The Film Hunter

I volunteer for a local film festival. My job is to locate films for the festival as well as to review them. Although it sounds like great fun (which it is), finding the films, filmmakers, and production companies takes perseverance, as well as some dirty tricks.

First, I locate the contact information for production companies that make or distribute films containing the subject matter that would be appropriate for the festival. After visiting their websites, I contact those companies to ask them for "screener copies" of films that we would like to review. This is the easiest part. Unfortunately, public performance rights to show these films is not cheap, and so I must also rely on other venues for potential films.

My next stop to find new films and potential filmmakers are video websites. Video Menu and Reelseo provide many links to video sharing websites aside from YouTube. The research fun starts here, as I must use different keywords to search for potential films and filmmakers that cover the topics that our film festival celebrates. Quite often I find shorts this way, or promo trailers from independent or student filmmakers. I locate their websites, as well as their email addresses, and ask them for screener copies of their work to review. They are very happy to share what they have. If the reviewing committee wants to show these films, quite often they are free or at little cost to us.

Third, I subscribe to email lists, Facebook sites, MySpace sites, and LiveJournal sites for film festivals that show similar films. I find out what these film festivals are showing, look up those film makers or distribution companies, and request screeners. This is my dirty little film research trick, but I am sure that all other film hunters must do this as well.

Finally, I talk to a lot of people about my "job" as a film hunter. You would be surprised how many people say "You know, I have a friend who just made a film..." or "I have a friend in film school..." I leave no stone unturned; I get the friend's contact information and get a screener. This is a research strategy as well!

Finding My Favorite Girl Scout Cookies

It is Girl Scout Cookie season, and one of my colleagues brought in the order form for cookies. Of course, I decide to buy some as a gesture of goodwill. I was incredibly eager to get some more "Thanks-A-Lot" cookies, as well as my annual supply of Caramel deLites.

A glance at the order form revealed the following: no "Thanks-A-Lot" cookies, and my Caramel deLites were called Samoas. I hadn't heard Caramel deLites called Samoas since the '70's. I was under the impression that the Samoan community had gotten offended somehow, and so the Girl Scouts changed their name.

Something about all of this conflicting information bothered me. If the Girl Scouts of America are a national organization, wouldn't the cookies that they sold be the same in all 50 states?

I Googled "girl scout cookies" in the attempt to solve this information emergency. Not only did I learn about the history of Girl Scout Cookies, but I also found out that Girl Scout Cookies are only allowed to be baked by two licensed baking companies--ABC/Interbake Company (the company that makes my "Thank You" cookies) and Little Brownie Bakers (who still call Carmel Delites Samoas). This means that next year, I will have to order my Girl Scout Cookies from a troop selling cookies from ABC/Interbake (as each individual troop has the freedom to choose their Girl Scout Cookie baker).

The Story of Middle English

I studied Middle English in college. From 1066-1500, the English language had no standardized spelling or grammar rules because different ethnicities within England spoke different versions of the language we now know as English, the nobility spoke French, and the clergy only considered those who could read and write Latin as literate.

If you want a taste of Middle English, you can visit the much abridged online version of the MED (Middle English Dictionary) here.

Some English scholars believe that modern English began with the Chancery Standard, developed by King Henry VIII to ensure that the nobility used English as opposed to French or Latin. After the development of the Chancery Standard, all court business was handled in this form of English. In 1470, William Caxton brought the Gutenberg Press to England, and the Chancery Standard was used in mass produced books as well as hornbooks used to teach children how to read.

Other English scholars believe that modern English began in 1755, when writer Samuel Johnson wrote his dictionary.

Spice Research

One of the biggest research challenges that I face is tracing the history of spice usage and spice trade in northern Europe. There are many reasons why this work is so difficult:

1. Throughout most of history, the people who knew the most about spices were often illiterate. They were either cooks or traditional healers, and their employers did not always think that their work was important enough to record.

2. Spices were incredibly expensive throughout most of history, only used by the wealthy. Many merchants often kept their account ledgers and inventories in code, so that no one except that merchant family would know for sure what type of spices they handled, or how much money they had earned from those spices.

