History 777: Feeding Cities

Choose a Topic:

  • Something that interests you
  • Something you know something about - a starting point
  • Something that has been written about - information is available

Confirm and Build Your Knowledge Base

  • Reference works
    • Africa South of the Sahara DT 351 F71 (latest in ASL, earlier in the stacks)
    • Economist Intelligence Unit (online through the library)
  • Population statistics
  • Maps (travel books can have surprisingly good city maps)
  • Don't disdain encyclopedias for background information.

Initial Questions (There will be more - every answer can generate more questions)

My example is Ibadan, Nigeria, a city I lived near for two years in the early 1960s. I know it's been written about and is one of the major cities of Nigeria. It has been referred to as the largest African city in Africa. It was an urban center prior to colonial rule. My initial questions would be:

•  Find that quote about "the largest African city". What did the author mean?

•  Food in Ibadan as I remember it: gardens, markets, supermarkets, restaurants, an ethnic mix, with different cuisines. What's it like now?

Think of Words

What terms can I use as hooks to pull up books and articles on topics related to this city and my questions? Computers do not match ideas or concepts - they match words (actually strings of characters).

Ibadan//cities//Nigeria//Africa//Food//Agriculture//Cattle//Sheep//Nutrition//Markets//Commodities//Cookbooks

Finding Books

  • Use a keyword search to begin with. Try any and all of the terms you have listed in combination.
  • Use "and" to combine terms. Words strung together will be searched as a phrase. ALERT: for reasons best known to the programmers, the library system defaults to "OR" if there are no results for "AND". "Food AND Cities" yields a few dozen results; "Food OR Cities" yields nearly 9000 items, few of them of any real interest.
  • It's usually best to use just two - three at the very most - terms in your search. You are searching on the title, the subject headings and possibly some notes. Most catalog records have only 10 - 20 words in the fields searched by keyword.
  • Look at the records you find and USE them. There's a lot of information in the catalog record. Really looking at it can save you a lot of time and effort.
    • Decide if it's usable: look at the date, the publisher, number of pages. These hint at the quality of the work. (A work published by Oxford Univ. Press is probably more reliable than one that is published by the author. A work published in 1977 will not give you much information about offshore drilling in Nigeria. A 395 page work will have more "meat" to it than a 15 page working paper.)
    • Use the record to find more works on the same topic. What else has this author written? Click on the author's name. Subject headings are controlled vocabulary devised by librarians to help researchers know what the main topics of the books are. Click on those to expand your search. Add those terms to your list of search words.
    • Look for added benefit: maps, pictures, index, bibliography, foreword by other scholar, etc.
    • Note the LOCATION as well as the call number - big help in finding the work on the shelf.

Broaden your Search, then search in the book

Histories of the country will very likely include information on the major cities. Works on urbanization in Africa may contain sections on your city. Use the structure of the book:

•  Table of contents, especially in a collection of essays

•  Index

•  Perfect your skimming skills

Most books will lead you to more sources. Check the footnotes and bibliography for works that the author consulted.

Look farther afield

BU Libraries have good collections, but far from everything published. Check what other libraries have:

•  WorldCat (connect from the library pages) This database can be searched in much the same way as a library catalog, but shows results of books held by any of the member libraries.

•  Other Africanist libraries (see list on ASL page)

Give yourself time to borrow from elsewhere

  • Virtual Catalog (use the library page to request books held by participating libraries in the Boston area. These books usually come in a few days, but cannot be renewed.)
  • Boston Library Consortium borrowing card (allows you to go to participating libraries and borrow books)
  • Interlibrary loan (This can take several weeks)

Journal Articles

For many researchers, locating journal articles relevant to their topics seems to be a daunting task. Mugar Library alone subscribes to over 20,000 electronic and 30,000 print journals. Even allowing for overlap of some titles, this moderate-sized journal collection can add over half a million articles to the collection a year - a big haystack to search for a few needles.

In their day-to-day routine, many scholars prefer serendipity - reading many journals on a regular basis, making notes of interesting articles, and hopefully recalling them when the need arises. When this works, it works well, and is a large part of what makes the academic life enjoyable. But you have a deadline for this course, not the rest of your life to refine your research and broaden your horizons. Thus, indexes and databases are strongly advised.

