December 7, 2016
My Research at the Library of Congress
My current WIP, Lucy, is complicated. It delves into the life of earliest man with all of its threats and dangers, as well as the inventions of those big brain ideas that changed the world (like stone tools and fire). I’ve read everything available on the topic from my local libraries and online. The big resource I hadn’t yet plumbed was the US Library of Congress. It is the largest library in the world, with more than 162 million items on approximately 838 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 38 million books and other print materials, 3.6 million recordings, 14 million photographs, 5.5 million maps, and 70 million manuscripts. It’s had only 13 Librarians of Congress, the current one in that position for almost thirty years. In my case, I sought answers to questions like how did man discover music. How did s/he first organize a system of law? Who was the first person who thought, “I have free time not required to hunt and sleep. I think I’ll draw a picture.”
This is the sort of stuff that keeps me awake at night.
Many of the books are not digitized and none of them can be checked out (by non-Congressional folk) so in my recent trip to visit my daughter in DC, I spent a glorious day researching in this amazing building. You can tour the library as a visitor (which I did on a previous trip) but to use the books requires a library card. They’re easy to get, though you must go to a hidden room down a long hallway in a completely separate building. Once I found the right door, it took only about ten minutes to take my picture, input my data, and print the card.
Before going to the library, I went to the LOC website and ordered the books I wanted with a note informing them of my arrival date. The library staff collected my books and had them ready in the reading room I requested (there are about eight–I think).
When I arrived at 8:30 am, I received a rundown of the rules for using the reading rooms. No purses (though I could fill my pockets with whatever from my purse). No food or drinks, though there was a drinking fountain outside the reading room. The reading rooms aren’t easily accessible. You can see them on the library tour, but to enter them requires a circuitous trip down a yellow hall, up an elevator, and through a guard who makes sure you are approved for entry.
When I finally found the room and checked in with the librarian, he had a rolling shelf full of books awaiting me. Because I wanted to spread them out and compare books over an extended period, they gave me a private area with a long table-like desk with the shelves within reach of my work space. Here are some pictures:
And there I worked for eight hours. From 8:30 when the library opened to 5 when it closed along with a wonderful collection of cerebral fellow researchers. No one talked. No one varied from their task of consuming knowledge. The books I’d selected were amazing. None of them were avaukabke in my local libraries, some being original work from the early 1800s when we still had tribes living independent of modern society. When I got stuck, a helpful librarian found the right book for me (in one case, it was on the origins of counting) and had it delivered to my room. When I finished, I had to walk through an airport scanner to be sure I didn’t take anything I shouldn’t. When my daughter picked me up in the front of the building, I couldn’t stop grinning with the sheer fun of uncovering the answers.
What have you done lately that blew you away?
–republished from Today’s Author.
More on research:
How to Virtually Visit a Location You Can’t Drop In On
Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman
