User talk:Foobar

howdy.

yo. --Nonsensical 01:13, 8 July 2007 (EDT)

Researching for WCU

Thanks! I vaguely remember Pegram labs being mentioned somewhere and hunted down a proper reference somewhere. I could glean only very little information on the internet. I noticed the Crocker Institute on a couple of old campus maps this year and decided to follow up on that yesterday. I got lucky and even found a picture of the building in a book scanned by google. Screenshot+MS Paint followed. Anyway, here are some rough guidelines I follow when researching:

• 1) Find something you know nothing about and pursue it doggedly. A good source is old photographs and campus maps. Alternatively, see point 4 infra.
• 2) Do a columbia site search through google (site:columbia.edu "search term"), using all kinds of variations on parentheses to find what you're looking for. This is an exponentially superior method for searching Columbia's domain than the search engine on the site. It also allows you to pinpoint your search (e.g. site:http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/ for a news search, site:http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/ for Columbia College Today, etc. That's how I researched all the articles on the Awards
• 3) repeat the same on google in general. and the nytimes website, which has indexed issues back through 1851 and lets you look at clippings for free up through 1923. a good google search using parentheses might also turn up old articles in Time magazine)
• 4) Make ample use of google book search, because there are so much literature indexed there. In fact, read some of the older volumes listed at Books about Columbia for ideas to pursue and flesh out (e.g. Camp Columbia, something I've seen pictures of and references to). There's oodles of information on Columbia's campus architecture in those books.
• 5) Stick everything you find into an external links section or referenced footnotes! I can't stress this enough. So much of this is hearsay, inferential, or even conflicting. Unless it's coming from one of the few canonical works we have (e.g. McCaughey and Dolkart's books), having links to the sources makes sorting things out easier as we learn more. In the course of researching one topic, if I find some tangential reference intriguing, I bookmark it and make sure I come back to it later. I've got about a dozen spec articles bookmarked regarding turmoil in the public affairs office follow Bollinger's arrival. The whole Emily Lloyd issue etc. (which I've already fleshed out a bit). Another Good source is [1], the website for Robert McCaughey's University Seminar on Columbia history through which he did research for his book. There are some fabulous presentation notes on there.
• 6) Check out the USOpera article I linked on Brander Matthews Hall page. It's got a lovely anecdote that shows how poorly Columbia tends to its own legacies, as well as a great article idea (Columbia Opera Workshop) Absentminded 08:29, 21 February 2008 (EST)