#library research

[oneluckylibrarian]

Research Project

Hi everybody! I’m a librarian working on a research project aimed at understanding fanfiction and the wider fanfiction community so that it can be better included, represented, and supported within the library sphere. I’m currently running a pilot study to validate my research tools as part of a Higher Degree through Research course (Graduate Certificate in Arts and Social Science Research) via the School of Information and Communication Studies at Charles Sturt University, Australia. If you’re over 18, a part of the fanfiction community, and interested in participating in my research project, please go and do a survey here.

All data collected through the survey is anonymous and will not be gifted or sold to anyone. If you choose to participate in the interview process, your personal information will be anonymised, protected, and destroyed according to CSU policy. If you’re interested in supporting my research project, you can provide feedback about it after completing the initial survey. If you want to see how this research project turns out, please follow my research Tumblr. Thanks!!

[hdslibrary]

NERFC Fellowships Open!

Interested in doing research at Harvard Divinity School Library?

Apply for a New England Regional Fellowship (NERFC) grant now through February 1st!

[jstor]

Searching best practices on JSTOR

Hi Tumblr researchers,

As promised, we're going to dive into some best practices for searching on JSTOR. This'll be a long one!

The first thing to note is that JSTOR is not Google, so searches should not be conducted in the same way.

More on that in this video:

Basic Search on JSTOR

To search for exact phrases, enclose the words within quotation marks, like "to be or not to be".

To construct a more effective search, utilize Boolean operators, such as "tea trade" AND china.

Advanced Searching on JSTOR

Utilize the drop-down menus to refine your search parameters, limiting them to the title, author, abstract, or caption text.

Combine search terms using Boolean operators like AND/OR/NOT and NEAR 5/10/25. The NEAR operator finds keyword combinations within 5, 10, or 25 words of each other. It applies only when searching for single keyword combinations, such as "cat NEAR 5 dog," but not for phrases like "domesticated cat" NEAR 5 dog.

Utilize the "Narrow by" options to search for articles exclusively, include/exclude book reviews, narrow your search to a specific time frame or language.

To focus your article search on specific disciplines and titles, select the appropriate checkboxes. Please note that discipline searching is currently limited to journal content, excluding ebooks from the search.

Finding Content You Have Access To

To discover downloadable articles, chapters, and pamphlets for reading, you have the option to narrow down your search to accessible content. Simply navigate to the Advanced Search page and locate the "Select an access type" feature, which offers the following choices:

All Content will show you all of the relevant search results on JSTOR, regardless of whether or not you can access it.

Content I can access will show you content you can download or read online. This will include Early Journal Content and journals/books publishers have made freely available.

Once you've refined your search, simply select an option that aligns with your needs and discover the most relevant items. Additionally, you have the option to further narrow down your search results after conducting an initial search. Look for this option located below the "access type" checkbox, situated at the bottom left-hand side of the page.

Additional resources

For more search recommendations, feel free to explore this page on JSTOR searching. There, you will find information on truncation, wildcards, and proximity, using fields, and metadata hyperlinks.

[daily-isat]

day 12… siffrin fell asleep… snzzz…

[oldshrewsburyian]

Dear college students,

I really hope that I, your spinster aunt of Tumblr, am not the first person to tell you this, but: please use your university library services. You are paying for them. They are there for you. Moreover, your professors are operating on the assumption that you will use them as necessary.

When I say "library services" I mean not only physical books that will help you with research, but the usually more extensive eBook collections ditto. Novels you've been meaning to get around to and can't afford to buy. Even (quaintly?) DVDs for your entertainment. And perhaps most significantly of all, interlibrary loan.

I'm going to reiterate interlibrary loan in its own paragraph because a student complained to me recently that publishers were "literally incentivizing piracy" by not pricing academic monographs for purchase by college students and my reaction is best summed up as: ????? Publishers typically price scholarly monographs in the pious hope of not losing money on them. Everyone complains about the ones priced at $300, and a lot of them are priced around $30-50. They are priced for purchase by libraries and specialists. And they are priced for purchase by libraries precisely so that libraries can make them accessible to college students. Anyway, use interlibrary loan, good grief.

TL;DR: the library is there for you, that is what it is for, please behave accordingly.

[authorkarajorgensen]

Want to see a cool research thing? It's a collection of digitized menus from the 1800/1900s at the New York Public Library.

