The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [153]
BASIC SKILLS
How to Use a Library
Actually, if you don’t already have a good notion how to use a library, I strongly recommend that you don’t write historical novels. However, beyond a simple familiarity with the card catalog and the nuances of the Library of Congress system, there are a couple of possibly useful things to know.
For really detailed historical research, you will need a large university or college library. Public libraries simply don’t stock the sorts of references needed for good research on most periods—for the excellent reasons that most such references are a) fairly old, and b) not what most people want to read for recreation. Public libraries stock books for reading; university libraries stock books for looking up esoteric information.
When I began doing research for my first novel, I was a university professor, and fortunately had a large library available; not everyone is so lucky. Still, if you do live within driving distance of a college or university, go to the library and ask about getting a community borrower’s card. Most such libraries have these; for a small annual fee, you can have at least limited borrowing privileges (and if you’re a writer, the fee is tax-deductible as a business expense).
If you don’t live near a good library, it will be a lot harder to do effective research, but luckily these days no one is completely out of touch. Many large collections are accessible online, at least in terms of finding what’s available. Getting your hands on a book is another matter, but books can be ordered, or arrangements can be made to borrow material, even at a distance.
Virtually all large libraries have a system called interlibrary loan. This means that if you require, say, a book on Irish costume in the sixteenth century, and have discovered that your local university library doesn’t have anything of this nature—but the Boston College library does—you can file a request with your local library for the book, and your library will borrow it from Boston College for you.
This is a wonderful assistance to a researcher; the only real drawback to interlibrary loan is that it’s often rather slow, and may take weeks or even months to retrieve a particular volume and get it to your library.
Card Catalog
Most collections these days have been catalogued electronically. This is fast, efficient, and generally a Good Thing. At the same time, the transfer of information from real cards to an electronic version is not always complete; in the interests of efficiency, older volumes that don’t circulate much may not be recorded in the new catalog, or may be put aside for later addition.
The hard copy version of the card catalog also sometimes contains information that isn’t included in the new electronic version—handwritten notations by librarians as to book location, related titles, and so on. There isn’t much you can do about this, but if your library still has the hard copy card catalog, it’s worth consulting that, in addition to the electronic version. Also ask the reference librarian whether your library’s collection has been completely converted to electronic form, in case some older parts of the collection have not.
The idiosyncrasy of method that I mentioned earlier begins with the first steps of a search—what you type into an electronic card catalog (or a Web search engine). Even here, though, there are General Principles: one, cast your net widely at first, and two, look for call-number patterns.
That is, if you are interested in a specific time-period and a particular place, you would naturally type something like SCOTLAND HIGHLANDS EIGHTEENTH CENTURY as your search parameters. This will give you those titles most closely approximating what you think you’re looking for.
However, it’s also worthwhile doing another search, simply on SCOTLAND, since you may well find a number of useful books—on geography, history, customs, language, etc.—that don’t have the keywords HIGHLANDS or EIGHTEENTH CENTURY associated with them.
Casting