3. Biologically accurate plant illustrations did not appear in books until the invention of the Gutenberg Press in the mid-15th century. The average northern European would not be able to identify most plants from a book published in the Dark Ages or Middle Ages. Here are some examples of spice drawings from that time:



This is an Arabic translation of a classic Greek herbiary. Not only do all of the plants look like dandelions, but there are no standard words to describe leaves, stems, roots, or other parts of the plant. It was very easy to mix up plants, especially foreign exotic ones. This was a big problem for doctors, as plants, herbs, and spices were used as medicine. People had to rely solely on the text for whatever factual information they could find.





Here is another one, from a German health encyclopedia. As late as 1491, reference books still contained unidentifiable plant drawings. Some of the plants are even imaginary. (The drawing to the left is the "Tree of Life", if you ever run into it...complete with serpent.)

4. The Church has hidden away some of the best material on spices. Contrary to popular belief, many priests and monks of early Christian Europe were not far removed from their pagan roots, and they still indulged in the intake of spices as aphrodisiacs. Meanwhile, wars were fought over the consumption of gingerbread and highly spiced fermented beverages such as glogg and wassail.

Even the modern history of spice is highly secretive. In Cardamom: The Genus Elettaria by Indian botanists P.N. Ravindran and K.J. Madhusoodanan, I am left hanging by this fact:

"Cardamom was introduced in Guatemala only in early 1920s from Sri Lanka or India with the help of a New York broker and was planted in the vicinity of Coban in the Department of Alta Verapaz" (Ravindran, 2002).

Who was this spice broker? Must I travel to Coban to find his name? I cannot trace the name of this broker anywhere else in the literature, but I do not doubt the information, as India is the home of cardamom, and southern India is home to many cardamom research institutes.

5. There is no "paper trail" of previous research done on particular spices. Internet research on spices is the worst, as very few "facts" are cited, and some end up not being true at all if you do the grunt work of hitting the books.

My Friend Michael

Michael McGrorty and I went to library school together. He too faces many research challenges, and often tests other librarians to find out if they can think outside the box when handling his difficult research questions.

"I'd like to tell you that I'm doing some research right now, but the fact is, I'm always doing research. Because I'm a researcher. Some of you might know what that means--it's like being a librarian, only you have to get the actual answer. [Insert laugh here] Once I tried telling my boss, "Look over in aisle five," and he told me to research the term "unemployment." [laugh again, if you've got a spare]

"I was a researcher before I went to library school. Library school taught me a million new sources of information--priceless stuff for research. It also taught me how weak researchers could be in the area of data collection and, most importantly, in discriminating among many sources.

"I didn't know researchers often leaned heavily on bad sources or just did lousy work until I saw what a good librarian could provide--and that every researcher should be a good librarian. On the other hand, I didn't know what a weak librarian was until I had a few reference courses and saw that, like any other trade, half the practitioners were below average.

"My problem is that I am living in a statistical anomaly: somehow I get all the bad ones. My requests for library assistance are very often deflating. I think the reason for this is that I want very badly for colleagues to be sharp--to make me proud of them and our work. Too often this just aint the case, friends. Let me tell you how it's boiling down in River City.

"I'm working on a project which requires me to make contact with librarians in all fifty states plus some other localities; like most of my work it involves laws that are similar everywhere but which differ in their particulars. I have to formulate strategies for dealing with the differences. Think of something like benefits for the homeless or unemployment insurance--a thing of many variables with some significant similarities. The librarians are in state agencies. As usual, I am using them as they are supposed to be employed: as initial sources and links to needed documents, statutes, statistics--all that sort of thing.

