Rare Book Monthly
The Collaborative Project:Building An Anti-Slavery Book Collection Focusing On Women
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As to the “outcome” part of TCP, I was sure from the outset that I wanted to try and “price” and “acquire” these materials from online internet book selling sites: I figured that if I was going to go through the trouble of building a “wants” list, it would stand to reason that I would eventually want to own these books and other printed materials. Besides, I told myself, who knows: maybe I’d find some material along the way that was actually affordable to me. Maybe I would really build this collection. (Since I’m not at that point of my project yet this still remains to be determined.)
Once I had settled on my topic and had superficially perused the AE Database, I started building my “wants” list in earnest. This involved performing myriad of Keyword, Basic, Advanced, and other searches of the AED and copying and pasting each “match” or record into a separate Microsoft Word document (now nearly 175 pages long) in which I kept track of my running list. Each time I performed a search I typed the Keyword or Phrase or Author or whatever the specific search was into my Microsoft Word Document, and then I pasted the results in under this “New Search” label. I also summarized my results in a sort of shorthand; an example would be “-Mrs. & slavery: 40 matches, of which 33 are relevant-DONE.“
I bring up this last actual example for a reason: I found that as I continued with my searches, my methodology changed accordingly. For instance, at first I did a lot of searches with the words “woman” or “women” in them combined with a term like “abolition” or “slavery” Then I realized that one reason I was getting such frustrating results (either I’d get so many “matches” as to be unwieldy, or I’d get very few, if any, relevant “matches” at all) was because I’d been making a grave mistake: I had been searching with a modern vocabulary, not with a 19th century lexicon. It quickly dawned on me that I had to phrase my searches as title pages or library/auction records would have been written many years ago, not on how they would be classified today.
Using this line of thinking brought me to construct many searches employing terms like “female,” “ladies,” and “Miss,” or “Mrs.” in conjunction with a modifying term like “abolition.” I found many more hits this way. I will also embarrassingly admit to all of AEM’s readership that I mistakenly executed one or two initial searches by typing in the word “and,” even though the AE Database instructions -- which I had helped to write -- warn the AED user to employ the ampersand key “&” instead of the word “and.” Once I caught myself on this grievous error I was able to redo the two or so searches I had done incorrectly, this time with satisfactory results. And I must say that I have never forgotten that ampersand rule since!