Perfect for my historical fiction peeps or culinary historians

[nateconnolly]

Ted Lasso: All right, guys, listen up. The things in the world originate only because of their relation to other things. That means they have no essence or existence of their own. Their true nature is that they are “śūnya" or "empty”.

Coach Beard: Emptiness isn’t their true nature, either.

Ted Lasso: Say what now?

Coach Beard: Emptiness isn’t truer than the false natures of the things that are empty. 

Ted Lasso: Now how the hell does that work? 

Coach Beard: Emptiness did not arise independently, either. Its existence is also dependent upon its relation to other things. If there was nothing to be empty, then there would be no emptiness. 

Dani Rojas [excitedly, like a little kid with a new toy]: if all things are empty, then emptiness itself must be empty, too! 

Ted Lasso: now that right there is what we call “insight beyond insight” back in Kansas 

Higgins: Er, wouldn’t that make nirvana empty as well? And if it’s empty, doesn’t that mean there’s no reason to try to achieve it? 

Jan Maas [unfiltered Dutchman]: Thoughts like those are why you’re still stuck in samsara. 

[teawiththegods]

Btw for those interested this book is where I’m getting a lot of my information about Hera

The Transformation of Hera: a Study of Ritual, Hero, and the Goddess in the Iliad by Joan V. O’Brien

[stuckinapril]

What is a girl to do if she’s bad at driving but driving is literally relaxing to her

[paniniqueen]

I love you JSTOR, I love you university librarians, I love you Purdue Owl, I love you Zotero, I love you WorldCat, I love you digitized archival documents, I love you ProQuest, I love you EBSO, I love you Citation Machine, I love you GALILEO

[garadinervi]

Barbara Kruger in her New York City studio, ca. mid-1970s; Photo by Susan Katz for "The Woman I Am" Collection, part of the Archives of Women Artists, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Betty Boyd Dettre Library & Research Center, Washington, D.C.

[quotesfrommyreading]

The graduate degree for librarians is not, typically, a master of arts, but a master of science—in library and information sciences. Librarians may adore books, but they are trained in the technical and data-driven work of running libraries. Unlike a privately owned bookstore, where the stock might reflect the tastes and preferences of the proprietor, at the library, books are acquired based on information about what its particular community wants and needs.

“Librarians love data,” Dudenhoffer, who now coordinates the information-science program at the University of Missouri, told me. “Knowing how to analyze your community, knowing how to look at data, knowing how to look at circulation numbers, knowing how to look at population movement, those things are becoming increasingly important in what we do, and that drives all of this.”

Public librarians, she said, are looking at such things as regional household income, age, education level, and racial and ethnic backgrounds while making their selections. They also consider patron requests. In a school library, this analysis might include information shared by students or teachers about the needs and interests of the current student body.

Librarians who showcase books about underrepresented groups, including LGBTQ people, surely believe that these stories are valuable. But the librarians I spoke with insisted that they’re making these choices because an assessment determined that there was a patron need for these books, not to push some personal social agenda. Those controversial book displays? Many, Dudenhoffer said, are a means of letting patrons know that material they might be too shy or embarrassed to ask for is in stock.

“It’s really unfair to characterize displays or programs as ‘woke,’” Dudenhoffer lamented. “That’s just such a terrible word to use right now. But it’s not about that. It’s about serving our community, and everyone in the community, to the best of our abilities.”

What seemed most painful to the librarians I spoke with—even more than the personal attacks and fear of litigation—was the way in which book bans hinder their ability to connect their patrons to information that might help them.

  —  The Librarians Are Not Okay

[cashmere-caveman]

read a post about there being next to no record abt the historic edward little again (we dont even know what he looked like!!!) and now im thinking a lot about how he died in uniform again.

hes far from the only character to die in uniform (the marines die in uniform! franklin dies in uniform!) and he isn't even the only lieutenant to do so (gore, under his slops, was in uniform; fairholme, too presumably; irving famously wore his coat that hickey steals later; george wore something that used to be his uniform when he got eaten but imo atp he did not wear it as A Uniform anymore that were just the clothes that he had on if that makes sense) but at the end, he is the only one where i still felt that it was an active choice to wear it.

almost everyone else sheds their layers along the way or turns into something else, but ned starts in uniform and he stays in uniform and that's it.

fitzjames famously sheds his vanity and dies in his shirtsleeves, without any of the pomp and pizzazz of his uniform.

