Rare Book Monthly
The Collaborative Project:Building An Anti-Slavery Book Collection Focusing On Women
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Then there are the new searches that I have yet to perform. There are at least five general topics that I suspect will yield hundreds of results, only a fraction of which will be applicable to my topic. But if I don’t perform these searches, I will be cheating myself and this project, as I am sure that within these mammoth searches I’ll find some records or “matches” of use to me that I haven’t seen before. These five huge general keyword searches that I have yet to perform are the following: -Anti-Slavery (& Weed Out Women); -Slavery (& Weed Out Women); -Abolitionist (& Weed Out Women); -Female (& Weed Out Slavery/Abolition)-; and -Woman (& Weed Out Slavery/Abolition). The thought of these searches is quite daunting as they involve wading through literally many hundreds if not thousands of records one by one to find applicable items and reject others that don’t fit my parameters.
And I won’t be done here. After I perform these five huge general keyword searches listed above there are still other “to dos,” some other searches that will need to be performed. The most obvious is the proper name search of about 65 names that I mentioned previously: I need to search for each and every one of these names (& its variations) in the AED. I would also like to go through my collected “wants” or “match” list and cull names of various anti-slavery and/or abolitionist societies and search for these organizations specifically. And I would like to go on Abebooks.com and like internet book selling sites and perform some general “females & abolition” type searches to see if they come up with proper names or titles or keyword phrases that I don’t yet have but that should be added to my “to do” list.
Finally, once I’ve done all of these ideal searches as sketched out above I’ll probably have to weed my “wants” or “match" list once again for duplicates, pro-slavery material, and/or material not by or addressed to women that may have somehow slipped in. Oh yes: once I have my cumulative, weeded, working list of “wants” or “matches” (which, let’s face it, will always be growing as the AED is perpetually adding new records to its resources) I’ll have to search, item by item, record by record, on Abebooks.com and other internet book selling sites to try to “price” and “procure” or “obtain” the items in question, assuming the condition and price is theoretically right.
So far, I am assuming that the “buying” part of TCP will be purely theoretical. But who knows: maybe by the time I am ready to “buy,” a rich but distant relative whom I never knew will have passed on, surprisingly leaving me a small fortune with which I could pursue this project in earnest? If that unlikely scenario were to occur, I would and could “play this game” with real, not “monopoly” money, and both I and my book collections would be that much the richer for it.
