Advanced Notes on Archival Research

My project has paired advantages and disadvantages:

	Advantages	Disadvantages
A	Obscure primary sources	Costly archival research
B	Image-texts take little time to read	Image-texts take too little time to read
C	Well-developed tertiary sources from two fields	Tertiary sources from two fields aren't in conversation with each other.

Disadvantage A: "Costly archival research"

By the grace of God, I've got the first disadvantage sorted out. I've received funding to go to London, Oxford, and Antwerp for two (discontinuous) months this summer to research at the British Library, the Bodleian, and the Plantin-Moretus Museum. That just leaves the problem of deciding what to do with the time I've been granted.

Disadvantage B: "Image-texts take too little time to read"

As the stoics say, "The obstacle becomes the path." So the short amount of time it takes to read an image-text yields a lot of time that I can spend writing close-readings in the libraries. This also means that I can take lots of bibliographic measurements while I'm there.

Disadvantage C: "Tertiary sources from two fields aren't in conversation with each other."

This is the most interesting problem. Here are some of the tertiary sources I'm using for advanced research:

• Ingram and Luborsky's Guide to English Illustrated Books (hereafter, Ingram and Luborsky)
• The Electronic Short Title Catalogue (hereafter, ESTC)
• explore.bl.uk
• Early English Books Online (hereafter, EEBO)
• Malcolm Jones' The Print in Early Modern England (hereafter, Jones)
• Michael Hunter's Printed Images in Early Modern Britain (hereafter, Hunter)
• Antony Griffiths' The Print in Stuart Britain (hereafter, Griffiths)
• Sheila O'Connell's The Popular Print in England (hereafter, O'Connell)

Since I have a project organized around image-texts, I can use these resources for image-based research, or for text-based research. Here's how.

Image-based research

1. Begin with any of the illustrated codices from above (Ingram & Luborsky, Jones, Hunter, Griffiths, O'Connell). Flip through and mark every illustration that appears interesting.
2. Repeat step 1 with another codex, if desired.
3. Use the bibliographic information provided in the codex to search the ESTC and Ingram & Luborsky for holdings. 
• Ingram & Luborsky hold more descriptions, but may be out of date / non-comprehensive
• The ESTC is more likely to be up-to-date, but may have less descriptive content
4. If an entry in the ESTC or Ingram & Luborsky matches the archive you will visit, record that entry.
• You will need to be up-to-speed on STC notation and library codes to use Ingram and Luborsky. For my two largest archives:
• L = British Library
• O = Oxford
5. Reserve the entry at the relevant library.
• explore.bl.uk has a handy "workspace" option, and an automated reservation system
• other libraries are more difficult
6. Repeat steps 1-5 until you hit the maximum reservations for each day.

Text-based research

1. Compile a list of interesting image-textual keywords you want to research.
• "strip"
• "row"
• "column"
• "sequence"
• "progression"
• "narrative"
• "volvelle"
• "pack"
• "cards"
2. Search the ESTC for the phrase "ingram and luborsky" and one of your keywords from 1.
3. Scroll through results and add new keywords.
4. Refine results according to your library codes.
5. Reserve the entry at the relevant library.
6. Repeat steps 1-5 until you hit the maximum reservations for each day.