A Mysterious Methods Book for Library Research

I recently read a book that I think should be required in every historical methods graduate seminar. Surprisingly, though, a search for this title in Syllabus Finder revealed that there are more theological seminaries than history departments that assign this text. In fact, I found only two online syllabi for history courses that listed this book. For more information about this mysterious title, read on.

The book I am talking about was written by a former private detective with a PhD who now works full-time at the Library of Congress:

Mann, Thomas. The Oxford Guide to Library Research, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN-13: 9780195189988.

I am surprised that there aren't more tenured history professors assigning this book in their graduate research seminars. The methods described in the book are definitely tried, tested, and old school. The book provides an overview of starting with encyclopedias, using subject headings and the library catalog, the serendipity of systematic browsing, the importance of subject headings and indexes to journal articles, the problems of keyword searches, and the power of citation searches, the method of related-record searches. It also discusses the value of looking for review articles, published bibliographies, brick-and-mortar libraries, computer searches, interlibrary loan, interviews, microform, CD-ROMs, government documents, reference sources, archives, biographies, book reviews, newspaper indexes, and variety of other lesser-used sources. I may be partial to this book because of how many years I have spent working in libraries, but I still think it deserves a wider audience among historians.

The disparaging comments in this book about keyword searching in databases and natural languages searches in Google also caught my attention. The author clearly feels that searches with controlled vocabularies are superior to searches with user-generated terminology. This is an issue of semantic search that digital historians will have to face in the near future. I will have more to say on my blog on how well I think
Zotero is preparing to deal with this problem.