How do the perspectives of women and men writing about Cairo in the first
quarter of the twentieth century differ from one another?
How has writing about Cairo changed over time?
With these questions in mind, we will demonstrate the process of building a
list of works with which to compare your central text.
Collecting the titles that share a common subject heading
We will build our
list by using the Library of Congress by Subject Heading. Since the Library of Congresscatalog lists only its own holdings, we
will use WorldCat to do our research. WorldCat also uses the Library of Congress SubjectHeadings, but it searches the holdings of
libraries all over the world. For a brief tutorial on WorldCat, visit our
WorldCat module . Here, we will be taking the
information we gathered at the Library of Congress and performing an Advanced Search toproduce lists that meet our research needs. You can use either the full version of
WorldCat , which many libraries subscribe to, or
WorldCat.org , which is free but has more
limited features. Below we demonstrate the full version.
Once you have arrived at the
WorldCat homepage, select the Advanced Search option. Enter the Subject Headinginformation into the text box exactly as it appeared in
the Library of Congress result. Then use the pulldown menu and select the word Subject. It should then appear inthe box instead of Keyword.
Doing a subject search in WorldCat Select Search and you will be provided with everything WorldCat has
categorized under the Subject Heading: "Cairo (Egypt)--Description and travel.""Oriental Cairo" appears as the fifteenth result out of one hundred and fifty-six
books.Now we will narrow this list down based on how we wish to compare them to
"Oriental Cairo". The following sections are headed by some of theresearch questions listed above. We will use WorldCat's
Advanced Search features to explore related resources according to criteria such aspublication place and date.
How does "oriental cairo" compare with similar works published
around the same time by other people from great britain?
For this list we will need to locate works
published from England within five years of "Oriental Cairo." Return tothe WorldCat Advanced Search page and re-enter the Subject Heading information in to the
first text box as we did above.
Next, in the second text box type the word London, a major publishing hub in
Britain. Then use the pulldown menu to select Publisher Location.
In the box labeled Year, type the year that fell five years before the
publication of "Oriental Cairo" in 1911 and that year that fell fiveyears after it with a dash in between them. Your entry should look like this:
Searching WorldCat for Related Works Published in London Select Search and you will find three titles that seem to fit our criteria for
comparing "Oriental Cairo" to the works of Douglas Sladen'sBritish contemporaries: Walter Tyndale's
Below the cataracts (1907),
A.O. Lamplough and R. Francis's
Cairo and its environs (1909), and John
Patrick Barry's
At the gates of the East (1906).
WorldCat Results If your library does not have these works and you would like to examine them,
you can request that the library borrow them through
Interlibrary Loan . Note that the WorldCat record typically provides a link to
Interlibrary Loan for your library to make it easy to borrow works you've found.
How does "oriental cairo" compare with works published from
another region, say the united states for example?
For this list we will return to
the Advanced Search page and reenter our Subject Heading information. Since we can onlysearch the publication place by city, we should now enter a few publishing hubs from the
United States,namely Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Make sure you separate the names of the cities
with the word "or" so that the search engine will not offer you entries that include allthree instead of one or the others. Your entry should look like this:
Searching WorldCat for US works Notice that in the third entry from the top both London and Philadelphia are
listed as cities of publication.
WorldCat Result: Work published in the US and Great Britain Some books, particularly popular ones, were published both in the United States and Great Britain.
In order to determine where the author is from, we may need to do some additionalresearch.
You now have two lists of works published in different regions all having to
do with traveling and describing the city of Cairo.
How has writing about cairo changed over time?
For this list we shall not limit our search by date so that we might get the
widest range of publication dates possible. In order to keep our list manageable we willlimit our search by region once again, continuing with the publications coming out of
London. Return to the Advanced Search screen and re-enter the subject headings andpublisher location information into the text boxes. Do not, however, enter anything into
the date text box. Your entry should look like this:
Searching WorldCat for works on Cairo from different periods Your search should produce around thirty or so results from the first half of the
eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first
.
To put them in order by date select the Sort option at the upper left hand of
the screen.
Sort by Date You will have several sorting options. Use the arrow next to the text box to
scroll down to the Date option and then select the Ascending option to the right ofthat box to move from earliest to latest dates.
When you return to your results, the entries should be arranged in order from the
earliest publication to the latest. From this list you may select the works that seem mostappropriate, in relatively even increments of years from the beginning of your designated
period to the end.
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?
