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31 August 2001
Mastering the Library
Reviewed by Sheldon Greaves
Mann, Thomas. The Oxford Guide to Library Research. (New York: Oxford University Press) 1998. 316 pp. $15.05. ISBN-0-19-512313-1.
A long time ago when I was working on my Master's degree, one of my more candid professors told me–in a kind of sotto voce stage whisper–that the purpose of graduate school was for the students to become as good as their professors. It was not a sentiment he expressed in the presence of other professors.
Like Rodney Dangerfield, amateur scientists "don't get no respect" from many professional scientists. Although the number of enlightened pros continues to grow, and the amateur community includes some frighteningly competent people, there are still many professionals who would rather we stayed out of their proverbial playgrounds.
One solution to this problem is as daunting as it is straightforward. Like the grad student, sometimes the only way for an amateur to be taken seriously is to show that they know more than the pros do. This means doing your homework.
In my previous book review, (Martin Maner, The Research Process) I described a book that helps the reader through the process of writing a quality research paper. I criticized the section on library research as inadequate in the space allowed and promised a remedy. Well, here it is.
The Internet notwithstanding, the ultimate source of information remains the major print library. As marvelous as the internet is for doing research, it sings a siren's song that promises completeness, accuracy, and totality of coverage. The fact is that the most optimistic estimates of information flowing into the Web are far below what comes off the presses of hard-copy publishers. Currently more than 10,000 new commercial book titles are received by the Library of Congress every month, far more than even the most rabid internet pundits can reasonably claim for the growth of the Web. Besides, as long as there are copyright laws, most current books and periodicals will never be available (legally) on the Web. This means that if you really want to do your homework, if you must know more about your subject than anyone else, you must use print libraries.
Thomas Mann is remarkably qualified to take us through the process of assembling raw facts. His various careers include journalist, private investigator, and his current post as a reference librarian at the Library of Congress. Both his approach to research and his writing style are refreshing and eclectic. Best of all, his techniques work. For years I considered an earlier edition of this book (published as A Guide to Library Research Methods) to be one of my "secret weapons", referring to it frequently for many projects, including pieces written for The Amateur Scientist's Bulletin. One of the first things this books does is to explode the assumption that one knows how to use a library. Most people know how to look things up on a computer or in the card catalogue (in those few libraries that still have one). They may know how to locate magazine articles in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, and perhaps one or two other tricks. Mann's book is to most people's knowledge of libraries what Gray's Anatomy is to a First Aid merit badge booklet. More than just a list of useful tips, Mann explains why libraries are structured the way they are, and how clever researchers use this to their advantage.
The first chapter covers encyclopedias and how they serve as a useful first step in any research project. Mann explains how encyclopedias are organized, and gives some good advice for locating those specialized encyclopedias that contain the information you need, but are not immediately obvious as a source for that information.
Subject Headings and Library Catalogs make up the topic of the next chapter. The classification of books into subject areas forms one of the most difficult subdisciplines of library science; many items do not fit neatly into just one catagory. Mann helps the reader understand how subjects are assigned and organized, introducing us to resources like the Library of Congress Subject Catalog to help make searching easier. He also introduces the reader to issues such as filing conventions, subject vs. uniform headings, scope-match specificity, as well as techniques to identify the proper category term for vague or difficult subject areas.
Chapter Three is dedicated to the art of systematic browsing and the role of serendipity. This is more exacting than it sounds. Mann explains why most libraries go to the considerable expense and trouble of arranging books by subject on the shelves, which is precisely because it makes shelf-browsing a viable and valuable technique for finding sources that might otherwise have eluded you. These same principles can be profitably applied to other forms of browsing. This was one of the most eye-opening parts of the book for me, as it helped me learn how to exploit the structure of libraries for finding that little extra bit of information.
Subject Headings and Journal Articles are discussed in Chapter Four. In today's world, many of the most recent sources of information in a particular field are journals and periodicals. But like that big stack of National Geographic magazines in your garage, these bodies of information are useless without some kind of index or catalogue. These catalogues exist, many of them in the form of databases. But most casual researchers do not know that these catalogues exist, let alone how to access them. Some databases are notoriously expensive to use, but Mann describes how the researcher of modest means can still take advantage of these rich storehouses of data.
Chapters Five and Six concern Keyword Searches and Citation Searches, respectively. Keyword searches deal with other methods for searching journals and other periodical literature. Citation searches are a more recent innovation; a citation catalogue lets you look up an article on a subject you are interested in, and then shows you what other authors cited that article in their articles. This can help uncover previously unrealized sources of information, and it can give you a sense for how the author of an article is regarded by others in the field.
