Life as a library researcher

Scanning the list of editorial staff on the OED website, you may notice that amongst the Assistant Editors may be found a small, solid concentration of library researchers. Are we, perhaps, nostalgic recent graduates, still haunting academic libraries because still stuck in the rhythm of preparing for a weekly essay?

Are we filling in time, as my mother used to say about girls who took token employment before getting married? Not so. Junior though we may be in terms of job title, we are of all ages up to late fifties (me). We all have higher degrees, wider than average linguistic knowledge, and experience of jobs or careers in the outside world. Other library researchers, mostly similarly mature and well-qualified, work as freelancers in the Bodleian, the British Library, the Library of Congress, and major libraries in Toronto, New York, Boston, New Haven, and Riverside, California. We are all responsible to our manager in Oxford, Melinda Babcock, who keeps in touch with us by e-mail or through weekly or intermittent meetings, distributes our work, and generally mediates between us and the rest of the editorial staff and management.

How do we spend our time? Is our work purely ancillary to that of the many editors? Do we simply check the spelling and punctuation of quotations to be used in OED entries, convert those that require it to their form in the earliest available edition, and provide the page numbers or wordings that do not appear in electronic databases? (Literature Online, a much-used literary database, gives page numbers but not the folio or signature numbers that occur in early printed books. Nexis, a newspaper database, includes some paraphrases of newspaper stories, which then have to be checked against the originals.)

So far, so mechanical. We do a large amount of this work, usually in answer to individual requests, but sometimes in the form of pre-arranged batches of quotations taken from a single source. Even in the ideal surroundings of the Bodleian Library, too much of this kind of thing can induce the feeling that ‘research’ is a euphemism for what we do. Luckily, this is not all. An apparently rudimentary task can make unexpected demands, as when (for example) a researcher realizes that a previously misunderstood quotation has led to the misdefinition of a word; or when a quotation already published in the OED simply cannot be found in the source to which it is attributed; or when it is found after a search, in a place quite different from the location given.

Often, too, an editor asks a researcher to clarify the sense of a word by looking at it in a wider context than that of the minimal or obscure quotation that he (or she) has to hand. Or he may need help with dating an item, or may ask for new, antedating or postdating examples of the use of a word, either in general or in a particular sense. This involves finding quotations from any English-language source, dated earlier or later than any of those already published in the OED, those found on the databases consulted by editors, or those gathered from material sent in by readers. Equally, he may ask us to interdate two quotations dating from (say) 1630 and 1880. Using our background knowledge, initiative, and capacity for lateral thinking, we then become creatively involved in the editorial process. Sometimes, to spare us too much time or exertion, an editor may point us towards a specific secondary source found in an on-line library catalogue. This may be a start, or it may be a dead end. Often we are on our own, refining our own database searches; scanning through bibliographies and indexes; remembering books used for similar, previous requests; or, if we work in the Bodleian (where we are privileged to have stack access), browsing in the section or sections of the stack devoted to a particular subject.

As for concrete examples of the kind of word-finding that we do: dealing with up to thirty-five separate requests a week, one forgets individual instances fairly rapidly until, for some reason, they re-surface in a later bundle of requests. However, I will give a couple from the ‘O’ range which have come my way recently.

‘Oyster cellar n.: please antedate.’ I'm always happy to be given food-related requests, and this was an unexpectedly easy one. There is, as yet, no comprehensive electronic database of diaries or letters, the kind of source in which this seemed most likely to occur. To judge from the few quotations already given in OED2, oyster cellars were mainly Scottish or (later) American. I unsuccessfully tried Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851), and skimmed a handful of oyster-related books in the Bodleian, before trying the index to James Boswell's Journal. This revealed, indeed, that, in eighteenth-century Edinburgh, Boswell visited an oyster cellar, substantially antedating the existing nineteenth-century examples.

Orion's hound n. An editor had found the phrase on an Internet site, which quoted it from a recent, slightly off-beat book about astronomy and the Iliad. Would I please (she asked) check the phrase in the book to provide a recent example of its use. Fair enough, except that in the book it comes in an extract from a Victorian prose translation of the Iliad. Was the editor aware, I wondered, that this name for Sirius was a direct translation of the Greek? Orion's hound was already in OED, with a single quotation from Spenser; I supplied an additional quotation for Orion's hound from Chapman's translation of Homer, together with quotations for Orion's dog (an alternative name, not given in OED2) from other versions of the Iliad by Hobbes (1676) and Pope (1720).

Library research is culturally enriching, even addictive; and its constant variety and interconnectedness can compensate for what some might regard as lack of depth. It also requires a fairly flexible, intuitive approach, despite the strict guidelines laid down for researchers. (Follow instructions exactly; do not deviate from the point.) As editorial requests are issued without discussion, it sometimes helps if a researcher can anticipate the next step or two. Does the editor, for example, want only a simple conversion when with minimal extra effort one can give a general antedating or postdating? Sometimes antedatings happen unbidden, as when the requested conversion of a quotation to an earlier source reveals the existence of a still earlier one, allowing the intermediate source to be bypassed.

I also like to send in odd voluntary slips with new quotations which have caught my eye in the course of work, especially for OED entries in the current or imminent ranges. A distraction from the task in hand? Yes; but a marginal, fleeting one, from which something valuable can usually be learnt. And so much better than the annoyance of endlessly remembering the sentence that you might have written down, if you could only remember the name and chapter of the book in which you had once skimmed over it.