jopson, another character who is to me really connected with a certain mindset of holding up appearances, dies in his shirtsleeves, believing himself abandoned by the very person that was his reason to even wear a uniform at all.

goodsir as a doctor/assistant surgeon doesn't really have a uniform in quite the same sense as many others but when he dresses himself before his suicide it is not as an affirmation of his role, or at least not a positive one. he has sworn to do no harm, but he was forced to do it anyway and now he will add a final evil to his toll of sins in the hopes to balance the scales at least somewhat and for that to work, he must wear his outfit as always. he ends up with all pretenses stripped bare anyway.

tozer, a man so proud of his uniform in the beginning, again, dies in his shirtsleeves, no rank left, betrayed by someone who had convinced him to give up everything and yet! reduced to nothing but an ordinary man, he tries again where before he had given up. he cooperates, he coordinates, he even calls crozier captain again, he tries very hard to do the right thing in what looks like a no win scenario from the get go!! and he fails, of course, but he tried.

almost everyone else also ends up either dressed down (bridgens, armitage, dundy, des voeux etc) or somehow transformed (blanky, to some extend silna with her patched and bloody furs) or in hickeys case, both (iconic underwear & greatcoat combo). little never changes. he sometimes has a little scarf, theres the bandage for his headwound for a bit, he sometimes wears the full parade uniform with epaulettes and sometimes just the regular one, there are at least two different uniform hats and ofc you can tell that he loses weight by the way his shape chages under all that wool but he is always. in. uniform.

and maybe this is just my mind making up dots to connect but i think he might even be the last character that crozier ever gives an order to in his official function as a captain (in the tuunbaq seduction/boss fight scene he has been stripped of his rank, at least according to e.c.).

before his final scene, all we get is little arguing over the orders they are given, and how to interpret them. and he is still wearing his uniform!!! wait hold on im not gonna check but maybe he might only wear a jumper in the tent where dundy lauches his soft mutiny actually, so maybe this whole post is crumbling like a domino line but!!! ignoring this. moving on. (even if it is a jumper i remember him wearing sth dark blue aka Uniform Colour so im claiming it doesnt even matter bc spiritually that hypothetical jumper still is a uniform. im not going to let anything like "accuracy" and "real details" fuck up my post smh 🙄. im joking. however! Moving On as i said)

he doesnt even dress up for carnivale! the only other characters that are not in costume are jopson and crozier and they were literally too busy keeping crozier from dying to even begin thinking about joining the communal arts and crafts session! little is atp the acting no2 of the expedition so u might say he was busy but fitzjames has the overall command and still finds time to have a little gender moment in private and the imperialism-approved version of it for the Big Crowd!! (u could ofc argue that fitzy Always has time for a gender moment and who would i be to argue but my point is: i have no doubt that man was fucking busy preparing carnivale & beginning to prepare the walkout and there still was time to Express Some Character!! so how come ned didn't do anything?)

the one other scene we get where we can catch a small glimpse of characters out of their element before it all unravels (pre tuunbaq attack on the camp) is the scene at night when morfin gets shot. it shows lots of characters in various states of undress (silna big blanket burrito i love you) that allows us to see them differently, like their costumes at carnivale did, but in an entirely opposite direction. while carnivale was about putting on masks, this scene is about taking them off. and it drives me insane because i know that little must be there. he is somewhere in the crowd when morfin gets shot but so far i havent been able to make him out and i need to know what he is wearing so bad. it is actually for science (my own curiosity) ! i really need to know. and i cant help but feel that maybe it is intentional that he is just ~somewhere~ instead of In Front of the Fucking Camera because, well. that would be just ned little, wouldnt it? and we dont even know who that is.

[jstor]

What is JSTOR??

We’re glad you asked 🤩

JSTOR is a digital library for the intellectually curious. We provide access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images, and primary sources across 75 disciplines to facilitate research and teaching—working with the academic community to make important content discoverable.

Students and alumni at participating institutions may be able to access our content through their school library. But don’t worry! In addition to free, Open Access materials, we provide those without institutional affiliations up to 100 free articles per month OR an individual JPASS subscription.

You can visit our about page for more about our mission and initiatives. Thanks for the ask, stay curious! 🤓

[chiropteracupola]

The wanderer on his way.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The Main Reading Room (now the Rose Reading Room) of the 42nd Street Library is always filled with researchers and writers, 1920s.

Photo: FPG/Getty Images/NY Daily News