Category Archives: Research

Researching on the Cheap, Part 11: Where do I go for more information?

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So, you have exhausted the online museums and libraries, your local library (if you have one) is a bad joke, and you have no access to a university library (if you have a local university library see if they have some sort of “friends of the library ” membership that will give you access to their information and inter-library loan). Now what… Facebook and Yahoo interest groups, and Blogs.

Just a few years ago all of my “special interest groups” were located on Yahoo, and some still are. But my most active study groups are now on Facebook. For both of these online service you must be a member, but once you are a member you can search their groups and ask to join. Generally most of the special interest groups require membership in order to post, and if you want to ask questions, you need to be able to post.

Now, I am NOT in love with Facebook. I hate the ads, and I have actively started blocking people who consistently annoy me. But to be able to go onto a group, post a question, and have people from all over the world reply, is amazing.

Are there drawbacks? Definitely. Modern Mythology abounds on some of the groups. What do I mean by that? Well, someone who believes that just because something is this way now, or that people believe something now and therefore it was true in the Middle Ages, may post really bad information. Again, just as with using the internet, you need to educate yourself and maintain a good amount of skepticism in your thought process.

Be certain that you read the descriptions of the groups carefully. One of the Yahoo groups that I am on is very academically oriented. Blatant trolling or posting of bad information will initiate a message from the moderators. If the bad behavior continues the individual in question will be removed from the list.

Often the questions that are posed on these groups are practical. Things like – I need help with a pattern for a specific type of pants – which one do you recommend? I am trying to locate a good source for this type of fabric, where should I go? I am trying to find an Italian Renaissance portrait that shows a specific type of hairstyle, do you know where I can find it? These groups are positively amazing, when it comes to answering these sorts of questions. Instead of spending hundreds of hours in a futile search, or experimenting randomly with retail sources, you can get help from other people who have already used a company.

Aside from groups, there are individuals who post some very good information on their Facebook pages. Some of these people live in countries other than the USA and will post pictures that they have taken in local museums. You can often find these people through the special interest group pages.

And then there are the blogs. Blogs can be anything that the person who writes them wants to publish. Some are awesome, and some are totally full of bad information or totally skewed philosophically. Blogs will come up in regular search engine searches. You are the only one who can decide if the writer is a real authority or a crackpot. But there are some truly excellent blogs on the web. Full of well-taken photographs and facts. Sometimes you can locate the good ones through comments on a special interest group. If you have questions about a blog post a question about it on the special interest group and see what the response is.

I hope that this blog post helps you locate even more helpful information on the internet!

English: A panorama of a research room taken a...

English: A panorama of a research room taken at the New York Public Library with a Canon 5D and 24-105mm f/4L IS. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Researching on the Cheap, Part 10: Communicating with Museums

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So you have done your research online, but the amount of information about the piece that you are interested in is just not enough. How do you get more information? Contact the museum where the artifact is stored.

I have chatted with many people over the years about their communications with museums. Some have had good experiences, and some have not. Some museums have a mandate to educate the public (the Museum of London is fabulous about this). Some are still locked in the archaic thought that the artifacts are “theirs” and that unless you are someone important you shouldn’t even ask for information, much less the right to actually SEE something. Fortunately this last view of the world is changing, but, and this is a BIG but, we need to be realistic. Most museums, like any underfunded organizations, are staffed by overworked employees. They already have a ton of work on their plates and any request that you make is just another thing to add to that pile.

So how can we make communications with a museum more likely to succeed? Well, the first thing is to make our question as concise as possible. Locate the museum’s accession number for the artifact. Every artifact in a museum usually has a specific number associated with it. In older collections that have not been updated, you will occasionally find a picture of multiple items, where there are no numbers listed for the individual pieces – note the number associated with that picture. When you contact the museum, use that number.

Be specific. Do not ask things like “could you tell me everything about this piece”. If you want to know “everything” then ask yourself what “everything” means, and make a list. Good examples of the sort of things to ask include: what is the thickness of the metal in this piece, what type of fabric is this made from, how much does this piece weigh? Be specific. Ask if there is a publication available that has specific information about an artifact.

I once contacted the Archaeology staff at Jamestown Historical Site, in Virginia, to ask about some black glass buttons that were in their collection. I randomly chose a collections archaeologist off of a list on their website and wrote her a concise note about the information that I was looking for and why I wanted it. It took about a week to hear from her, and when her email came back it contained information about the buttons that I knew about, and others that I did not know about, including pictures. I wrote her back, thanking her for all of the excellent information and asked if she knew of any publications. And yes she did.

