An Evening of Research

Yesterday I finished research and then wrote a paper on the historical background to the acclamation of Herod Agrippa as a god (Acts 12:20-23).  That was the last of seven short research papers/projects of the semester.  This afternoon I started research on my major one.  The assignment is to produce an article of publishable quality not longer than 8,500 words dealing with primary sources related to a background issue in the New Testament.  My topic is Jesus’s cleansing of the temple.

I started today and the paper is due in a month.  Since I’m losing nearly a week to a couple of conferences in New Orleans and since there are other things to do in that time, I know I’m in a bad place.  There was no way I could have done any better than I have, so I will make the best of it.

This afternoon I started research, and as I wound things up tonight, I was reflecting on how different research is today than it used to be. I thought that those who hadn’t done much research in recent years might be interested to get a glimpse of the process in 2009.  When I wrote my first masters thesis, I spent a lot of agurot at the library across town xeroxing sections of books.  They had the catalog on computer, but it was quite primitive and you had to write each call number down and then go search through the stacks.  I had a computer, but everything was done manually.

I started this afternoon by reading a 50-page chapter written directly on my subject.  It’s from an unpublished book that one of my professors is editing and he graciously (I think) shared it with me.  It has a lot of references that I copied into a Word doc.  I read another article, the one that provoked me to write on the subject, and I copied some more references.  Both of these articles I have in electronic format, so I didn’t type anything; just copy/paste.

I sorted the 5-page list into sections: Books, Journals, Josephus, Rabbinic sources, Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha/Pseudepigrapha, and Other.  This is to facilitate gathering these sources.  I’m in a particular rush since I hope to have several hours tomorrow in the library, and I’d like to avoid an extra trip to the library during the next two weeks when I don’t have classes.  The more sources I have in hand, the more likely I ‘ll be able to make it through.

Finally, we get to the interesting part, or at least the part I thought might be of most interest to those who have researched lately.  I first went to work on the book list, with the goal of creating a list that I can take to the library in the morning for books to copy (portions thereof) or check out.  I did this by searching the school library’s catalog using my bibliographic database software (Endnote).  You can quickly type in the author’s last name and a book title and the record will be automatically imported into the software.  This includes the call number.  I did this for about 30 books and I would guess it took about 30 minutes.  Soon I ‘ll print off the list, ready to take in the morning.  This doesn’t tell me if the book is checked out, but if I don’t see it on the shelf in the morning, I ‘ll do another search on my computer and any books that are checked out, I ‘ll put a hold on them (with the press of a mouse button).

Now to journals.  I have a list of 17 journal articles.  I logged into ATLA, a journal database, and searched for each in turn.  When I found one, I would first save it as a pdf file (if available), and then save the citation in Endnote format.  Of the 17 articles, 10 were available as pdf.  All 17 of the records are now saved in my database.  That took just over 30 minutes.

In short, in less than two hours, I have:

1) A list of 30 books, sorted by call number

2) 10 journal articles in electronic format (no copying required)

3) 7 journal articles in a list, which I will pull from the library in the morning and scan directly to pdf.  Copying is a thing of the past.  I can scan using a copy machine (=fast) and it saves it directly as a pdf file.  If the book is real big, there’s no need to turn the book around again and again, as the copy machine handles 11×17.

4) About 50 sources already entered into my database program.  They ‘ll require some minor editing, but otherwise, they ‘re ready be inserted as footnotes and bibliography.

Pretty slick, eh?  We ‘ve come a long ways, even in my short lifetime.  If I was conducting this research in 1993 when I did my thesis, it would have taken, well, about the same amount of time, given that most of these sources had not even been written then.