Biographic+Historians

Caitlin Arndt Emily Fairey Lauren Orso 20 October 2010 Professor Pattueli

Assignment 2: Literature Review, Bibliography

Literature Review

The ancient art of biography was traditionally more "popular" than history because it was more personal. Plutarch's Lives of Great Men, and Suetonius' Caesars are among the first works that defined biography as a distinct prose genre. It used the same tools as history to make a portrait in gossip. The modern word "biography" now has many shades of meaning, from the psychological case study to the short web bio. In specifically selecting “historical” biographers as a subject, the intimation is that their practice is closest to history, the original source of biography. We cannot compare all the different brands of biography. Since this is beyond our scope, we have kept in mind a focused question of comparison: Is there a difference in research methods between historical biographers and "specialty" biographers?

The word "specialty," being a generalization, requires explicating. For the purpose of this study and for our literary review, "specialty" denotes a modern, popular portrait with a commercial slant, whereas "historical" signifies a biography with the goal of scholarly advancement. The difference is not one of subject matter as much as tone, but some subjects do seem to lend themselves more to popular recension than historical analysis: Hollywood stars and sports heroes are two examples. On the other hand, biographies of people who played some major role in history tend to be deemed "scholarly." The biography of Napoleon is scholarly, while that of Mick Jagger is popular. This distinction between the seriousness of history and the tabloid tone of biography is one if the original distinctions between the two genres. Although it is possible to blur it, and write an historical account of a popular phenomenon, or a popular version of a powerful figure of history, there is a real difference in prestige and market between the different types.

In our literature review, we have striven to get a good general sample of historical and scholarly methodologies, as well as insights into popular biographic techniques. The weight of literature on biographic techniques is very much heavier on the side of historical biography. Perhaps this is because the historical element is taken more seriously. There is a fairly wide range of recent sources on modern methodologies and sources for general biographic techniques of the academy, as well as for a few sub-genres, such as music. A few good general studies and surveys include Wengraf (2001), and Miller (2005). Wengraf has created a highly practical manual on proper practices for semi-structured interviews that encompasses the entire process, from creating good questions to behavior in the interview setting. This could be useful as a way to see how biographers construct interactions with subjects. It is highly technical, so it is difficult for the non-professional to understand, but it would be interesting to see to what degree our interviews match this sort of methodology. Miller has collected a four volume, encyclopedic range of 65 articles on biography that represent the last 5 decades of professional and academic descriptions of biographers conducting research in practice. On the whole, though it records debates of approach, the scholars in the book do not propose a theory of biographic method that is distinct from the historical.

Librarians have historically been interested in biographic methods, perhaps since they were the gatekeepers of much biographic source material. Labaree (2006) is a very useful article on biographic methods from a librarian’s perspective, that explores the use of life histories as method. He discusses the design of a life history research study and looks at issues of methodology and qualitative research for those within the library construct. There is also one interesting "biography of a biographer" in Rayward's (1991) study of early librarian and information professional Paul Otlet's work, in particular his theory of "documentation." Rayward looks at Otlet as a pioneer of biographical methodology, and discusses how his approaches are still relevant to biography today.

On the premise that the historical biography shares a methodological basis with history, it was worthwhile to examine surveys with this broader scholarly context. The studies of Case (1991), Dalton & Charnigo (2004), Delgadillo & Lynch (1999) and Orbach (1991) have been particularly useful and enlightening. Case describes a study of 20 American historians that focuses on their motivations and results of information needs of historians. The study asked about research topics, specific projects, use of archives, categorizing materials, writing habits and computer use. Suggestions for future use of such sources are discussed. Dalton & Charnigo's article "examines which materials historians consider most important and how the discover them" including use of electronic materials. They found that print format (book reviews and browsing) remains most popular, though electronic resources "increased use of catalogs and indexes…to identify appropriate primary and secondary sources of information." 278 surveys were returned (27% of those sent out); 33 follow-up surveys were returned (out of 66). Many historians said that AV materials were important to their work, but very few ever cite them. This study could be a useful methodological model for our current study. Delgadillo & Lynch's paper investigates whether graduate students exhibit the same information-seeking behaviors as established scholars and questions how they use new technologies vs. reference services at the university library. It is limited in scope to one program at one university (22 history graduate students at UCLA in 1995), and makes the general assumption from students is that library will have what they need, whether or not the library does. This topic may be too specific as a model for us, but the paper is extremely well designed and easy to read. Orbach strives to develop a fuller picture of archival use by history scholars. Specifically, Orbach believes that too little study has been undertaken that deals with what leads to archival searching in the scholar’s information-seeking process. Her small-scale, qualitative study was conducted with ten historians at the professional and graduate levels.

