On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, geni wrote:
On 10/3/05, Geoff Burling
<llywrch(a)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cited is unpublished, then we can't use it in Wikipedia.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that if you need to depend on unpublished primary material for an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