"Compiling Bibliography" explores strategies and resources for compiling a bibliography of an author's works, using as an example the author Douglas Sladen, whose works "Oriental Cairo" and "Queer Things about Egypt" are included in the online Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). We discuss using WorldCat and the online database for the Times of London Archives, and provide some useful hints for managing your research. This is part three of a nine-part course that uses Sladen's work for a case study on performing historical research.
What can an author's bibliography tell us about him or her and the particular work
we are researching?
If you are working on a research project such as an
investigation of Douglas Sladen, author of
Oriental Cairo: City of the Arabian
Nights , knowing more about
what he has written can enable us to understand his background, interests, possible biases, and expertise. In our previousmodule on Sladen, whose work is included in the
Travelers in
the Middle East Archive , we examined
how to research biography . Now we turn to the
process of building a bibliography, which can include not only books but alsopersonal letters, reviews of other books or responses to reviews of his or her work,
later or earlier editions of the work you are researching, etc. We will examine the process oflocating everything by a particular author to demonstrate the variety of information such a search
can produce. For some major authors such as Shakespeare, scholars have already prepared extensivebibliographies listing not only works by the author but about him or her. We might also have luck
using a reference work such as
The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature or
Dictionary of Literary Biography, which lists authors'
major works. The
Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue will also contain a listing of all works published in Britain, its colonies and the US from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of World War I. However, let's do our own research to determine what Sladen has written. In our previous research into his
biography, we learned that Sladen wrote over 60 books; let's find out what they are.
Confirming the identity of your author
First, we have to make sure that we
have enough information to identify one Douglas Sladen from another. For that we willgo to
[link] WorldCat, an online catalog that searches the holdings of thousands of libraries.
If you are unfamiliar with the WorldCat, visit our
WorldCat module.
In order to make sure that the information we gather is for the author of
"Oriental Cairo" and not another author with the same name, we should perform a search forthe book by entering its title, logically enough, into the title field.
Once you have found "Oriental Cairo," take a note of the full name, birth and
death dates of Douglas Sladen. It will not always be productive to enter all of thisinformation when we are searching for his works--he may be listed only be first and last
name--but it will enable us to differentiate him from other Douglas Sladens.
Receive real-time job alerts and never miss the right job again
Source:
OpenStax, Conducting historical research: the case of "oriental cairo". OpenStax CNX. Oct 23, 2006 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10291/1.4
Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google Inc.
Notification Switch
Would you like to follow the 'Conducting historical research: the case of "oriental cairo"' conversation and receive update notifications?
