What you'll be doing Friday and why you're going to meet in the library with your peer review group instead of in class.

The Bibliography Challenge! (No lying required.)

When I was an undergraduate, one of my classes had this super evil library scavenger hunt. It was full of psychotic questions like, “The following quote [insert random bizarre quote] is a line from a book. Find it.” This was before the internet and there were 100 questions like this.

Me and my group were working, like, 8 hours a day every day for two weeks. We were so mad about that stupid assignment and the awfulness, etc. And we were having trouble. So we started to get desperate. To try desperate things. For example, we (finally!) narrowed one question down to four books based on criteria that included philosophical trends in the last two centuries, changes in spelling over the years, oddities of punctuation that pinpointed a particular country of publication, etc. But we couldn’t find the answer in any of the four books. So we found the phone numbers of the living authors. I believe one of us lied to a secretary from one author's university, proclaiming to be said author's research assistant. We'd lost his number, silly us! But we needed to tell him something important about some data!

Yeah.

I believe we got all of the numbers under various pretenses involving various levels of deception. Don't judge. Y'all may think you're above reproach, but when it comes to a choice between your grades and your moral certitude, well, let's just say that a lot of y'all honors students might have done the same thing because I was just like you once and, oh, how the mighty will fall for an A.

Anyway, we CALLED them. All stalker-like, we got their phone numbers and friggin called them at home and read them the quote and asked them if they wrote the book that had the quote and if so, which book was it in?

Incidentally, it turned out we HAD identified the right author, just didn't have the right book. I think he actually sent us a copy of the right one. Dear man.

Side-note: Since we're all modern now, you could probably just email an author instead of calling them on the phone. Maybe this assignment was when my phone-freak-out started...

Back to the horrible assignment.

We did everything we could think of to get the answers. We talked to professors. We not only pretended to be research assistants for secretaries to get phone numbers, we pretended to be research assistants for professors that didn’t exist and got librarians to find stuff for us. Nothing was too low. We were like Veronica Mars, but with more rage.

Well, I wrote nasty things about that horribly hard assignment on the course evaluations. It was the worst assignment EVER, I concluded. That made the professor the WORST professor EVER. (Forget that whole, "professors are supposed to teach you"; professors are supposed to NOT MAKE YOU MAD.)

Fast forward a few years and I was in grad school, doing a research project. Everyone in the class was having trouble finding research, but I wasn’t. They all asked me how I was finding so much stuff. I mean, I was WEEKS ahead of them all. So I told them some of the stuff I'd done to find it.

They looked at me like I was crazy.

And it hit me: everything I knew about doing research--about how traditional approaches don't always work, about how you have to be creative and how you want to learn to think more like a detective who wants to know EVERYTHING than a lazy student who only wants to know *just enough*--everything I knew about doing research, I learned from that one awful assignment.

Everything.

(Funny how sometimes it takes us a few years to really appreciate what we've learned. In the case of literary deconstruction, my learning to appreciation curve was ten years. The awesomeness of this assignment, however, only took me about four years to accept. Only a little embarrassing.)

In addition to stalking authors, and being horrified at how easily we all accept what people tell us as the truth even if we've never met them, one of the most helpful things I learned is that bibliographies are fantastic ways to find sources. Instead of pouring over databases, grab books on topics slightly larger than yours (the slightly larger is important: if there are *books* on your topic, itself, your topic is too big). Once you have them, turn directly to the bibliographies. Don’t even read the books. Just read the bibliographies. You’ll be amazed how much easier it is when someone else has done the research for you.

Something I commonly do is to go to the library, find 20 books, pile them on a table and pour through the bibliographies. (Let someone else put the books away.) So useful.

Later on, when you're more comfortable searching through academic databases, you can do the same thing with the bibliographies you find in peer-reviewed journal articles. And thanks to the miracle of the internet and the HBLL, you can do it mostly without ever leaving your bedroom.

But for now, here are the rules of the challenge:

1) Work in groups

2) You have only the class period. Fifty minutes. After that, time is up.

3) Start with one person’s topic and then work your way through others. Get through as many people as you can, but don’t exceed the time limit. Rock paper scissors to see who goes in what order if you can't decide.

4) For each topic, find 20 books written on a broader topic. Don’t open the books yet.

5) Once you have 20 books, put them on a table and flip directly to the bibliographies.

6) Write down any journal articles that apply to each person's smaller topic from each bibliography.

7) When you’ve gotten through the 20 bibliographies, it’s time to move to the next person in the group.

8) Repeat for each person until the time limit is up.

9) It's possible you'll only get through one or two people's topics. You can agree to finish up everyone's research later if you find it useful. The only entries that apply to the challenge, though, are the ones done in the first 50 minutes.

9) Bring your lists of articles to our next class. The group with the most articles wins a prize.


Go forth, my bibliophiles. The library awaits.