On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, geni wrote:
On 10/3/05, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
[*] ISTR someone mentioning that it is not uncommon for most important works in at least one field -- railroad history -- to be published by the author & often not listed in these catalogs. I'd be happy to include some or all college, public or private libraries with online catalogs to solve this problem -- but there *needs* to be some easy way to verify that the work cited does exist.
Simular for canals except there you go back to the primary sources which you dig out of various record offices (which for some reason are often in a completely different part of the country to the canal).
Finding documents in Britain is half of the challenge: as I understand it, records of a given locale are scattered across the country -- & over the ocean to the US & beyond -- due to historical connections, accidents of history, vagarities of how family papers are disposed of, as well as previous researchers who did not try hard enough to remember to return what they have borrowed.
However, Geni, you have touched on another matter. If the material cited is unpublished, then we can't use it in Wikipedia. The policy is that if you need to depend on unpublished primary material for an article, have your research published first in an appropriate forum (in your case, a local history journal or monograph), *then* quote from there. As burdensome as this may seem, having your research published elsewhere first helps Wikipedia to offer the assurance that at least one set of expert eyes has examined the material we are using.
Geoff