Related-Record Searches are covered in Chapter Seven. This is an exciting new application of computer search technology that can get around some of the limitations of keyword searches. Stated briefly, related-record searches allow rapid searching of a range of years of keyword and citation indexes, which can vastly simplify and accelerate your research activities. As with citation indexes, all you need is one good article to get started.
Review Articles (Chapter Eight) are overviews written by experts in a field that describe the state of research in that field. They are also a much-neglected treasure trove for both casual and serious researchers. As with so many other things, Mann shows the reader where to find these articles and how to make the best use of them.
Chapter Nine coveres published bibliographies. In my own academic career, this was one of the more important sources of grist for papers and projects. A good bibliography can save you weeks of work and lead you to authors and sources you never knew existed. They also have the advantage of being assembled by experts who have weighed and judged each entry for its usefulness. You are not left with just the output of a computer search that found everything that happened to fit the right keywords. This chapter shows how to use printed bibliographies alongside computer printouts, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Perhaps the most controversial part of Mann's book is in Chapter Ten, Real vs. Virtual Libraries. As a long-time devotee of the print medium, Mann is understandably skeptical about the glowing promises made by pundits of the Information Superhighway. Although he does not dismiss the Internet, he dishes out some thoughtful and extremely pragmatic observations on the role of the Internet vs. print libraries. For someone like myself who has spent a great deal of time using both, I found his insights very refreshing and realistic. This chapter does more than descant on the respective merits of print vs. electronic media. For someone who views the Internet as an imperfect replacement for print libraries, Mann nevertheless describes some effective internet search techniques. While doing so, he hammers home the fact that search engines cannot replace the intelligent application of sound research strategies.
Mann then continues to explore the use of computer searches in Chapters Eleven and Twelve, describing computer sources and types of searches respectively. These can be suprisingly technical; his discusions of word searching, component-word searching, controlled-vocabulary terms, geographic search codes, etc. leave one with the initial impression that the computer age has not simplified, but complicated the once simple task of looking things up. However, readers that perservere through this chapter will come away with some nifty tools that will ultimately make their online research faster and easier.
It is a fact well-known among librarians that the collections of different libraries for a given subject are going to vary significantly. For the librarian, this means justifying the existence of collections that may appear "redundant" to a bureaucrat with an itch to wield the budget axe. To a researcher, this means that he or she must find a way to gain access to materials in other libraries. Using Other Libraries is the subject of Chapter Thirteen, and as one might suspect by now, it goes well beyond using the local Interlibrary loan program. Part of the researcher's problem is locating those books so that by specifying a library where they can be found, the chances of actually getting ahold of them are improved. (I once had to use Interlibrary loan to obtain a book that was so obscure only two libraries in North America owned a copy. In fact, it was so obscure that I can't even remember what it was about...) This chapter also discusses special subject collections and how to find them; something that can be a tremendous mine of information on a suprisingly wide range of subjects.
One of the more suprising parts of this books is Chapter Fourteen, People Sources. Strange as it may seem, you can learn a lot by actually–get this–talking to people. Mann is obviously drawing on some of his experience as a journalist and gumshoe in this section, which contains good, solid down-to-earth advice about locating experts in a field, cultivating contacts and using them in a way that they will not feel used when you are finished. Mann also pointedly reminds the reader that the reference librarian is your friend, and that they can help you find additional nuggets of information when you thought you had tapped out the obvious sources. I have personally used this advice to great advantage.
Chapter Fifteen, Hidden Treasures, is one of my personal favorites. In earlier editions of this book, this chapter was almost exclusively about government documents, which still makes up the bulk of this chapter. The current edition includes information on microform sets and CD-ROM collections, but the section on government documents is, in my view, one of the most important parts of this book. The US government is the largest publisher in the world. Literally tens of thousands of new titles on a huge range of topics are published by the government every month (that's right, every month). However, because of the way government publications are handled, most of these are never advertised. There is no one single index of government publications, and in an even more bizzare twist, most librarians who hold a MLS (Master's in Library Science) degree do not know how government documents are classified and catalogued. For that reason, the information in this chapter can put you in contact with excellent information that even the "experts" may have overlooked. The value of this chapter alone far exceeds the price of the book.
Chapter Sixteen serves as a review, plus some extras that don't fit well in other chapters, as well as some additional insights into how reference librarians work their magic. Finally, there is an appendix, Special Cases, where Mann talks about how to work with other less-frequently-used sources, such as archives, public records, book reviews, films, geneology, photographs, maps, newspapers, finding out-of-print books, standards and specifications, translations, and so forth.
If you intend to delve deeply into a subject that interests you, and particularly if you find yourself needing to reach professional levels of knowledge about a particular subject, this book will save you a great deal of time and trouble. I find it a remarkable exposition on the science of organizing information, as well as a means of sharpening my own acumen in thinking, writing, and research. This book belongs on the shelf of anyone who wants to seriously think or write about pretty much anything.