In recent years there has been increased interest in analyzing how humanists and historians approach digital resources. For much of the digital age, there has been a preconception of historians (and humanities scholars in general) as Luddites with incredibly complicated search strategies. The result of this attitude has primarily been neglect in creating digital resources designed specifically for this group. Now, more attention is being paid to the information-seeking habits of this academic community, and the field of “digital humanities” is a growing. A study by Tibbo (2003) focuses on the availability of primary resources for biographers, and discusses whether advances in descriptive markup languages now employed by librarians and information professionals are actually affecting the research practices of historians. Her very useful article gives a history of studies that have been done on the information seeking behaviors of historians, and then reports the findings of a large-scale, international study of U.S. historians at sixty-eight top-ranked institutions. Tibbo’s results point out that across the board, these scholars make use of a wide array of digital (on-line databases, Web searching,) and print resources, and makes suggestion as to what this implies for archives and virtual repositories. Also, due to her breakdown of strategies based on type of historical research, we can see that the biographical historians cast the widest net in their search process. Tibbo study reveals that historians do, in fact, have an interest in and regularly use of a variety of digital resources. Tibbo’s further planned research should provide more workable suggestions for how the digital finding aids created by information centers can be improved to match the historians’ habits. According to Wiberely’s research, humanists weigh the worthiness of incorporating new technologies into their search patterns against how much time it would take for them to learn the technology (Wiberley 2000). It is also clear through Wiberley’s work that it technophobe and historian are not necessarily synonymous.

A thread that runs through much of the literature on historical information seeking is how researchers use informal search strategies, especially in archival settings. One predominant method includes finding and searching with proper names, typically names of individuals in searching for materials concerning a certain topic or period. The consequence of this behavior is that even historians that are not strictly concerned with biography are searching for people and using personal names as an access point. Charles Cole in multiple studies (Cole 1998, Cole 2000) describes the research behavior of history Ph.D. students. One of the most important concepts to emerge from this work is the formal analysis of the cognitive benefits of performing searches based on proper names. This strategy is particularly useful when accessing archival collections, a crucial step in obtaining information from primary sources. Duff suggests that the prevalence of historians that gather a list of names from secondary literature to employ in seeking primary materials may be due to the lack of subject or keyword access to most archival collections (Duff 2002). In Duff’s analysis of information seeking in historical, archival collections, she emphasizes the importance of using these names in each stage of her process of orientation to the collection, seeking known material, building knowledge (and context) and identifying relevant material. In addition to the aforementioned proper-name searching, citation linking is another leading informal strategy, one Green deals with in detail (Green 2000). While this study provides insight into a dominant strategy and its efficacy, further research is required to determine the implications of the findings for libraries and information centers serving historians and humanists.

A study that deals with the financial problems facing biographical historians is Carmichael (1991). This ALA Library History Roundtable describes the result of a survey sent to 102 library biographers to identify "the extent of their work in biography and to garner information regarding funding, sites visited in conducting research, and problems encountered." The financial problems of biographic historians do represent a different type of information seeking they must perform.

There are some interesting articles on specific historical biographic sub-genres. Biographies of traditionally discounted minorities have generated much commentary in the last few years as requiring a different approach to sources than those of dominant cultural subjects. Taylor (2008) focuses on the way biographies of African-American women in the 19th century are "hidden" in traditional sources, and must be approached in a different way. This article may seem excessively skewed towards the theoretical. Nevertheless it does have a strong emphasis on the methodology of research; how to approach archives, and learning how to discover the right documents has bearing on our topic. Hudson (2009) discusses some of the problems the author encountered when dealing with a historical figure whose life was rather risqué, so that the task of uncovering what fits the eulogistic demands of "feminist biography" was more difficult. She found that the sources had either "dried up" in disapproval, or were be skewed in the direction of sensationalism. Notice what she considers the expected places for a biographer: "archives, public libraries, microfilm reading rooms, and the like." Therefore her other sources are coded as more unusual: "audience members at book signings, bed and breakfast owners, and the men and women who collected pieces of California’s African American history."

