ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Know thyself: A librarian uses the library

by Amy Brunvand

At a recent library conference, several speakers mentioned the need to know more about how and why university faculty and researchers use the library. In a way, this seems like a funny question—after all, why should the experience of doing research be radically different for librarians than for anyone else? Sure, we librarians have a slightly easier time figuring out the organi- zation of the facility and material—we are the ones who put everything where it is in the first place—but the research process of locating, filtering, absorbing, and synthesiz- ing information is hard for everyone. This hit home the last time I tried to write a pa- per. As an example of the real-life research experience, I present here, with only slight embarrassment, my research diary for a pa- per called “The Spread of Contra Dancing into New Communities” I presented at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Oct. 17-20, 1996.

Research diary for a paper

Month 1:I submit an abstract to a conference.

Month 2:Hooray! I got a letter saying that my abstract was accepted! Now I have six months to actually write the paper. I don’t do anything about it immediately because I still have plenty of time.

Month 3:I pull stuff out of my personal files, bookshelf, and journals that might be useful. I check the library catalog and some journal abstracting databases and find many interesting-looking books, articles, and dissertations. The library has maybe half of them. I check out a couple of books and start to read. I look up about ten articles in the journals we have at the library and find that only about two of them are actually useful and the rest are either off topic or content-free.

Month 4—5:I order two articles and two dissertations from interlibrary loan. Several other articles might possibly be useful, but I’m not really sure so I don’t bother with them. I figure I can get them later if I need to (but I never do). I interview two of my three sources. (One is in Europe until the end of the summer.) I scan three years of back issues of a newsletter to which I have a personal subscription (the library doesn’t have it, and there is no index anyhow). At an event, I purchase a self-published book and talk to the friendly author about her research. The ILL dissertations arrive. Uh oh! They are both over 600 pages long and one is on microfilm and I only have two weeks to read them. It’s not enough time! After they are already several weeks overdue ILL sends me a threatening note. I photocopy what I hope are all of the important sections and sheepishly give them back.

Month 6:I look up some things that I found listed in the bibliographies of other things. In conversation, another librarian suggests an interesting passage in a book I read years ago and then forgot about. It’s in Special Collections’ locked case so I put off having a look. Finally, I take the time to look at it. Akkk! I need some more information on this subject. Another quick round of library research and digging stuff out of my personal library and files to fill the gap. It turns out some of the information is on the notes of several cassette tapes I own. I’m awestruck at how obscure my own sources are getting. I remember something related in a letter I read on a listserv three years ago. Aha! Someone put it on his Web page. Good thing, because I didn’t keep a copy.

Month 7:My third interviewee returns from Europe so I can interview her. A week before the conference I go into panic mode trying to condense all of this into a 20-minute talk. I haul my research notes and some books with me on the plane in case I need to add something at the last minute, (but it’s just a security blanket. I never look at them). The morning before my talk I am still slightly adjusting the content of what I want to say because I have too much information and the talk is too long. Everything goes fine and a few people give me business cards so we can get in touch. I plan to write it up for publication.

Research has its pitfalls—even for librarians

What tickles me about this is that despite being a pretty good librarian I am as susceptible to the same pitfalls as every other library patron. I could blame it all on Hofstadter’s law: “Everything always takes longer than you think it will, even if you take Hofstadter’s law into account,” but the sad fact is that research expands to fill the time available, regardless of how early you start. Luckily, our library has a generous renewal policy. Although I didn’t really procrastinate all that badly, it still took an entire six months to complete the project. Still, the loan period was too short. I really did need to have all of this stuff on hand for six months. And during moments of panic, I was much less friendly and personable than usual, and

I was inclined to feel selfish and willing to break rules.

It’s only fair to point out that I was not starting from scratch as many students are when a professor assigns an arbitrary or not- yet-familiar topic for a class project. In fact, I chose my subject because I already had lots of information and thought it would be easy to write up (which it was not particularly).

Librarians love indexes, but I used indexes as only part of my research strategy. For one thing, I already owned a collection of interesting stuff, and for another, a lot of it wasn’t indexed. Being part of a community of other people with similar interests was as important for me to get the information I needed as being adept at library research.

In any case, one major reason I needed to do library research was that I was afraid authors of similar papers would show up at the conference (which they did), and I didn’t want to look like a fool in front of them. Good library research is partly a self-preser- vation device.

Using ILL

Using ILL is an especially interesting experience. If you have never done it for actual research purposes, you should give it a try. Don’t get me wrong—I love ILL. I wouldn’t have been able to finish the paper on time without it, and I’ve used ILL in the past to get my hands on things that otherwise would have been completely out of reach. However, remote access is no substitute for a handy collection. I wanted to know what articles existed, but I didn’t necessarily want to read them all. When I started looking for journal articles there were plenty with interesting titles, but a lot of them didn’t live up to their promise. If I had been trying to do the whole project through remote access, I suppose I would have had to order them all anyway, and then throw most of them out (and feel guilty about killing trees.)

And by the way, scholarly journal articles and dissertations are the only types of literature that are really well-indexed and abstracted. The other materials I was using— newsletters, book fragments, tape recordings—are not in standard indexes or, as in the case of books, not indexed in much detail unless you have the book in hand. That makes it really hard to know what to request in the first place.

Surprisingly, the Internet did come through for me on this occasion, so I solemnly promise not to be as skeptical about its virtues as a research tool in the future.

Looking at my own behavior gives me a bit more compassion (if not actual forgiveness) for faculty members who say they always read a certain journal, but there is no evidence anyone ever touches the thing; who keep their library books too long and act possessive when asked to return them; who take library books along on out-of-town excursions; who refer students to the library for things that aren’t there; who seldom use the expensive index bought just for them; and who freak out when they find out ILL will take a week or more to fill a request. In any case, a little self examination can provide insights to the experience of other researchers and help you as a librarian experience the library with the innocence that zen teachers call “beginner’s mind.”