What can an author's bibliography tell us about him or her and the particular work we are researching?
If you are working on a research project such as an investigation of Douglas Sladen, author of Oriental Cairo: City of the Arabian Nights, knowing more about what he has written can enable us to understand his background, interests, possible biases, and expertise. In our previous module on Sladen, whose work is included in the Travelers in the Middle East Archive, we examined how to research biography. Now we turn to the process of building a bibliography, which can include not only books but also personal letters, reviews of other books or responses to reviews of his or her work, later or earlier editions of the work you are researching, etc. We will examine the process of locating everything by a particular author to demonstrate the variety of information such a search can produce. For some major authors such as Shakespeare, scholars have already prepared extensive bibliographies listing not only works by the author but about him or her. We might also have luck using a reference work such as The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature or Dictionary of Literary Biography, which lists authors' major works. The Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue will also contain a listing of all works published in Britain, its colonies and the US from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of World War I. However, let's do our own research to determine what Sladen has written. In our previous research into his biography, we learned that Sladen wrote over 60 books; let's find out what they are.
Confirming the identity of your author
First, we have to make sure that we have enough information to identify one Douglas Sladen from another. For that we will go to WorldCat, an online catalog that searches the holdings of thousands of libraries. If you are unfamiliar with the WorldCat, visit our WorldCat module.
In order to make sure that the information we gather is for the author of "Oriental Cairo" and not another author with the same name, we should perform a search for the book by entering its title, logically enough, into the title field.
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Collecting a Bibliography with WorldCat
WorldCat is an excellent place to start collecting the writings of any author because of the breadth of collections the system has access to. Apart from books, WorldCat also lists items in archives, computer files, serial publications and sound recordings held by thousands of libraries around the world. It is not completely exhaustive, but WorldCat will produce one of the widest varieties of media for each search.
Note that Sladen's name, which is beside the Author(s) heading, is an active blue link, .
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You will notice the rather daunting amount of items at the top in a series of tabs.
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Computer Files
Let's look at the computer sources first. Just select the appropriately labeled tab. A glance at the list will tell you that your items are scattered around the world; libraries in Tokyo, Melbourne and London. Notice the words Computer File next to the heading Document. That means there is a very good possibility that we can receive it digitally in a very short period of time. In fact, it may already be available online, since some libraries create catalog records for free Internet resources. Select the title of one of the items, then scroll down to the Borrow this item from another library option. For a review of how to borrow items from other libraries, visit our Interlibrary loan module.
Now let's move on to the archival material.
Archival material
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Books
We have one hundred and fifty five books attributed to Douglas Sladen. Scrolling through, you will probably find that many works are repeated due to subtle differences in the entries from different libraries. The list produced by WorldCat will be very comprehensive, but it is not everything. For instance, WorldCat will probably not index Sladen's publications in magazines and newspapers, which would be available through separate periodical indexes. So that you can easily collect a list of all of Sladen's works available through WorldCat, mark the box beside each listing on each page. You can save time by just scrolling down to the bottom and selecting mark all. Skip to the next page and repeat. Once you have marked every one, select the Email or Print option at the bottom of the page.
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Collecting Articles in Journals and Newspapers
Tracking down all of an author's publications in newspapers and magazines is a much more intensive process than finding his or her books, since there are so many possible periodicals where he or she could publish and indexes to them can be spotty. Since Sladen was writing in the nineteenth century, we may be able to find relevant information using the Nineteenth Century Index, which includes the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index and Periodicals Index Online. (Note that coverage extends only from 1770 to 1919). According to the Nineteenth Century Index, Sladen published 57 articles, with titles such as "SOME YOUNGER AMERICAN POETS" and "MILAN CATHEDRAL." We could also use the Nineteenth Century Masterfile, which contains extensive indexes for the nineteenth century. Here we will focus on the online archives for the Times of London and take a look at what we found by our author.
The Times of London
The Times has been the daily newspaper of record in England for hundreds of years. Douglas Sladen was born in England and published most of his books there. Of all the newspapers we could search for Douglas Sladen, the Times of London seems the most promising. It would have been the newspaper he would have been most interested in as a figure in the London literary scene and the newspaper that most interested in him as an Englishman.
Fortunately, the archive of the Times of London is available online to subscribers.
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