Drawing on every scrap of experience amassed during a long career which embraced research at doctoral level, spells as a private investigator and as a freelance researcher, appointments as a reference librarian in two university libraries and, for 15 years, in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress, Thomas Mann’s aim in this compact guide is to outline alternative techniques for librarians and information specialists to adopt when conducting subject research. Rather than the customary approaches, either by subject, or by type of literature, Mann outlines a different strategy structured round methods of subject searching. These encompass controlled vocabulary searching; browsing and scanning subject‐classified bookstacks; keyword searching; citation searching; related‐record searching; published bibliographies searching; Boolean combination searching; using other people’s subject expertise; and type‐of‐literature searching. Each of these preferred methods, he argues, is potentially applicable to any subject area.
Lending force, and interest, to his argument, Mann’s philosophy is enshrined in his conviction that the processes of the retrieval and dissemination of subject information are more effective in traditional libraries than on the information superhighway. He contends that “in the overall universe of information records there are three considerations that are inextricably tied together:
- 1.
1copyright protection;
- 2.
2free ‘fair use’ of the records by everyone; and
- 3.
3a localized where restriction.”
Further, “the first two cannot be combined without the presence of the third. It is precisely this third element that real libraries alone provide.” He is also at pains to distinguish another significant difference between real and virtual libraries ‐ the format of material which they provide. Moreover, format is firmly linked to a hierarchy in the world of learning, extending from data, to information, opinion, knowledge, understanding and, to the highest level of all, wisdom. And that is not all. The highest levels cannot be attained by those with short attention spans. Where that leaves the cyberprophets, predicting the end of real libraries (ironically, he nudges, in printed and copyrighted books), he charitably declines to spell out, contenting himself with the affirmation that “the book format is much more successful at conveying the higher levels of thought.” If any doubts remain as to the validity of Mann’s pragmatic philosophy, then a careful chapter‐by‐chapter reading of this latest publication should rapidly dispel them, as he proceeds from encyclopaedias, subject headings and the library catalogue, systematic browsing and scanning in classified bookstacks, subject headings and indexes to journal articles, keyword and citation searches, related‐record searches, review articles, published bibliographies, the differences between real and virtual libraries, computer searches, locating material in other libraries, people sources, hidden treasures (microform sets, CD‐ROM collections, government documents), and reference sources: searching by types of literature. This last he reinforces by an Appendix, labelled “Special cases”, a survey of over 20 different formats and sources of research material. If anyone is entitled to paraphrase Queeg, in The Caine Mutiny, Thomas Mann is surely the one: there’s the right way, the LC way, and my way. As this book clearly demonstrates, library researchers will do well to follow his way.
