Research for Writers on a Budget -- Garbo
Those of us who were passed over -- again! -- for a genius grant last year have had to earn our own bread. And with so many non-paying venues for which authors work, it can be a struggle to bring in the dollars. And of course any writing-related monies in the "outgoing" category come right out of our pockets. You looked at the cost of printer cartridges lately?
What's your budget for research? Mine's pretty limited.
Currently, I'm working on a history-based project. Over the years, I've written both fiction and non-fiction in which I've had to do a fair amount of research. One can Google the year that the Golden Spike was driven (1869), after which characters in a novel could conceivably have traveled cross-country via railroad car. But if you need harder-to-find information, or to go more deeply than names and dates, the Digital Age is a wonder.
It used to be that scholars traveled to specialized libraries and sat under fluorescent lights for a month or more, taking notes eight hours a day. And that kept research out of the reach of anybody not comfortably middle-class or anybody who didn't have a steady stream of patronage money flowing in. Even if you took a Greyhound and ate nothing but bologna sandwiches, you would have needed both time off work and a place to stay for a month.
But now, you can access research materials all over the world via free wi-fi. Let's look at some of the sites which help you write better because you know more.
The JSTOR website is a repository of academic writing ( JSTOR = JOURNAL STORAGE).
If you write for a group or a school or a company which can afford to pay the modest JSTOR subscription fee, you'll have access to all kinds of cool info. But if, like me, you only need a couple of articles now and then, you can read up to six articles a month for free! It costs to download articles, but you can read them on the site for nothing. You just register with an email and a password. Most recently, I used JSTOR to find an article in an obscure educational journal from 1952. Back issues of that academic publication go for fifty bucks an issue, so online reading at a cost of zero was awesome.
If you've looked at used books on Amazon lately, you'll see that the payment system doesn't work for small booksellers. The sellers these days are big warehouses. They are so big they don't really need to compete, and costs are pretty unreasonable. I prefer to support small businesses, and if I can pay a fair price for a book at one place, I've saved enough to buy a second volume. Thus I go to the ABEBooks site to shop for books I can't get from the library, or materials I know I'm going to need to use frequently. The site shows me used books available at small local stores. I've been happy with the sellers who put their inventories on the site.
Another boon the Computer Age has brought us is the upgrading of the dreaded Interlibrary Loan system into statewide networks of libraries. It used to be a hassle, even once you'd even discovered that your local library could get materials from other libraries, to file a request and they took forever. And once you'd borrowed the book, the due date was similar to an eviction notice or a MasterCharge bill -- miss it at your peril. If you were late a day more than once, they'd block you from the system for three months, I think. Or six months?
Now, if I can't find a book or DVD or music CD from my local library, the library's website will allow me to search MaineCat, the network of Maine libraries found east to west and north to south. Public libraries, university libraries, and privately-funded libraries all participate. And because the orders go through digitally, there is sometimes a wait for a book to travel from Fort Kent, up near the Canadian border, all the way down to Southern Maine where I live. But it's a much shorter wait than the old Interlibrary Loan system used to put me through.
To make sure this is true across the U.S., I randomly chose Kansas to check and they do the same thing.
And there's a super-system for library searches in-state or out-of-state: WorldCat.
Now, where I found the listing for the Kansas-wide catalog system was through the Kansas State Library. Each of the U.S. states has its own library and while they don't lend out materials like your local public library, you can go there and do research. And your trusty source of free wi-fi can take you through the electronic resources your own State Library has to offer. Here's just a partial list of what Kansas makes available to its residents:
Last on my low-cost or no-cost research list today is Internet Archive.
What isn't on the site? Check out this random snip of page full of search results -- a children's book, an old detective magazine, a 78 rpm record, a 1951 Reader's Digest Condensed Book, and on and on. . . How it works is that you register for free with email and then you "check out" digital items for a limited time. I have found several out-of-print books that I couldn't find anywhere else right here on the site.
