Library resources: codex and computer

So you've got a research problem, an author or a specific work, and you need to gather information efficiently for a paper or a presentation. What do you do? What questions should you ask and how can you get the answers?

what are the meanings of the words in the text?
what are the basic facts about this work and/or author? What's the basic context?
what's already been written about x?
- what books are in OUR library? in larger libraries?
- how is discourse framed? (what traditions and recurrent issues in criticism, what's the vocabulary in use to discuss the author/work?)
- what have people already said?

How do we answer these questions? A lot of detective work is necessary, a lot of hunting in various resources, paper and electronic. In short, we're working to develop appropriate strategies for finding relevant materials to solve textual problems.

It's sensible to begin with a very general search with the nearest tools, EXAMINE the most likely items from the general search, then

narrow the search in the light of what you find
extend to more comprehensive tools

Consider the examples of Chaucer's "Gentilesse", Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book", and Dickinson's Poem 1551:

Start with Annie and ask the very basic question: what IS there in our library about Geoffrey Chaucer, Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson?

These searches should head you toward particular areas of the stacks, where some creative browsing of shelves in the same area as the call numbers you have retrieved will probably produce books that enlarge your view of the subject considerably. Such serendipitous browsing is a really important step because of the unexpected encounters you are sure to have with things you weren't looking for. It is also useful, somewhere near the beginning of your research, to ask biographical questions about the author in question, to lay a basis for understanding the person and the period.

Another step in the search for information about work on Chaucer, Bradstreet and Dickinson is to look beyond W&L's holdings. Searches in Harvard's online catalog (HOLLIS) yield a lot of worthwhile information:

Such searches will probably require you to learn the conventions of other online catalogs (few are as "friendly" as Annie). Scripted connection to and help with searching Harvard's HOLLIS is available under "Major U.S. and Canadian Research Libraries" ("Libraries and Research Resources" on W&L's Home Page).

The search for articles about poems or authors likewise requires some adventurous exploration, and will make use of paper resources and take us into the jungles of the MLA (Modern Language Association) Bibliography and other electronic indexes.

Articles about 'gentilesse' are easier to find than articles about Anne Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book", though articles about Anne Bradstreet are plentiful. And articles about Emily Dickinson are so numerous as to be impossible --1470 in the MLA, 626 in A&H Search.

Locating discussions and criticism of authors and their works has spawned an industry of indexes and compendia, many of which are print resources found in the Leyburn Reference collection. Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism [NCLC], Twentieth Century Literary Criticism [TCLC] and Contemporary Literary Criticism [CLC] are perennial favorites for (somewhat pre-chewed) quick summaries of analysis and opinion, but they are a starting place and not the final authority. Another source that may be useful in locating material about authors and their works is Literary Criticism Index, which you can find in the Reference collection: REF PN523 .W44. You may find this very useful in locating sources that list critical articles on particular poems... And you should consider ANNIE as a resource in the search for material about authors (here are some examples of authors-as-subjects).

Next time we'll look at electronic databases and searching, notably in the MLA Bibliography, A&H Search, Humanities Index... but others too.

Once you know what books and articles exist which may be relevant to your research, it may be sensible to shift the focus to WORDS in the poems. This means using dictionaries and other lexical resources.

For Chaucer the obvious dictionary choices are the OED and the Middle English Dictionary, but a keyword search for 'chaucer concordance' in Annie turns up two significant resources in the Leyburn Library.
For Bradstreet the OED may be useful in getting at 17th century senses of words, though the question is less what did she mean than how did she put the words together.
For Dickinson follow the links in the poem to see what the OED yields. And here's a link to a useful Dickinson resource I happended upon 'by accident'.

Another approach to the lexicons of the poems makes use of fulltext databases as electronic concordances. A search for 'gentilesse' in UVa's Middle English Texts database can give us a sense of the various contexts in which the word turns up.

The University of Texas Chaucer Bibliography is also worth a look, but in this case isn't very fruitful.