The realm of popular, mass-marketed biography has less self-documentation than the scholarly sector. Perhaps this is because unlike a serious educational or historical endeavor, biographers who write for the amusement of the general public and for financial gain have no wish to reveal their techniques and sources. Lee (2009) in a book of the “very short introduction” series from Oxford University Press has created an overview of the biographic genre, including the methodologies of popular biographers. He marks a recent trend to a stronger stress on “disreputable and salacious aspects of one's life,” suggesting that this represents a substantial change in the tone of the field. Thus the methodologies of this sort of biography have much in common with investigative and tabloid journalism, relying extensively on forces interviews, spying, and second hand reports. Bloom (1980) defined “popular” and “super-pop” biographies as discrete categories, discussing their different uses and acknowledgments of sources Levasseur (2000) discusses the rise of biography as a multimedia genre extending to audiovisual forms. It is an interesting question whether the format of a biography substantially affects the methodology of the biographic researcher. Although this article concentrates primarily on the types of subjects that film biographies take on, rather than the techniques used to gather information, some technical information is inherent. For example, self-biographies imply information taken from "self-filming." Likewise, "biographical concert performances," would imply that that footage of a star at a concert is used. This article has limited use for our subject, but may be a place we could begin to look for more "film-bio" information. Bale (2004) writes on the techniques of sports biography and the problems associated with this genre, providing methodological and conceptual questions for writers and biographers of sport figures, and discussing whether sports biography is of the same essential nature as other biographies. Rak (2008) has brought together a collection of essays that deals with the current wide range of biographic formats including personal documentaries, graphic books, song lyrics, personal zines, and celebrity memoirs. She makes the interesting point that although “official” biographies written by professionals are doing no better than usual, there is a drastic proliferation of personal memoirs and informal biographies that make use of generally available web information like blogs, wikis, personal pages, and search engines.

Bibliography

Bale, J., Christensen, M. K., & Pfister, G. (2004). Writing lives in sport: biographies, life-histories and methods. Århus: Aarhus University Press.

Bloom, L Z. (1980). Popular and super-pop biographies: definitions and distinctions. Biography, 3(3), 225-339.

Bresler, L., Stake, RE. (1992) Qualitative research methodology in music education. Handbook of research on music teaching and learning, 75-90.

Carmichael, J.V. (1991). Ahistoricity and the library profession: perceptions of biographical researchers in LIS concerning research problems, practices and barriers. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 31(4), 329-356.

Case, D. O. (1991). The collection and use of information by some American historians: a study of motives and methods. The Library Quarterly, 61(1), 61-82.

Cole, C. (1998). Information acquisition in history Ph.D. students: Inferencing and the formation of knowledge structures. The Library Quarterly, 68 (1), 33-54.

Cole, C. (2000). Inducing Expertise in History Doctoral Students via Information Retrieval Design. The Library Quarterly, 70 (1) 86-109.

Dalton, M. S., & Charnigo, L. (2004). Historians and their information sources. College & Research Libraries, 65(5), 400.

Delgadillo, R., & Lynch, B.P. (1999). Future historians: Their quest for information. College & Research Libraries, 60(3), 245-259.

Duff, W.M. & Johnson, C.A. (2002). Accidentally found on purpose: Information-seeking behavior of historians in archives. The Library Quarterly, 72 (4), 472-496.

Green, R. (2000). Location sources in humanities scholarship: The efficacy of following bibliographic references. Library Quarterly, 70, 201-229.

Hudson, L.M. (2009). Lies, secrets, and silences: writing African American women’s biography. Journal of Women's History 21(4), 138-140.

Labaree, R.V. (2006). Encounters with the library: Understanding experience using the life history method. Library Trends 55(1), 121-139.

Lee, H. (2009). Biography: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Levasseur, A. (2000) Film and Video Self-Biographies. Biography 23(1), 176-192.

Miller, R. (2005). Biographical research methods. London: Sage.

Orbach, B.C. (1991). The view from the researcher's desk: Historians' perceptions of research and repositories. American Archivist, 54 (1), 28-43.

Rak, J. (2008). Pop life: an introduction. Canadian Review of American Studies, 38(3), 325-331.

Rayward, W.B. (1991). The case of Paul Otlet, pioneer of information science, internationalist,visionary: Reflections on biography. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 23,135-145.

Taylor, U. (2008). Women in the documents: Thoughts on uncovering the personal, political, and professional. Journal of Women’s History 20 (1), 195.

