The weekend is over and Monday is behind us as well. Most of yesterday was spent very pleasantly in the law school's rare book room. The archival boxes arrived last week and I spent the day placing a recent donation, the papers of an eminent legal scholar, in the new blue/gray boxes with their shiny metal edges.
While I worked, surrounded by the environment of the rare book room, my thoughts turned to the Gordon study, "A Portrait of Research in Legal History," one of the titles on our reading list. I must admit, given the amount of time that has passed and the rapid development of the internet and its impact on our daily lives, I struggle with the releveancy of a study that took place in 1985 with a 1994 publication date. When you consider the change the internet has brought to scholarship and research methods since that time, the Gordon article looks antiquated, a historical piece on research trends in the nascent period of the internet.
Maybe it's not fair to look critically at this study given the changes in the academic environment since 1985, but, like it or not, times have changed dramatically and research methods are no loonger the same as they were then. So, I will play devil's advocate and discuss some of the problems I see with this article.
Gordon's article looks at responses from historians who participated in the Historical Documents Study in 1985. The HDS, noting increased usage of respositories, institutions and museums, designed this study to examine the researcher and their research methods in order to gain a better understanding of who the researchers were and the methods used to perform research.
Gordon makes several interesting comments that I would like to explore further. For example, " . . . among members of the Organization of American Historians, nearly three-quarters of whom teach at academic institutions, only half recognized their primary library as a major research institution." While there are some statistical tables in the article there is nothing to support these comments. Given that the academic community, then as now, is composed of a vast array of community colleges, public and private colleges and universities with differing levels of academic standing I feel that it is quite impressive that 50 percent of those polled consider their libray to be a major research library. If we had statistics to examine, we might be able to point to a high rate of survey respondents from land grant universities or Carnegie One institutions. We might be able to see that those institutions make up a larger portion of the study respondents. Or, we may be able to determine something completely different that led to this conclusion.
In the next paragraph Gordon states that "only five percent of them (respondents) indicated use of presidential libraries." Isn't this simply a relation to locale? Presidential libraries do not dominate the academic landscape and a figure such as this doesn't take into consideration a scholar's research interests. Excluding airline travel, I would venture to guess that most scholars do not live within traveling distance of a presidential library. I would also guess that in the broad spectrum of academic research, may topics do not require the use of presidential ibray holdings.
Perhaps the biggest issue I have with this study stems from this paragraph: There are historians active today whose formal education predates the start of national guides to unpublished sources forty years ago, for example. The explosion of related finding aids and computerized newtworks for sources since that time has challenged successive waves of historians to augment their skills after leaving school. Changing interests also push individuals beyond limits taken for granted when they first studied their craft."
Indeed they do. While many of the respondents will have retired now, there remain many who are still researching and teaching. Though their careers were grounded in an earlier time, these respondents learned new skills and became adept in a changing academic enviroment. We all love a tool that will provide the desired information faster than before. As I've learned from other of our readings, the glosses on Justinian's Codex, the dictionary, the index, the table of contents, print versions of national guides, and all those finding aids and computerized networks do just that. Help us get our hands on the data we need and want faster.
My own undergraduate degree, a double major in history and religion, was earned in an age when papers were typed on a typewriter and there was one phone per hall in the dorm. Twenty-five years later I went on to earn my masters' degree in library science online through the distance program at a major research institution recognized as one of the top twenty schools for library science in the nation. I was never able to go the library physically, but thanks to the online library service I never had to leave the confines of my home, let alone get up from my desk, to have all my research needs met. This old dog was able to learn a few new tricks over time and succeed. What may have appeared frightening or challenging to Gordon or the respondents then, can be seen now as what it was, a learning curve for a period in transition.
Ideally, it would be of great benefit to see an updated version of this study. I'm sure there is something out on the World Wide Web that takes into consideration researchers and their methods in this internet driven age. Today, nearly every library supports blogs, podcasts, twitter feeds, and facebook pages. Examining deep web usage, subscription databases, library resources, and free tools like Google Scholar, Google Books, and the Internet Archive can yield statistics for instruments that readily place many scholarly avenues at a researcher's fingertips without having to travel beyond their armchair to locate resources that were once limnited. It's a different world. Let's examine it.
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