An oldie but a
goodie
Several months ago I came across a reference that I
wanted to read:
Price, D. J. de S. (1956) 'The exponential curve of
science'. Discovery, 17(1), pp.240–243.
The subject matter of the paper is of little concern for
this post but the journey I had in locating it is noteworthy for those reliant
on inter library loans or resource discovery services (RDS).
When I refer to RDSs I am meaning new technologies within
the library profession that facilitate a single search approach to finding
academic materials. Gone are the days of having to look through three or four
databases relevant for your subject/topic as the RDS does it all for you in one
place. The University of Bedfordshire has an RDS in DISCOVER (lrweb.beds.ac.uk/discover).
Going back to Price’s (1956) paper, the University of
Bedfordshire library did not have a copy so I did what all good researchers do
and requested it via inter library loan (UoB call it document supply and it is
a great service (lrweb.beds.ac.uk/libraryservices/docsupply)).
Unfortunately I got a reply from the British Library
stating that they could not find the article even though the information I
provided was accurate. The British Library provide an excellent (but automated)
service so I started thinking about why this has happened?
I decided to check on the British Library catalogue
convinced they should have the paper.
A title search gave me nothing.
But remembering a colleague of mine facetiously rambling “it’s
the quality of the metadata” what dawned on me was that the age of the paper (1956)
may be too old for there to be metadata about the paper I want. Database
providers may not have the resource to provide metadata for old papers, in
effect meaning that the only way to know about Price (1956) is by the old ways
(checking references lists of papers and browsing through catalogues) but not
the new ways (relying on RDS’).
So if I can’t search the article title, I was hoping for
some luck searching by publication.
My first thought was that the title of the journal (Discovery)
was too generic a word. According to the British Library records there are 35
journal titles beginning with “Discovery”. My solution at this point would be
for a visit to the British Library itself and look one by one until I get
lucky. This may sound like too much effort for some. The new ways in searching
for words and phrases in databases is much of what librarians teach. My
solution at this point would be for a visit to the British Library itself and
look one by one until I get lucky.
The RDS the British Library has is good but for this
particular information request it was the remnants of the British Library
catalogue that helped me for an article from 1956. I also looked for the
catalogue of a top university library and noticed that the library catalogue
had disappeared and had been replaced by an RDS. A researcher may become
conditioned (due to the successes of RDS’) that a metadata search will be
sufficient (let us call this Plan A) when the Plan B of relying on browsing,
looking at references and spending more time for the search process can lead to
success.
An accompanying argument can be made that old articles
are old and should not be used when compared to more recent articles. Academic
librarians work in a system that supports that type of thinking but a more
sensible thought could be that it depends on the circumstances. Price’s (1956) paper
is perfect for me but it has been buried due to the popularity of new methods
getting in the way of old methods.
Ask yourself how
reliant you are on Resource Discovery Services dictating your information world
and how old journal articles may only be located via the references of papers.
