wherein Liz has a minor library adventure, with mixed results
Today I failed at retrieving books from Cornell. It turns out that Olin library has a bunch of the books I'm interested in, and they are available for borrowing rather than the kind of huge and/or delicate reference texts that cannot be removed from the building. Yay! However, it further turns out that in order for a member of the general public to get a library card, you can't just fill out a form at the circulation desk. You have to go down a hall and around the corner to the library office... which closes at 3:30pm on Fridays, and I didn't arrive until 4:00pm, dammit. And while the library itself is open every day, the office is not open on weekends, so I will either have to get up an hour early Monday morning or wait until Wednesday which is my next day off work. Argh.
Still, the books are there! I noted down the call numbers, wrote down some other titles I found while browsing the catalogue, and physically visited the stacks to verify that the books that were listed as available were, in fact, available (and shelved correctly) -- that not being a thing one can wholly trust. I had a bad moment when I initially failed to find them, before I realized I was searching among the oversized books rather than the normally-sized books. (Olin's shelving system is not very intuitive that way, and their little cheat-sheet map thingy is not especially intuitive either.) The oversized section was fascinating in its own way, though, since I discovered a complete multi-volume edition of a wonderful primary source I hadn't even thought to check for in the catalogue, since I'd assumed it was the kind of specialty thing one only finds in national archives and most of them in Europe... but then again, it's a very important and broad-ranging primary source so on second thought I don't know why I assumed Cornell wouldn't have a copy. The Olin library copy is beyond old -- actual leather bindings that are falling apart from age in some places -- but man, so cool. (I'm probably not going to use that source, since it is so huge that it's not very useful unless you already have a reasonable idea of what you're looking for, and/or a whole week to spare, neither of which criteria I meet. That does not stop the little thrill of glee at knowing I could get lost in it, should I so desire.)
I also used Cornell's JSTOR subscription to read a brief article I had noted as being of peripheral background interest -- more a character reference than anything directly pertinent to the incident I'm hanging my Yuletide fic around. I forgot to bring my flash drive with me so I couldn't save the PDF, but since it was, as previously stated, of peripheral rather than direct interest, that's not a huge loss. And it does mean I can go ahead and use the character interpretation/attitude I was planning on... which is more or less the one from canon, but since canon has thus far skipped almost entirely over this portion of my main character's life -- it would not have fit tidily into the narrative flow, for various reasons -- it's nice to have some professional historical support for my choices. :-)
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Still, the books are there! I noted down the call numbers, wrote down some other titles I found while browsing the catalogue, and physically visited the stacks to verify that the books that were listed as available were, in fact, available (and shelved correctly) -- that not being a thing one can wholly trust. I had a bad moment when I initially failed to find them, before I realized I was searching among the oversized books rather than the normally-sized books. (Olin's shelving system is not very intuitive that way, and their little cheat-sheet map thingy is not especially intuitive either.) The oversized section was fascinating in its own way, though, since I discovered a complete multi-volume edition of a wonderful primary source I hadn't even thought to check for in the catalogue, since I'd assumed it was the kind of specialty thing one only finds in national archives and most of them in Europe... but then again, it's a very important and broad-ranging primary source so on second thought I don't know why I assumed Cornell wouldn't have a copy. The Olin library copy is beyond old -- actual leather bindings that are falling apart from age in some places -- but man, so cool. (I'm probably not going to use that source, since it is so huge that it's not very useful unless you already have a reasonable idea of what you're looking for, and/or a whole week to spare, neither of which criteria I meet. That does not stop the little thrill of glee at knowing I could get lost in it, should I so desire.)
I also used Cornell's JSTOR subscription to read a brief article I had noted as being of peripheral background interest -- more a character reference than anything directly pertinent to the incident I'm hanging my Yuletide fic around. I forgot to bring my flash drive with me so I couldn't save the PDF, but since it was, as previously stated, of peripheral rather than direct interest, that's not a huge loss. And it does mean I can go ahead and use the character interpretation/attitude I was planning on... which is more or less the one from canon, but since canon has thus far skipped almost entirely over this portion of my main character's life -- it would not have fit tidily into the narrative flow, for various reasons -- it's nice to have some professional historical support for my choices. :-)
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