As with books, the tools for searching article databases are the words you associate with your topic. With some indexes you may want to refine the search strategies somewhat. A keyword search in the library catalog will typically search on 20 words or fewer per record: the title and subtitle, the subject headings, and sometimes notes on the contents or special features of the book. A one or two word search query works well.

Journal databases and indexes search not only the title, but often the abstract, occasionally descriptors, and sometimes the full text of the article. This means that you are looking for matches of your search words in a much bigger pool. Journal titles tend to be longer than book titles - but social science titles in particular can often be whimsical, sometimes with more informative subtitles. Including abstracts or the entire text in the search can yield many more results from a search, but the results may be less meaningful. I might find an article that combined the terms Ibadan and agriculture, but it could turn out to be a biographical note on someone who had been born in Ibadan and had a career in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, with the actual article on peanut exports.

With the larger base to search on, refining the search becomes essential. Learn and use the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT (e.g., ("Niger NOT Nigeria") and Urbanization). You may still get Niger Delta or a peanut fungus (aspergillus niger). This is when remembering algebra can help. The operations INSIDE parentheses are done first: e.g. "(food OR Agriculture) AND Ibadan". You can also instruct some databases to search for words adjacent or nearby one another. Use the advanced search option and take the time to learn the ins and outs of databases you use often. Most have instructions, help screens - even tutorials.

Selecting Databases

Electronic Resources by Subject: Africa

List of Databases and Indexes

Both of these are linked from the ASL web page.

You should start with:

AfricaBib

Historical Abstracts

Anthro dbs

Agricola

CAB

NISC

LC Nairobi

yield results that are often hard to find

Be Old Fashioned: Use Print

Back in the old days, dedicated scholars and librarians compiled lists of books and articles on an array of topics - some of them delightfully obscure, others designed more as reading guides to broad topics. Electronic indexes are fast and efficient, but they cover only about 20% of the world's intellectual output. That's fine for an undergraduate paper, but not good enough for real academic production - this course, your dissertation, your professional writing as you move through your career.

Find bibliographies in the ASL reference collection. Search the catalog for bibliographies by adding the term "bibliography" to a word or subject search.

Learn How to Browse Efficiently

Because of the efficiency that computerized catalogs and databases have brought us, few people browse the shelves anymore. Randomly wandering up and down the rows of books is hardly recommended, but there are some techniques to make serendipity more possible.

You can browse in the online catalog. When you find a book that looks good, click on the call number, then browse up and down. Look at HT 148 - it's all African cities.

HN 771 - 840 contains a lot on African urban development and cities, mixed in with villages and rural development.

Actually browsing the stacks lets you leaf through journals that may not be indexed anywhere, and check the contents of collected works. It's not efficient, but usually soothing, and often productive.

A list of call number ranges specific to Africa is included in our collection policy statement: http://www.bu.edu/library/collections/cdafr.html .

Web Resources

Ah what a tangled web - sometimes it deceives, sometimes it delivers some great resources and information. Using Google Scholar ( http://www.google.com/ and then select "Scholar") will cut down on some of the dreck, but can still be confusing. It goes into databases and indexes, but not always as a BU subscriber. You may be asked to pay for an article that you could get for free going to a BU subscription database. Use with caution; experiment on your own, come in to ASL and we'll join in the webcrawling.

Primary Sources

We have several guides to identifying, locating, and using primary sources. Start with http://www.bu.edu/library/instruction/africanprimaryarchives.html , and ask about the guides we've been developing recently that aren't up on the web yet.

Evaluation

You need to evaluate every source you find - encyclopedia, primary source, web site, scholarly monograph, article in a prestigious journal - as if it is a tip on a horse at the track. By this time in your academic careers you should be doing this all the time. If you need some advice, talk to ASL staff and your professor.

When to call it quits

Bottom line is: when you have to write the paper. Give yourself enough time to check on those troublesome questions that will come up as you write and find that you have contradictory information in your notes.

Do your bibliography and footnotes as you go

Write down the full citation of whatever you read (EndNote or a similar tool is great for this). If you are sure you're going to use a quote or paraphrase, jot down the citation on the note. When all else fails, come to ASL staff. We don't scold very much, and are expert at recognizing the typeface and layout of photocopied articles when you haven't noted the journal title, and often know what you're talking about when you say it "was in the big red book you suggested." But we don't take calls at the hours many students are writing their papers.

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