3 ms·

I was channel surfing on TV yesterday and flicked onto one of the Harry Potter films, to hear Hermione saying she researched something in the library and couldn

by corin_ 12y ago

I was channel surfing on TV yesterday and flicked onto one of the Harry Potter films, to hear Hermione saying she researched something in the library and couldn't find a single reference - my immediate thought before moving on a channel was that (assuming I don't have her magical skills), I would have no idea how to research something in a library without either the internet, or asking other people who might know where I could find the answers. (I say no idea - obviously on a basic level it wouldn't be hard to start by finding all books on the rough topic, reading them, etc.... but to do it with any sort of efficiency as opposed to so slowly that I'd end up beating myself to death with a hardcover.)

digi_owl 12y ago
Funny, that's pretty much how i do it online as well. Read article after article until i have a reasonable grasp of the topic i was looking into.
slantyyz 12y ago
That's a fascinating perspective. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we were taught how to use a card catalog and later, microfiche for finding stuff in the library. While I was still in university up until the earliest 90s, I was still using microfiche for research.
- corin_ 12y ago
  I was born in 1990 - I spent my childhood in libraries for fiction, and I guess occasionally for extremely basic "research" for school projects, but at an age when "research" was enough to look up a book on the topic I needed to know about, that probably was at least partially a picture book, then borrow that and go home with my mum... Have fond memories of both card catalogs and microfiche, but only really for finding novels I wanted.
femto 12y ago
> .... but to do it with any sort of efficiency as opposed to so slowly that I'd end up beating myself to death with a hardcover. I'd say you have the process down pat. It really was a matter of spending half a day locating a candidate set of books in the subject catalogue, writing down their details, then walking all over campus to locate the books in the various branch libraries and reading the relevant section of each to see if it was what you wanted. The only reason people didn't beat themselves to death with a hardcover was because they didn't know any better, because there was no better. (Mind you, from a Body Mass Index perceptive, the old way was better!)
dredmorbius 12y ago
Methods depend on the topic, but frequently: ⚫ A subject search in the card catalog. Find both books on the subject and related subjects. Cross-reference the books to find other possible subjects to search. Later, online catalogs (computers accessible typically only at the library) could make this far faster. ⚫ For news items, title searches in news indices. Later, Lexis-Nexis. If it was a major story and you knew the dates, looking through issues of major news publications (e.g., TIME, Newsweek, etc.) could often turn up hits. ⚫ Bibliographies. Let someone else do your research for you. Cross-comparing bibliographies often turned up the key / seminal works in an area, where you could then use ... ⚫ Citations indices. These show where a given work was referenced. So if you find a seminal work, you now find the works (generally journal articles) which reference it. ⚫ You're also probably starting to recognize key authors at this point -- in most fields there are a limited number who really know their stuff. So you can start running author searches on their other writings. ⚫ If the library has open stacks, stack surfing can be quite interesting and serendipitous. Find the area containing books of interest and pull interesting titles. This is limited to the books which are on the shelves, so it's biased away from the more popular material. Depending on just how popular the material is, it can still be quite useful. Though those are the "old school" methods (1960s - 1990s for the most part), they're still generally applicable today. I like to research a field for a while until I start turning up the same names repeatedly. At that point, you've got a general feel for the size of the area. It's possible to dive in and read in depth. I also have a personal bias for older works -- I like to dig in deep. Much more recent material doesn't change the understanding all that much, and you can often find that there's been a significant degree of bias or skew in how original works are interpreted. Reading them with your own eyes can often reveal what you wouldn't otherwise know, or can give you an unbiased (or at least your own bias) of the original work's meaning and focus. Many fields are highly skewed to a present / current bias. While it doesn't hurt to note where recent research has actually advanced the state of the art or changed understanding (and curiously: it's in the study of some of the oldest events, particularly of Earth's geological history and that of the Universe that we've seen stunning progress over the past 40 years), in human, political, and philosophical fields I find that at the very least having a familiarity with works going back 200-2000 years (and occasionally further) can be quite useful. There are some very persistent aspects to human behavior which remain unchanged. And yes, there are ancient beliefs which have proven themselves quite wrong. But that itself might serve as a caution -- the same human nature that generated those ancient errors persists today.

