All the way from America...

Research is a much abused term. If you ask undergraduate students they will confidently describe a Google based “bash in a couple of terms and hit the return key” as research and subsequently suffer from the delusion that that is all research is. What I have been engaged in for the last week I think could be defined as a “fishing trip”. This is a research approach from the “old days” before the whole world was claimed as available online.

When you were opening a new major area of research you would take yourself off to a monster library (The British Library at Boston Spa was ideal – due to the immense journal collection it possessed) and using printed abstracts and indexes would slowly wade back through the last ten or twenty years of “stuff” as appropriate. At the end of the exercise you would have reasonable confidence that you had covered the field in detail. The subsequent reading of the literature gathered would allow you to patch what gaps there were. As my LCSH topic predates the standard abstracting and indexing services, this older approach was required.

So ensconced on the 5th floor of the Library of Congress Adams building I worked my way through sixty years worth of Library journal about thirty volumes of the Bulletin of the American Library Association and about ten years of the Catalogers’ and classifiers’ yearbook. The most recent volumes consulted were 1940. I would regularly branching off to pick up specialist subject heading lists or contemporary textbooks as I moved forward.

The result of this process can be evaluated in at least two ways. A simple measure of the thickness of the stack of photocopying to be brought back evidences (in a real sense) the extent of the information capture. The other measure came as a surprise to me, it just kind of sneaked up on me as the process developed. My confidence in my knowledge of the topic strengthened as the week proceeded. The previous slow and laborious accumulation of material of the last two years had not inspired my confidence (I was painfully aware of gaps in the process – even though I did not really know what the gaps were!). Having dug in and worked my way through the major sources of information my doubts as to how to proceed have cleared and the next stage in the process seems quite straightforward (at the level of ideas!).

The total luxury of having a whole week to dedicate to nothing else except the research has been massively helpful. I have waked, washed, ate, walked, worked and slept the research. This has allowed effective thinking to occur as those thousand and one well intentioned interruptions that plague my working and home life were simply turned off – along with the mobile phone.

Today is Thanksgiving – the massive American family festival, everything is closed – even the food facility in the hotel – just a continental breakfast – I have to eat out tonight – if I can find somewhere. So the day has been spent sorting my document harvest so I know what I need to copy in my Friday morning visit to the Library.

The real task begins when I get back to Liverpool as I attempt to convert this short sprint in Washington into the steady paced marathon that is required to deliver this research as an academic thesis.