With the rapid proliferation of machine readable data bases, computerized literature searching is getting to be more than a technological curiosity for historians.
The widespread use of microcomputers for word processing is also making it possible for any historian to search these data bases from his or her home or office.
But what is possible is not necessarily worthwhile. Are there good reasons for learning how to do computerized literature searching? Or are researchers better off relying on the services provided by their institution’s library?
I am not going to propose unequivocal answers to these questions. Each individual should assess his or her situation. Much depends on the amount and type of bibliographic searching you do. Much also depends on how comfortable you feel about working with computers. And much depends on the quality of the data bases searching services available at your library. But I will attempt to provide enough information to allow you to begin such an assessment.
One should first consider how much use one may be making of the available data bases. While it is not possible in a short article to give an exhaustive description of all of the data bases of potential interest to historians, I will try to give some idea of their scope. Of particular interest are the two data bases produced by ABC-Clio which correspond to Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life. Also important are the Institute for Scientific Information’s Social Sciences Citation Index and its Arts and Humanities Citation Index (which will soon become available online). Historians will also want to search Dissertation Abstracts and the MARC and REMARC data bases, which include almost all of the western language books ever cataloged by the Library of Congress.
Many other data bases will interest historians with particular specialties. These include The Philosopher’s Index, The MLA Bibliography, Sociological Abstracts, the ERIC data bases (in education) and the data base corresponding to the Government Printing Office’s Monthly Catalog of Government Publications.
The above data bases, taken together, provide fairly good (although not complete) coverage of recent periodical articles, dissertations, English-language books, and recently published US government documents. Lacking is extensive coverage of the older periodical literature, unpublished materials, and all but a fraction of the books and articles published in foreign languages. It should be noted that all of the above mentioned data bases have printed counterparts, which often include earlier literature not included in the online versions.
Why would a historian want to search these data bases from a computer terminal instead of using the printed index es? The first reason is speed and convenience. It is possible to search in a few minutes by computer an array of sources which it would require many hours to go through in the library. It is also a great convenience to have the computer write out a list of citations, including in some cases abstracts, which it would be laborious to copy by hand.
It is possible to ferret-out types of information by computer which would be extremely difficult to locate through a manual search. A computer can look for key words in the titles and abstracts of articles which may not be reflected in the printed index. This capability is useful when you are looking for materials on a subject that is so new or unusual that it is not adequately indexed.
The computer can also search out and then combine terms to locate materials on narrow compound topics. This is an ability that the researcher working on a subject, like the history of Italian immigrant women in large cities in the Unit ed States at the end of the nineteenth century, will find most useful. It would be laborious to winnow-out articles on a topic like this by looking up articles under such subjects as “women,” “Italian-Americans,” or “immigrants.” The computer’s ability to locate materials which contain all or a combination of these terms makes such a literature search relatively simple.
Thus, it is clear that most historians have at least some potential use for data base searches. Computerized searches are likely to be most useful to scholars who want to locate recently published materials, to gain a quick overview of the literature on a subject, to supplement the results of a manual search, or to look for materials on certain specialized topics. What is not so clear is whether it is better for the individual historian to conduct such searches on his or her own, or whether they are better done with the aid of a librarian. The considerations to ponder here are cost and expertise.
Data base searching is not inexpensive. Even the historian who already owns a microcomputer (or a “dumb” terminal attached to a printer) will have to invest around $200 for a modem, a communication port, and communications software just to be able to connect with the commercial vendors of these data bases. Next, the would-be searcher will have to pay a variety of fees to a data base vendor. The two leading vendors of academically oriented data bases are Bibliographic Retrieval Services (BRS) and Lockheed’s Dialog (which is the exclusive vendor of the important ABC Clio data bases). The fees for a vendor actually conducting a search include telecommunications charges, computer time charges, and data base royalties. You can expect to pay about $20 for a typical literature search on a fairly narrow subject in several data bases, al though the actual cost of searches varies greatly.
