The Library as a Space of Access: Research Q&A with Schomburg Librarian Michael Perry
View of researchers using the Schomburg Collection, when it was at the 135th Street Branch Library. Image ID: 5186396
Kiani Ned, Schomburg Center Communications Intern, writes about the importance of libraries and talks to librarian Michael Perry about the best research practices.
I have always understood the purpose of a library—tangibly, a collection and reserve of knowledge, to not only make information more accessible but to make new worlds possible.
Libraries should hold a mirror up to society. They should put information in the hands of those who must do more to access it—as if handing a metaphorical pen and paper to those disenfranchised to say “your stories matter too.” Your stories are, too, at the heart of the human experience.
I was speaking at just eight months old, telling stories by ten months old. I learned the nuances of the spaces between letters and words even before books were introduced to me in kindergarten. From a very young age, I knew that words and language would be my saving grace. For that reason, my neighborhood library was always a happy place for me. It was quiet and smelled of paper. Every kind of person entered through the doors to do any number of activities: use the computers, check out some music, research for a school project, attend an event, enter a drawing contest, or just escape to any of the quiet corners to read or giggle with friends. This library meeting point for the community offered respite for anyone who needed it.
That space helped me to begin to understand life as a commitment to learning, unlearning, and relearning. This learning, unlearning, and relearning has continued to manifest itself in all areas of my life, including my practice as an artist and writer, and as an Intern this summer in the Schomburg Center Communications department. Whilst working as an intern this summer, I’ve had access to their incredible collections of over 10 millions items by and about people of the African diaspora. While I’m deeply saddened by the fact that I’d literally never be able to make it through them all, I have become skilled at navigating the New York Public Library’s extensive online catalogs to find the resources that I was looking for, and other exciting materials.
The typical online catalog can be quite daunting with all of its dialog boxes, drop down menus and whatnot. It is worth noting that my comfort with online catalogs is the result of using the catalogs over the course of the summer! Because I’m passionate about accessibility and transparency, I sought conversation with someone who could help folks understand how to better access the information they need. I spoke with the very knowledgeable and helpful Michael Perry, a librarian in our Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, about his Basic Research 101 workshop. The workshop introduces folks to the best ways to go about online and offline research using the extensive catalogs of NYPL and other online resources.
We talked for over thirty minutes about archives, libraries, and accessibility. Check out some excerpts from our conversation below!
How did you get to the NYPL and start this work navigating databases?
I started at the New York Public Library as a librarian in training in 1993… so I’m coming up on 23 years now. I’ve always been information oriented. I like to read… I‘m just curious. I like to know things. I guess I was really lucky because I came in about a year or a year and a half before the library got the internet. The internet was brand new, then. We didn’t know what it was. It was like a black and white screen with a little cursor that spun around. There probably weren’t 10 thousand websites in the world, at that point. So, it was very limited. That was my first exposure and I kinda got to grow up with these things. I was always a computer person going back to the ‘80s with things like the Radio Shack computers and computers that have less power than my watch has and computers that took up rooms. That’s kinda where this all started. And dealing with people. People always want to know things. You have to figure it out. Basically, what we do is detective work.
My first real accomplishment as a librarian was the Mr. Softee song. I would always hear this song. It’s a nice piece of music. And I was wondering “Where did it come from?” And “are there words for this?” These were the first days of the internet. I looked everywhere, and couldn’t find anything for Mr. Softee. And then, one day Mr. Softee came to my block. It was quiet and I’m talking to the guy (working), and I asked him, “Do you know anything about this song?” He was like, “Yeah, I know the Mr. Softee song.” He actually stood there and sang the words to the Mr. Softee song, and told me the whole story. But the whole point is that you never know, with the information that you need, you never know where it is. You have to be diligent. You have to look everywhere and be open to things.
Word! So, who usually comes to Basic Research 101?
I’ve gotten librarians, library students, people interested in history, kids whose parents made them come. It runs the spectrum. You never know who’s going to show up. That’s part of the fun.
When you teach this class, how do you begin? Do you begin with a certain topic?
With librarians, when we talk about this kind of stuff… I don’t want to say that it’s boring. But it’s dry. Until you find something that’s useful to you, it’s not real. I like to take a topic that is sometimes controversial and not necessarily definite. We get to see how you get from point A to point B.
[Michael creates beautifully thorough Powerpoint presentations on topics such as black Samurais, how the White House got its name, and black horse jockeys.]
