Library Raid
©2026, George J. Irwin. All rights reserved.

I've mentioned at least once in these bytes that Research Techniques was the most important class I took in High School. Not my favorite class, but the most important class. That's still true, even though most of the Research Techniques taught at the time are now hopelessly obsolete. There were barely personal computers then, never mind the internet, and if you mentioned the name "Wikipedia," someone might have thought it was an exotic disease of some sort, not a source of information.

But the ideas still hold, and I still use them.

Come back with me now to my school days, and the assignment of what might have been called a "term paper" back then. Your local dialect term may vary. To be a scholarly work ("scholarly" being a favorite word of the instructor), said assignment needed to include legitimate sources, which, at the time, exclusively meant "in print," thank you. Your Aunt Camilla's personal recollection of the Roosevelt Era might have been interesting and informative, but it wasn't official and it could not appear in a citation (read: footnote). No, if you wanted that good grade, you needed to quote Primary Sources, and the more, the better.

So off to the library it was. By that I don't mean the one in the town in which I lived. That location, which was in a converted two-story house with an insufficiently tall basement, was sorely lacking in useful information for term papers, being maybe a half step above what the school system itself had available. To really get enough research done, you had to go to the next town over, which boasted a modern building with at least an order of magnitude more books. To be fair, that township was also at least an order of magnitude larger in population as well, but it seemed, let us say, to have placed more of a priority on such intellectual pursuits. Also to be fair, a number of years after I left, the town in which I lived built a much more suitable library next to its government offices, which is still in use at this writing. But for me, it was the out of town library, in order to find enough material to stock the term paper and provide a sufficient number of footnotes.

I was not really a fan of the term ibid, which is an abbreviation of a Latin term meaning "in the same place" that referred to the immediately previous source. So if Footnote Number 47 was a reference to, let us say, Aardvark's Guide to the Tin Exports of Bolivia, and so was Footnote Number 48, then instead of typing the whole citation over again, you could just use ibid. I thought that the more sources I could use, the better grade I would get on my submission. It became kind of a game.

In order to do that, though, I needed as many sources as possible. And thus was born the Library Raid.

Let's presume that the topic of the paper was Bolivia—tin exports, or something else. That meant I needed information on the country and its economic and political history.

History is in the 900s in the Dewey Decimal System—look it up, kids—but let's also presume that I didn't know that. So it was off to the Card Catalog. OK, not fair to tell you to look that up. It was a physical cabinet that had a series of drawers, each of which held hundreds of small cards, about index card sized. Each card contained an entry for a single item contained in the library. So if there were five books about Bolivia in the library's collection, there would be at least one card for each in the card catalog, perhaps more if the item was cross-referenced, by both author and title for example. Card catalogs are long gone, but the concept lives on in electronic directories. Presently, I live in a county where the library system is consolidated and any resident can go to any branch in any town, so the directory is comprehensive and includes all items in all facilities. And, not surprisingly, it's online. Try that with index cards...

Anyway, for me the key data point on the card wasn't the title, but the exact Dewey Decimal System number. A book on the history of Bolivia might have the sequence 984 M828b. With that information, it was off to the shelves, where I located the book if it wasn't already checked out...

...and also grabbed every other book on the subject.

In other words, the Library Raid.

I didn't necessarily check out every book I grabbed off the shelf. First, sometimes that was too many to carry safely (!) and second, it might have been a little bit selfish. (Although I was never challenged on that point.) I did take time to check the index of each book—another important Research Technique I learned in class—to see if there was anything useful I could include in the term paper. If there was, the book came home with me.

Today the concept of the Library Raid seems quaint. There is much available that is not in print form, or is still in print form but also online. See, for example, "The Internet Archive" site which is great for older books and obscure populations. And those folks over at Wikipedia are really good about ensuring that there are cited sources.

That presumes, of course, that students are still writing scholarly term papers at all.

However! As I write this, I have in my temporary possession the results of an actual Library Raid. I was asked if I would be interested in giving a presentation to a somewhat farther away than local historical society which Colleen and I visited last year. The topic: railroads, which is among the subjects at this society. (Some of you might have just said "Of course" in your head.) I realized that the subject of my talk was going to require a number of primary sources, including two that I did not own but the main library downtown did. So, using the skills I learned back in high school in the Previous Century, off I went, returning with more than the two books I'd originally gone to borrow. I'm not yet sure whether my presentation will be considered "scholarly" but I do intend to ensure that it will be well researched.

...