Today, my American women’s history class had their session on conducting research in the library. They all looked like they could barely keep their eyes open. I really don’t understand how anyone could think research was boring. Nothing is more fun for me than digging up a piece of obscure information, especially on someone who has been dead for a hundred years. I’m lucky that finding that kind of information is what I do for a living. When I was at the Association for Documentary Editing conference this week, I had a conversation about this with a woman who works on the Benjamin Franklin Papers. She said, “For most people this kind of work would be hell. But if, like us, you like research, its like pigs in slop.”
There are a lot of great research sites online these days available free of charge. Here are a few of my favorites:
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Available through the Brooklyn Public Library website, this site allows you to search the Brooklyn Daily Eagle by word from 1841 through 1902. This is a great site if you love New York. www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/eagle/
American Memory. Available through the Library of Congress website, this site allows you to search by word for letters, speeches, published articles, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music. For written or printed items, there is often a transcription and a scan of the original document. There is really an amazing variety of material here. memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html
Bartelby.com. This site allows you to search the full text of an amazing number of books, including the King James Bible, the 1914 Oxford edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Gray’s Anatomy, the 6th edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia, and the 1918 edition of the Fanny Farmer cookbook. If you are looking for a quote or a quick fact, here is the place to go. www.bartelby.com
Ancestry.com. This is a subscription site, but you can get a 14 day free trial. This site was, I believe, originally designed for genealogists, and it is great for doing family or local history research. You can search census records, newspapers, genealogies, and local histories, among other material.
www.ancestry.com
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I also like research, everyone at St. Mary's is required to take a legal research class and I actually don't mind it at all.
I also have a lexis nexis and a westlaw account so if anyone needs any reseach done on either one of those sites just let me know and I will look up some stuff for you. Printing is free too so I can send you the print outs.
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