What are some best practices that you teach in Basic Research 101?
Use keywords if you have any doubt, subjects if you know exactly what you’re looking for. (Key words are natural language describing the topic. Subject headings are more controlled and exact). If you want to find a subject heading on “Martin Luther King,” you’d have to be precise; use “Martin Luther King Sr.” or “Martin Luther King the 3rd.” “Martin Luther King” as a keyword would include everything.
Most catalogs are going to give you the option to search keywords or subject headings. If you have any doubt, always go with keywords. If you’re absolutely sure, I’d use subject headings. My favorite are boolean search and boolean terms (showing relationships between “and,” “or” and “not” within search engines). When I use those, I’m doing a keyword search; books about cats and dogs, for example. It has to show me not just books about cats, and not just books about dogs. It has to have both of those topics. Or it’s just the opposite; the engine can show me cats and dogs, cats or dogs, one the other or both.
The next important thing is the parentheses. Parentheses let you take multiple terms and treat them as one word. That’s a crucial search method.
My analogy is that you want to be fishing in the right pond. You can have the best bait in the world, the most perfectly crafted search phrase and keywords, but looking in the wrong database, it’s not gonna help.
New York Public Library has resources. Our databases are excellent. It’s always good to familiarize yourself with them.
My all-time favorite is Google Books, which is wonderful. A couple of years ago, Google decided that it was going to digitize everything. Anything they could get their hands on—whether they owned it or not—they were going to turn it into a digital text. We can search content of about 85% of what’s published. It’s available in Google Books. We can search the keywords. Things that I used to spend days and weeks looking for, you can find in seconds now. It’s the most fantastic thing. I recommend it to everyone!
My other favorite is WorldCat. WorldCat lets me search hundreds of thousands of library catalogs simultaneously. Now I can find out who has a book if NYPL doesn’t have it, who has it. It saves tremendous amounts of time.
[If we don't have the book, ask if we can borrow it for you from another library.]
Are there any common mistakes people make when doing research or looking through an online catalog?
People tend to give up too easily. Researchers (and librarians) make mistakes, so you always want to try multiple spellings. You want to try synonyms. You always want to try something else. When I do my research class, I always set up some kind of failure. We hit a roadblock. What do we do now? You have to go back and look at other things to try. For example, sometimes someone’s name is William but their name is recorded as Bill. You have to use your detective hat.
Do you have a preferred way of approaching your research?
I always start with my favorite databases. I like to use ProQuest’s Historical African American newspapers because it covers so many mundane things. When I’m searching that database, I’m actually looking at the classified section of the Amsterdam News from the 1920s. So this person who never did anything else besides rent an apartment or sell their chair, they’re in there. We have their existence. We know where they lived and maybe their phone number. I like Google in general; it’s so huge. I also like that they have specialized projects: Google Scholar, Google Books, all these different things. Those are usually like my starting point. But they don’t work with everything.
There’s the Biography Resource Center. Also, we have to remember that everything is not online. One of my favorite and most useful tools is the Kaiser Index. Ernest Kaiser has the same job that Mr. Bell has here. What he did over 40 years was he sat upstairs and he would go through every periodical that came in and write down all the topics of all the articles. No one was really doing indexes of black periodicals, even before or since—from 1948 to 1984. So, we have these gaps. His work is comprehensive and a six volume set. It’s amazing that one man was able to do all this work. You’re going to find more things there than anywhere. They made a digital project out of it at one point, but I don’t think it’s ever been online. So it’s something you have to have in your hands to look at.
Before and after the turn of the century, people were doing a lot of fantastic work. Things you’re not going to find anywhere, you’re going to find in there.
My job as a librarian and researcher is not to tell you that something exists but to lead you and give you that information so you get to decide on your own.
Michael Perry’s Tips for Research Success
- Start with Google
- Check the qualifications of the sources
- Is the author a professor/PhD/scholar or Just Joe?
- Keyword versus Subject Heading
- Are you looking more broadly or more specifically?
- Distinguish between what is useful to you
- Use your topic’s full name
- Utilize variations of words
- Ex: For “Black” you might try; “negro”, “colored”, “African American” depending on the time period
- Ex: For “William” you might use “Bill”
- Use a variety of resources
- JSTOR, Google Scholar, Google Books, NYPL
- Capitalize
- Names and places
- Don’t give up!