research

It’s that time of the semester again - that is, close to its end. I think just about anyone who’s done the whole college thing would say that the end of the semester, the last few weeks, are the worst. Even if you stay on top of things the rest of the time, things start falling apart near the end - more and more things are due, more and more studying has to be done. That’s been my experience, anyway.

At the end of last semester, I actually said I’d be away from the blog for a week or two, due to lack of time. I’m not at that stage yet, but it may be quickly approaching.

Like last semester, I’ve got to write a term paper. 8-10 pages long, on anything I want, as long as it ties in with the American Revolution. Compared to the last term paper I had to do, which was about the American South, I figured doing one about the Revolution would be a piece of cake; I mean, it’s the Revolution, there should be plenty of articles about it!

Sort of.

There are indeed masses of articles about the period. However, I’m having a really hard time finding 3 good articles about the same thing. I’ve gone through hundreds of search results in research databases, probably having spent 8 or 9 hours on it at this point, and I’ve just not come up with anything solid. The first topic I wanted to tackle was how the American Revolution was received in European countries, and how the Revolution influenced conditions there (besides the obvious “It helped lead to the French Revolution!”). This ended up being a total flop. While I was able to find some books on Spain’s involvement, they didn’t lead me to any usable articles; I simply didn’t find anything at all in the research databases on the topic.

The next topic I chose, which I’m still fighting with, is espionage during the war. I’d prefer to focus in on one facet of it, such as military intelligence or political espionage, but again, I’ve not found enough on either of those to prop a paper on. I’ve found one excellent article on the development of the British military intelligence; one article about Britain intercepting letters from the colonies and creating extracts to see what colonial opinion was (not very suitable for what I’m trying to do); and one article that, while I thought it was going to be excellent, is ultimately, I think, not going to work. It had no abstract, but was entitled British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance. Well, hey, the title sounded great… Unfortunately, when I received it through interlibrary loan, I discovered that it’s an examination of a few people in London who were double agents. The extreme focus on these people, rather than a wider view, is not going to work, I’m afraid.

I’m at a standstill right now. I’ve one more article on the way via interlibrary loan which I hope will give me enough overall to work with. I’ve a long list of other articles I can request through interlibrary loan, but I’d really prefer to see if the one that’s (supposedly!) on the way will allow me to get to writing or not. The paper is due on the 2nd, so I’m running out of time, and ILLs take time. Furthermore, I have to pay for every article I get through interlibrary loan, and if I start requesting things willy nilly, I’ll soon have $50+ in my paper, which I’m not exactly keen on doing (at all). The articles are only $.10 per page, but those dimes add up quickly.

I’m meeting with the professor of the class Friday to essentially show him the articles I have and say “help!” Hopefully he can help me get things going. This is driving me nuts, as those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably noticed.

Last week I met with the preacher of my mom’s church again, for a bit of lunch and some talk. We ended up not talking about religion hardly at all, which I found surprising but not unwelcome. Our discussion veered off, somehow or another, to education. I think that he asked me how classes were going, and it spiralled from there.

We talked a lot about the state of public education in America (not good), and how things have changed since he was in college (early 80s, I believe). Him talking about researching stuff for his papers made me realize something which had hitherto never occurred to me: research used to be a lot more difficult, and a lot more time consuming. Certainly, if you’re really going to be digging into a topic, research still takes a considerable amount of time. But with the internet and huge conglomerations of academic journals (EBSCOhost, I’m looking at you), complete with full text search, finding some initial sources is fairly quick. With EBSCOhost alone, I can search across something like 5,000 academic journals, all at once, and have results back in 5 seconds or thereabouts. Not only is one able to search that many journals at once, but with that search, one is also searching across time. Many of the journals go back at least 10 years, and all of those articles are brought up within a search.

That’s quite a different picture than what the preacher told me about his researching: heading off to the card file, looking for his subject, and then going to the stacks; finding a book, browsing through it, and then going from that book to another via the bibliography. And that’s just with books - with journal articles, it was even more time consuming. The preacher and I didn’t talk about journal articles, but a friend of mine (hi, Chantal) was willing to fill me in on how it worked: you’d check a journal index, usually published yearly, to find journals on the topic you were after. You’d then have to hunt down the journal(s) in question, and basically dig through them to see if there were any articles you could use. Chantal said that her university had all of the journals she ever needed, but I’m sure folks who attended smaller universities / colleges ended up having to request journals via interlibrary loan or a similar system. I can just imagine waiting 2 or 3 weeks for a journal to arrive, just to find it didn’t have anything in it you could use.

Thinking about these two means of researching brings to mind two different fictional scenes: one, showing a Star Trek computer fellow bringing up reams of information - exactly what he needs, of course - with a few key strokes; the other, showing Gandalf sitting down in the libraries of Minas Tirith for days on end, sorting through document after document, hoping to find some scrap about what he was after. Certainly, perhaps these two scenes are exaggerations of how things were pre-internet and how things are now - but I don’t think the exaggeration is that great. It really is amazing how the internet has changed things.

I am, however, still holding out for my hovercraft vehicle…

While at the university library yesterday, talking to one of the reference librarians, I discovered something that made my day.

It turns out that all citizens of Ohio have free access to a large pool of research databases, via Ohio Web Library. All you have to do is enter your public library card number, and then you get access to a large number of research databases. I have access to more via my university account right now, but the offerings from Ohio Web Library shouldn’t be ignored, either. Here are some of the things available:

• Encyclopaedia Britannica Online.
• Academic Search Premier. Academic Search Premier is an excellent source of scholarly journals in all academic disciplines. More than 8,000 journals are indexed and full text is provided for more than 4500. Most are peer reviewed. Searchable cited references are provided for selected titles.
• Oxford Reference Online - All Subjects. Dictionaries, thesaureses, reference works for politics, history, religion - this site is a treasure trove of goodies. I was, however, slightly let down to find that the Concise Oxford English Dictionary is available - not the regular version. Oh well.
• AccessScience

Based on what the Ohio Web Library page says, they’re far from being done with the project, so I’m sure Ohioans will see some more great resources added to it.

While I was quite happy about discovering this, I have to admit: I was also a little peeved. Why wasn’t this program publicized more? Apparently, it’s been around for quite a few years, and I still knew nothing about it. Considering how great a resource it is, Ohio could have gone to a little more trouble in letting citizens know. Perhaps I’m making too much of it, though. Admittedly, being into history, languages, and a dozen other “scholarly” topics (not to imply I’m a scholar - I’m not!), I’m probably more excited about the project than most people would be.

* By the way, I suppose I should clarify - this isn’t free; it’s paid for by Ohio tax dollars. When I say free, I mean you don’t have to pay anything when you access the resources.