Good researching to you all. Be smarter than the President! Look things up.
What's your budget for research? Mine's pretty limited.
Currently, I'm working on a history-based project. Over the years, I've written both fiction and non-fiction in which I've had to do a fair amount of research. One can Google the year that the Golden Spike was driven (1869), after which characters in a novel could conceivably have traveled cross-country via railroad car. But if you need harder-to-find information, or to go more deeply than names and dates, the Digital Age is a wonder.
It used to be that scholars traveled to specialized libraries and sat under fluorescent lights for a month or more, taking notes eight hours a day. And that kept research out of the reach of anybody not comfortably middle-class or anybody who didn't have a steady stream of patronage money flowing in. Even if you took a Greyhound and ate nothing but bologna sandwiches, you would have needed both time off work and a place to stay for a month.
But now, you can access research materials all over the world via free wi-fi. Let's look at some of the sites which help you write better because you know more.
The JSTOR website is a repository of academic writing ( JSTOR = JOURNAL STORAGE).
If you write for a group or a school or a company which can afford to pay the modest JSTOR subscription fee, you'll have access to all kinds of cool info. But if, like me, you only need a couple of articles now and then, you can read up to six articles a month for free! It costs to download articles, but you can read them on the site for nothing. You just register with an email and a password. Most recently, I used JSTOR to find an article in an obscure educational journal from 1952. Back issues of that academic publication go for fifty bucks an issue, so online reading at a cost of zero was awesome.
If you've looked at used books on Amazon lately, you'll see that the payment system doesn't work for small booksellers. The sellers these days are big warehouses. They are so big they don't really need to compete, and costs are pretty unreasonable. I prefer to support small businesses, and if I can pay a fair price for a book at one place, I've saved enough to buy a second volume. Thus I go to the ABEBooks site to shop for books I can't get from the library, or materials I know I'm going to need to use frequently. The site shows me used books available at small local stores. I've been happy with the sellers who put their inventories on the site.
Another boon the Computer Age has brought us is the upgrading of the dreaded Interlibrary Loan system into statewide networks of libraries. It used to be a hassle, even once you'd even discovered that your local library could get materials from other libraries, to file a request and they took forever. And once you'd borrowed the book, the due date was similar to an eviction notice or a MasterCharge bill -- miss it at your peril. If you were late a day more than once, they'd block you from the system for three months, I think. Or six months?
Now, if I can't find a book or DVD or music CD from my local library, the library's website will allow me to search MaineCat, the network of Maine libraries found east to west and north to south. Public libraries, university libraries, and privately-funded libraries all participate. And because the orders go through digitally, there is sometimes a wait for a book to travel from Fort Kent, up near the Canadian border, all the way down to Southern Maine where I live. But it's a much shorter wait than the old Interlibrary Loan system used to put me through.
To make sure this is true across the U.S., I randomly chose Kansas to check and they do the same thing.
And there's a super-system for library searches in-state or out-of-state: WorldCat.
Now, where I found the listing for the Kansas-wide catalog system was through the Kansas State Library. Each of the U.S. states has its own library and while they don't lend out materials like your local public library, you can go there and do research. And your trusty source of free wi-fi can take you through the electronic resources your own State Library has to offer. Here's just a partial list of what Kansas makes available to its residents:
Residents pay taxes to support their State Libraries, and as U.S. citizens, our Federal taxes pay for us to go to the Libary of Congress website and look stuff up. I find their image bank of hundreds of thousands of old photographs a real treasure trove.
Last on my low-cost or no-cost research list today is Internet Archive.
What isn't on the site? Check out this random snip of page full of search results -- a children's book, an old detective magazine, a 78 rpm record, a 1951 Reader's Digest Condensed Book, and on and on. . . How it works is that you register for free with email and then you "check out" digital items for a limited time. I have found several out-of-print books that I couldn't find anywhere else right here on the site.
Good researching to you all. Be smarter than the President! Look things up.
 |
| Garbo |
Comments
Post a Comment