The Oxford Guide to Library Research is one of those books that I had to buy because the library insisted on having their copy back, and I was nowhere near having extracted all the information I could from it. I’m still not, though I’ve discovered infovore treats unforseen. The bio of the author, Thomas Mann, lists him as being a former PI, presently Reference Librarian at the Library of Congress – in other words, there’s probably not a lot he doesn’t know about finding things out.

He starts with a rousing defense of the physical library versus the virtual resources of the internet, and then goes on to describe how to identify and use the resources that currently are available only within libraries – copyrighted materials and proprietary databases. He describes the wonderful world of specialist encyclopedias, attempts to elucidate LOC subject headings for the uninitiated, and points the readers towards specialist databases. Having had the humbling experience of knowing a book existed, and yet completely missing it in my subject searches in my local university library (memo to self: if you know the author, search the author), I was somewhat consoled to discover that yup, efficient searching is hard. Swinging from subject heading to subject heading, browsing the stacks, hunting down bibliographies and encyclopedias, combing through lists of references, and serendipity are all recognized search methods, if applied intelligently. I can’t say that I am much more enlightened as to the intricacies of the LOC classification – some fluency in MeSH does not prepare one for pursuing books on naval history from D to V.

I’m sure it makes sense to those who understand the knowledge domain, but searching is not independent of the knowledge domain. What I fancy is the ability to display all books (or other materials) related – through common subject headings – to a given book, expanded out to two or three times removed, and graphed in clusters by subject heading, so given a start point, one would get an immediate, integrated picture of how things are related in L(ibrary)-space.