 volumes covering authors worldwide, from all time periods, as well as associated subjects (collectors, publishing houses, etc.). Each article within the set identifies where the papers of the subject are located. A subscription version is also available, as either Dictionary of Literary Biography or Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online—the latter also includes the texts of the extra printed sets Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook (ca. 23 vols.) and Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series (ca. 50 vols.). This Documentary set reprints primary source documents. (Volume 263 of the “regular” DLB series is William Shakespeare, A Life Record: A Documentary Volume; this is the best compilation, at more than 300 pages, ever assembled of primary sources on The Bard.)
Two older British publications are still useful. The Index of English Literary Manuscripts (Mansell/Bowker) is a listing of authors and manuscript locations; Volume 1 covers 1450 to 1625; Volume 2, 1625 to 1700; Volume 3, 1700 to 1800; Volume 4, 1800 to 1900. The second is Location Register of Twentieth-Century English Literary Manuscripts and Letters: A Union List of Papers of Modern English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh Authors in the British Isles, 2 vols. (G. K. Hall, 1988).
For access to unpublished U.S. federal agency records, which often include individuals’ papers, the best starting point is the website of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) at www.archives.gov. A set of printed volumes, the Guide to the Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States, 3 vols. (National Archives and Records Administration, 1995), is available in many libraries; it is also online, with updates at www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/. The Guide describes the various Record Groups held by the National Archives; these groups of government “filing cabinet” records are arranged not by the subject of the individual documents but rather according to the agency or bureau that produced them. If you wish to find out which agencies’ records have material on your subject, the NARA website will certainly be of use, but you also have to use some imagination in thinking of how the federal government would have become involved with your area of interest, for (with some exceptions) there aren’t any subject or name indexes to the records. For this reason alone your best access will come from working with the archivists, who will have a better sense of what types of things, or whose papers, can be found in the various agencies’ documents. This same rule applies at other repositories: use the expertise of the staff as much as you can and be sure that they understand clearly—and not just in vague, general terms—what you are ultimately trying to research. Although many guides to archival and manuscript collections are now appearing on the Web, and in subscription databases, direct contact with the archivists onsite is still a very important element in this kind of research.
The British equivalent of NARA is the National Archives, holding official governmental records for England, Wales, and the United Kingdom; this agency combines the former Public Records Office and the Historical Manuscripts Commission. Its website is www.nationalarchives.gov.uk. The National Archives of Ireland’s site is www.nationalarchives.ie/; the site for Scotland is www.nas.gov.uk.
The second level of searching is done through archival inventories or manuscript registers; usually these are locally produced finding aids. Each will describe a particular collection with an introductory note followed by a listing of the collection’s contents down to the box or folder level. Most of these inventories and registers are themselves unpublished, although there is now an effort among major archives to put their finding aids online. The largest online source with full texts of finding aids is ArchiveGrid, but again, Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Wikipedia are also useful. An excellent printed list of finding aids can be found in Donald L. DeWitt’s 479-page Guide to Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood Press, 1994); it lists more than 2,000 inventories, checklists, and registers (at this second level), as well as repository guides at the first level. (Many of these have been digitized since the appearance of this book.) DeWitt has also compiled the 459-page Articles Describing Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood Press, 1997). Each volume has an excellent subject index, and together they may bring to your attention many collections and articles describing them in depth that you would not find through web searches.
Chadwyck-Healey, a subsidiary of ProQuest, publishes ongoing microfiche collections of the finding aids of a variety of manuscript collections in the United Statesand the the United Kingdom. All of these finding aids are indexed in the Archive Finder database, but (as of this writing) the full texts of the guides themselves are available only in the microfiche collections. The U.S. set is the National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States, which has three components: Part 1, Federal Records (including the National Archives, Presidential Libraries, and Smithsonian Institution Archives); Part 2, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; and Part 3, State Archives, State Libraries, State Historical Societies, Academic Libraries and Other Repositories. (Note that the holdings of the National Archives, and of the many state archives, are not covered by NUCMC.) The British microfiche set is the National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United Kingdom and Ireland, containing more than 14,000 unpublished finding aids from more than 120 libraries and records offices. These sets do not publish the actual manuscripts located in these repositories (either U.S. or U.K.); rather they give you the finding aids and manuscript registers of the collections. Some of the same finding aids that are published in these Chadwyck-Healey microfiche sets are now directly searchable on the websites of the various repositories themselves.
As helpful as the inventories and registers may be, only at the third level of research—reading through the documents themselves—can you really know what is in a collection. Although much manuscript material is being published online through repositories’ websites, the vast majority of manuscript material can be read only onsite when you actually visit the particular collection that interests you. The reason for this is that copyright restrictions apply to unpublished manuscripts as well as to books (with the exception of most records produced by government agencies); legal restrictions prohibit the wholesale republication of most manuscripts. So you still have to go, in many cases, to physical repositories. And you cannot do archival or manuscript research quickly; you must be prepared for much browsing and many dead ends before you come to any nuggets. Plan your time accordingly.
If you do plan a site visit, it is especially important to read as many secondary or published sources as you can on your subject before you look into the unpublished sources. The reason is that the latter, unlike book collections, are—again!—not cataloged or arranged by subject. This means that you will have to have in advance a rather clear idea of what you are looking for in order to recognize it when you’re browsing. It is especially useful to know the names of any people connected with your area of interest; names are easy to look for in records. If you are planning a research trip, it is a good idea to e-mail or write the archives in advance, stating what you are interested in and asking for suggestions on what to read before you come in personally. Advance contact with the local archivists is highly desirable for other reasons as well: some collections may be stored offsite and entail delayed retrieval, and some may have restrictions on access requiring written permissions. There may also be local restrictions on photocopying, scanning, or digital photography; it is best to find these things out before a visit.
Once you are at the repository and are looking through the boxes or folders of manuscripts and documents, it is essential that you use only one file folder of material at a time within a box, maintain the order of the folders within a given box, and carefully preserve the original order of manuscripts as you find them within each folder. Always replace in correct order any individual item you remove to photocopy or photograph, and never mix items from various boxes or folders. The individual papers are not individually cataloged or recorded, so if you misplace an item it may be permanently lost for other researchers. Remember, too, to make a careful record in your notes of the box and folder title or number in which the documents are located within a collection. A good pattern is: Container number, Collection title, Repository division, Repository name. (This is very important—my colleagues in Manuscripts tell me that people frequently forget where they saw something and then often have to make a special return trip to check a citation, especially when they have used a lot of collections in many repositories.)
As with the other two levels, some of this third-level material—the actual records, not just finding aids—is now appearing on the Internet. An example is the Online Archive of California, a site that leads to tens of thousands of digital images of primary sources on the history of that state, at www.oac.cdlib.org.
Research in public records—those that are still with the agency that produced or collected them and not yet sent to an archival repository—is another very valuable avenue of inquiry for studying individuals, businesses, and government itself. A good guide to finding such records is The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook: A Guide to Documents, Databases, and Techniques by Brian Houston and Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., 5th ed. (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009).
Other useful sources for locating manuscript or archival records are discussed in Chapter 14 in the sections on Biography, Business Sources, Genealogy and Local History, and Primary Sources.
It should be obvious at this point that few researchers would get very far into special collections (subscription databases, free websites, or microforms), government documents, or archival/manuscript sources if left only to the most widely used Web search engines or the most popular subscription databases—you must actively seek out these collections. This will often mean making a leap of faith that the effort will be worthwhile, but you should give it a try anyway—the results could be spectacular.