There are ways in which these costs can be reduced. Perhaps you can persuade your department to buy some computer equipment or to subsidize part of the cost of the actual literature searches. Bibliographic Retrieval Services (BRS) and Lockheed’s Dialog also offer after-hours searching at reduced fees. Historians would, however, do well to be wary of these after-hours services. As of this writing they do not offer some of the data bases of greatest interest to historians. In addition, both of these after-hours services have a command structure that is easier to use, but also less powerful and sophisticated, than the regular services.
In any consideration of costs, you should investigate the cost of searches which you can have performed at your library. Libraries have already paid for their hardware and start-up costs, and as quantity users of data base services, they can often obtain discounts. Libraries are also sometimes willing to pick up all or a portion of the connect-hour and royalty charges of a search. Where searches are subsidized through the library, the historian who only needs an occasional search might do well to think twice about the cost of “do-it-yourself.”
The other factor to consider in deciding whether to do your own searching is expertise. The fundamentals of data base searching are easy to learn, and anyone who can type and think should be able to master the basics in a few hours. Ninety percent of computerized literature searching involves nothing more than the typing in of key terms in conjunction with locational operators (which specify where in a document the computer should search for the terms) and combining them with Boolian operators (and, or, not). Using these simple techniques, the novice researcher can conduct a search and obtain useful results with little practice.
However, it is one thing to get useful results and another to get consistently good results. In some ways computerized literature searching is not as simple as it seems. The various data bases you may want to search are structured some what differently. Consequently, a search strategy that gives excellent results in one data base may not work well in another. Thus, you cannot search for keywords in an abstract in a data base that contains no abstracts, and you will find that different data bases require you to search for authors’ names using different formats. You will also find that some data bases are divided into differently structured segments. Thus in Dissertation Abstracts it is possible to search the full text of abstracts for the past few years, but this is not possible in the bulk of the file. These examples of differences and inconsistencies can be multi plied many fold.
The worst news for the would-be historical searcher is that the most useful data bases for historians are among the most difficult to search—namely, the Institute for Scientific Information’s Social Science Citation Index, and ABC Clio’s Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life. All three of these data bases have segments which differ significantly in structure depending on when they were produced. All three have a variety of quirks which are pitfalls for the unwary. And some of the features of these data bases which make them particularly useful also make them unusually difficult to search. Thus, it is possible to restrict one’s searches in ABC-Clio’s data bases to particular historical periods, but the structure of these data bases makes it difficult to do so without eliminating large numbers of relevant documents. In fact, a small cottage industry has arisen in which data base searchers tell each other how to search these data bases. The prospective searcher would do well to read one or two of these articles, several of which I have listed at the end of this piece. These techniques can be learned with application, but they are also easy for the occasional searcher to forget.
Historians with IBM compatible or Texas Instruments computers may want to consider investing in a newly released piece of software published by the Menlo Corporation of Santa Clara California called In-Search, which lists for $399. This software guides the searcher step by-step through the construction of Lockheed Dialog searches and (like many less costly communications software packages) makes it possible to construct searches “offline” without using expensive computer time. While this software simplifies the process of searching for the beginner, it does not eliminate many of the difficulties of performing sophisticated searches on complex data bases like Historical Abstracts and Social Sciences Citation Index.
Because of the costs and difficulties of doing your own data base searching, you may well want to do your searches with a librarian at the keyboard. In a well-constituted library search service, specially trained librarians devote at least several hours per week to data base searching. They are therefore likely to be more skilled at the techniques of searching than a scholar who conducts only occasional searches. Usually the librarian and the researcher collaborate in formulating and conducting a search.
If all goes well, this enables the historian’s subject expertise to combine with the librarian’s expertise in data base searching to produce superior results. Unfortunately, such services are not always available, and it is not always easy to schedule a search when you want one. The answer for some historians may be to do their easier searches at home and save up the more elaborate ones to do in collaboration with a librarian.
In conclusion, there is no simple answer to the question: Should data base searching be a do-it-yourself activity? Many historians who own microcomputers may well want to experiment with computerized literature searching. At the very least, any knowledge about the capabilities of computerized literature searching gained from such experimentation would be worth having. But I suspect that only a small minority of historians will want to do much computerized literature searching on their own. These will be the hard-core compute addicts, and those who do not have high-quality computer searching services available at their libraries.
David Y. Allen is a reference librarian at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and has a PhD in history.