"My requests take the form of emails (when possible), and letters. I have not yet reached the phone call stage. Let's make up a question similar to what I'm asking:

"Dear Librarian, I am doing research on the application of federal blowtorch standards through the blowtorch licensing agency of your state. Of course, the federal government and your state have similar standards, and in fact your state enforces federal rules. I am seeking statistics on the following:

1. Blowtorch injuries for the past five years, as required by California statute.

2. Number of investigations for these injuries, and also for preventive inspections by the appropriate agency.

3. Final penalty assessments for injuries and failed inspections.

"Please note that I have not been able to discover any other source for this information; I was told by the enforcement agency that the State Library was the sole repository of the information and records I require. Please consider this a request under your state's version of FOIA, and inform me if other steps need to be taken to receive the information described. Many thanks, et cetera."

"Okay, now you've read the prelims. In our next posting we will show you how to get gray hair in a real quick hurry."

Dr. Google

Disturbing research article about doctors who admit to using Google to diagnose their patients. Based on the survey, 58.8% of the diagnoses from Google end up being correct.

Ironically, I discovered this article while searching for another article about a doctor who received prison time for a misdiagnosis based on his wonderful Yahoo! and Pub Med research. I read that article last month, and forgot to save the link! ):( Is it possible that this article has been expunged from public record, now that Google has become an all-powerful cureall?

Perhaps it is possible that the pro-Google diagnosis study depends more on the doctors' skill in prescribing treatment, rather than making the diagnosis? Do those doctors only use Google to confirm what they have already discovered?

Definition of Multiculturalism

The origin of the term "multiculturalism" may be the stuff of academic legend.

In preparing for my presentation on multiculturalism, I wanted to find out when the term was first used. Many websites cited a book for language arts teachers, which cited a book review published in 1941. The reviewer stated that the book he (or she) had read brought up the strengths of a "multicultural" society, where citizens respect each other no matter what their ethnicity, religion, etc.. I thought that was pretty good stuff, and proceeded to go on a wild goose chase.

You see, none of the sources that I read identified the title of the book or the book reviewer. Not only that, but three of the five sources had incorrectly identified the source of the book review. Three sources said that the review had come from a 1941 issue of The New York Herald. Unfortunately, that publication no longer existed in 1941--since 1923 it had been The New York Herald Tribune after a merger.

Once I had identified the correct source of the book review, I had to locate it. Just my luck, The New York Herald Tribune is not indexed electronically in any library. You actually have to contact a public library in Texas that has a morgue of back issues. Even the public libraries in New York do not have copies!

I didn't have time to call the library in Texas, plus I did not want to pay for the review (if it even existed) to be photocopied and snail mailed to my office. I was getting pretty steamed; why should I pay for the sloppy research of others?

A sip of coffee shook a library-related memory from a dusty corner of my brain. Way back in ninth grade, long before electronic databases and the Internet, our school librarian taught us about the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. The Reader's Guide is an index to articles and book reviews published in newspapers and magazines from 1900 to today. It is published in heavy green volumes that wait patiently for librarians to remember them. If the Reader's Guide didn't have a listing for this book review, I was sunk.

If there was anyone who would know where the Reader's Guide was located, it would be the Reference Department. I went downstairs and asked Professor Hill, veteran Reference librarian, to show me the Reader's Guide. "Bless your heart," he sighed, and we dashed to the Ready Reference section where the entire Reader's Guide collection stood at attention like soldiers. I was on a mission now--find that review!

I will remind you that I did not know the title of the review, nor did I know the title of the book being reviewed, the name of the reviewer, nor the month and day of publication. Based on the quote from the review, I deduced that the book in question could have been about war, aggression, peace...the Reader's Guide is indexed by subject, so I had to search for the review that way. I did not find it, but I found a whole lot of articles from the New York Times which would have fit the bill perfectly.

In any case, I put in an ILL request for the language arts book that started this whole mess. The book is called America in So Many Words: Words That Have Shaped America by David K. Barnhart and Allan A. Metcalf (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). In this book, Barnhart and Metcalf provide etymologies for distinctly American words that became part of global discourse on social and political issues, but they did not provide works cited for their entries. For the serious researcher, this leads to a dead end and banging one's head on a desk.

As academics, we must provide a paper trail for our research. If we do not, history becomes stuff of legend that is easy to misquote yet nearly impossible to prove. If I learned anything about multiculturalism this semester, that would be the big moral lesson for the week.