by corin_ 12y ago

digi_owl 12y ago

Funny, that's pretty much how i do it online as well. Read article after article until i have a reasonable grasp of the topic i was looking into.

slantyyz 12y ago

That's a fascinating perspective. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, we were taught how to use a card catalog and later, microfiche for finding stuff in the library. While I was still in university up until the earliest 90s, I was still using microfiche for research.

corin_ 12y ago
I was born in 1990 - I spent my childhood in libraries for fiction, and I guess occasionally for extremely basic "research" for school projects, but at an age when "research" was enough to look up a book on the topic I needed to know about, that probably was at least partially a picture book, then borrow that and go home with my mum... Have fond memories of both card catalogs and microfiche, but only really for finding novels I wanted.

femto 12y ago

> .... but to do it with any sort of efficiency as opposed to so slowly that I'd end up beating myself to death with a hardcover. I'd say you have the process down pat. It really was a matter of spending half a day locating a candidate set of books in the subject catalogue, writing down their details, then walking all over campus to locate the books in the various branch libraries and reading the relevant section of each to see if it was what you wanted. The only reason people didn't beat themselves to death with a hardcover was because they didn't know any better, because there was no better. (Mind you, from a Body Mass Index perceptive, the old way was better!)

dredmorbius 12y ago

Methods depend on the topic, but frequently: ⚫ A subject search in the card catalog. Find both books on the subject and related subjects. Cross-reference the books to find other possible subjects to search. Later, online catalogs (computers accessible typically only at the library) could make this far faster. ⚫ For news items, title searches in news indices. Later, Lexis-Nexis. If it was a major story and you knew the dates, looking through issues of major news publications (e.g., TIME, Newsweek, etc.) could often turn up hits. ⚫ Bibliographies. Let someone else do your research for you. Cross-comparing bibliographies often turned up the key / seminal works in an area, where you could then use ... ⚫ Citations indices. These show where a given work was referenced. So if you find a seminal work, you now find the works (generally journal articles) which reference it. ⚫ You're also probably starting to recognize key authors at this point -- in most fields there are a limited number who really know their stuff. So you can start running author searches on their other writings. ⚫ If the library has open stacks, stack surfing can be quite interesting and serendipitous. Find the area containing books of interest and pull interesting titles. This is limited to the books which are on the shelves, so it's biased away from the more popular material. Depending on just how popular the material is, it can still be quite useful. Though those are the "old school" methods (1960s - 1990s for the most part), they're still generally applicable today. I like to research a field for a while until I start turning up the same names repeatedly. At that point, you've got a general feel for the size of the area. It's possible to dive in and read in depth. I also have a personal bias for older works -- I like to dig in deep. Much more recent material doesn't change the understanding all that much, and you can often find that there's been a significant degree of bias or skew in how original works are interpreted. Reading them with your own eyes can often reveal what you wouldn't otherwise know, or can give you an unbiased (or at least your own bias) of the original work's meaning and focus. Many fields are highly skewed to a present / current bias. While it doesn't hurt to note where recent research has actually advanced the state of the art or changed understanding (and curiously: it's in the study of some of the oldest events, particularly of Earth's geological history and that of the Universe that we've seen stunning progress over the past 40 years), in human, political, and philosophical fields I find that at the very least having a familiarity with works going back 200-2000 years (and occasionally further) can be quite useful. There are some very persistent aspects to human behavior which remain unchanged. And yes, there are ancient beliefs which have proven themselves quite wrong. But that itself might serve as a caution -- the same human nature that generated those ancient errors persists today.