But what do we do if the museum in question is in a non-English speaking country? Google Translate! Write a simple, concise letter. No complex sentence structures, no flowery descriptions, and run it through the translator. The person that you are writing to may speak English as well as you do, but they will appreciate your effort and the fact that you do NOT expect everyone to speak English. An example would be something like this:

I am studying Celtic pottery. Your museum has a piece that I would like information about. The number of the piece is 1234567-AB. Can you tell me how tall and how wide this piece is? Is there any published information about this piece?

Translation software usually gets the correct information across if the sentences are simple.

And be patient! Do not expect an answer within 24 hours. Or even a week. Assume that the person that you have written is busy. Maybe they are out of town at a convention, or maybe they are in the field. If you have not heard anything in two or three weeks I would write again and say something like “I am sure that you are very busy. I was wondering if you have had the time to investigate my previous request for information?” Always be polite. I understand the frustration of not being able to get information on something that you are really interested in. It happens.

So what do you do when you have exhausted your museum options and you haven’t found the information that you are looking for?

Next Time: Where do I go for more information?

English: Helmet from France, 1610-1620. Artifa...

English: Helmet from France, 1610-1620. Artifact in Brussels Royal Museum of History and Art (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Researching on the Cheap: Part 9 – Working with the Websites from Non-English Speaking Countries

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Do not allow the fact that a museum is in a non-English speaking foreign country to stop you. The first important trick to know is that many foreign websites have a set of flags across the top of the page. The British flag is your friend – it means that they have at least some pages available in British English – just click on the flag. I should note that there are different definitions for some words between British and American English. Make sure that you learn the differences. Recently several of the museum sites have switched to a tab at the top of the page that says “language”. These drop-down menus let you choose the language that you want to see the site in.

Now, choosing the English language version of a site may not get you what you want. While a few of the sites have set up their data bases to function completely in English, many have not. Also, some sites may have a sort of “Readers Digest” version of the museum pages that ignores the information that you want. Be sure that you compare the foreign language version to the English version to see if they appear to cover the same information. If the English version has two pictures and 200 words and the Danish version has six pictures and 800 words, the pages are not the same. So then what do we do?

http://translate.google.com/#     Google Translate

It will not be perfect, but you can usually figure out the information that you need. Sometimes you can just cut and paste sections of text into the translator, or ask it to translate an entire page.

Another solution is a variation on some of the original research techniques that I discussed at the beginning of this blog series. Make a list of the words that you need to know: iron, bronze, silver, bone, wool, amulet, bracelet, ring, time frames, locations – things like that. Choose the words that are relevant to whatever you are studying and make a list of the foreign words that you need to know. I often keep Google Translate open in one window and have the museum site open in another. I have spent a LOT of time in the Swedish National Museum database with a simple cheat sheet of artifact terms, and discovered some very good information. Is it as easy as dealing with a site in English? No. But if you want to get the accurate artifact information you need to learn to do this.

Here is a list of just a few of the foreign sites that are worth visiting.

http://www.dhm.de/datenbank/ Deutsches Historisches Museum Databank – This is actually a database that collects together artifact information from dozens of smaller museums all over Germany. Some of the information is very old, and some of these artifacts may not even exist anymore, having been destroyed in World War II, but they have some amazing artifact records.

http://www.libnet.ulg.ac.be/enlumin/enl01.htm Choix de miniatures des manuscrits de l’Université de Liège (French) – An amazing collection of manuscripts, many of which do not appear anywhere else.

http://mis.historiska.se/mis/sok/sok.asp Historika Museet – Swedish National Historical Museum (Swedish) – An amazing collection of thousands of artifacts from Sweden and some surrounding areas. Do NOT assume it is all Viking Age material – it is NOT. Be sure to learn the different timeframes and what they mean.

http://www.unimus.no/foto/old/fixedsize.html Photo Portal for Swedish Museums (Swedish) – A collection of artifacts from four Swedish Museums.

http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/?lang=en Rijks Museum in Holland (Dutch)

http://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/online-gallery/ Musee Natcional del Prado (Spanish)

http://www.musee-renaissance.fr/index2.html   National Museum of the Renaissance (French)

http://www.louvre.fr/selections The Louvre (French) – They have limited selections available online, but they are still pretty amazing to look at.

http://mv.vatican.va/3_EN/pages/MV_Home.html   The Vatican museum Website. It is less user friendly than I would prefer, but I expect this to improve in the future. The Vatican is in the process of digitizing a huge portion of their collections in order to make them available to researchers.

I hope that this brief list of websites provides you with some sources, and some ideas of your own about where you can do research. If you discover an interesting artifact, and know what museum has it, Google the museum! You may be able to find a LOT more information about it through the museum.

Next Time: Communicating with Museums

 

English: This is a Raven's Beak or warhammer, ...

English: This is a Raven’s Beak or warhammer, exhibited in the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. Deutsch: Ein Rabenschnabel bzw. Kriegshammer im Deutschen Historischen Museum, Berlin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)