Tibbo, H.R. (2003). Primarily history in America: how U.S. historians search for primary materials at the dawn of the digital age. American Archivist 66(1), 9-50.

Wengraf, T. (2001). Qualitative research interviewing: Biographical narrative and semi-structured. Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE.

Wiberley, S.E., Jones, W.G. (2000). Time and technology: A decade-long look at humanists' use of electronic information technology. College & Research Libraries, 61 (5), 421-31.



Annotated Bibliography  (EF) Citation: Bale, J., Christensen, M. K., & Pfister, G. (2004). Writing lives in sport: Biographies, life-histories and methods. Århus: Aarhus University Press.  Abstract: This is a book of stories about sports persons: sports stars, less-known athletes and relatively unknown physical education teachers and sports scientists. More exactly, these 13 essays all deal with problems associated with writing sport biographies - how does an author navigate among myths and truths? Why do some athletes live on in the public mind while others, whose achievements may have been greater, fade from memory? Are sports biographies different from those dealing with people from the non-sporting realm? The subjects range from direct theoretical explorations of writing sport biographies to discussions of biographies themselves. Topics include the following: The German-American sports- and physiology scientist Professor Ernst Jokl; Danish gymnastics pedagogue Niels Bukh; two studies of physical education teachers, including Martti Silvennionen's work on autoethnographical pedagogy in PE teacher training; women's sport in Denmark's intermediary period of 1920-1950; writing about women and sport, and the Finnish worker sports movement experience from a woman's viewpoint. Another essay observes the contrasts in the legends of two sports stars in twentieth century Britain, the English footballer Jackie Milburn and the Olympic athlete, Godfrey Brown. Other topics include the English sports hero from the 1940s and '50s, Denis Compton, the Swedish footballer Lennart "Nacka" Skoglund and the Danish cyclist Niels Fredborg. Writing Lives in Sports provides lively discussions of individual sporting lives as well as important methodological and conceptual questions for writers and biographers of sport figures and other genres.

I think on this last point, yes.

Note (LO); does this deal with research techniques, though? if not, it's not useful to us.

 (EF) Citation: Lynn Z. Bloom. (1980). Popular and super-pop biographies: Definitions and distinctions. Biography 3(3), 225-239. Retrieved October 15, 2010, from Project MUSE database.  Full text: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/biography/v003/3.3.bloom.html  Abstract: By defining popular and super-pop biographies as discrete categories, this article identifies key differences between these sub-genres, along such dimensions as choice of subjects, characterization of subjects (including number and characteristics of roles, and aspects of personality), uses and acknowledgments of sources, literary style, and intended audience.

 Bresler, L., Stake, RE. (1992) Qualitative research methodology in music education. Handbook of research on music teaching and learning, 75-90  Full text:

 (Model Template for copy)Citation: Full Text: Abstract: Annotation:  Miller, R. (2005). Biographical research methods. London: SAGE. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> To create a compendium of articles representing classic statements as well as ongoing discussions in the field of biographical research, Miller (affiliation not given) grouped the 65 selections in this reference into eight broad topics over four volumes. The first volume, Time and Biographical Research, begins with C. Wright Mills' seminal article "The Uses of History" and addresses the place of history in biography and the relationship between generations and life courses. Volume II, The Construction of Biographical Meaning, concerns the problems of narrative analysis and questions of biographical identity. The authors in this volume clarify the notion of narrative analysis and contemplate the problems of the postmodern self. The articles in Contexts, the third volume, are divided between discussions about the influence of the German School on biographical research and the role of the family in biography. The concluding volume, Dispute and Discussion in Biographical Research, reviews the methodological and ethical debates and problems in the field. Most of the papers, which cover the last five decades, describe conducting biographical research rather than the application of an approach to a substantive topic. Notes and references follow each article, but the volumes do not have a comprehensive subject index.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">(LO) Citation: Carmichael, J.V. (1991). Ahistoricity and the library profession: perceptions of biographical researchers in lis concerning research problems, practices and barriers. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 31(4), 329-356.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Full text:

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">http://www.jstor.org/pss/40323368

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Abstract: The ALA Library History Roundtable recently adopted a resolution charging schools of library and information science (LIS) to strengthen historical components in all parts of LIS curricula and to encourage historical studies among faculty and graduate students. To many individuals, such a statement may seem irrelevant and demand some explanation. In order to clarify some of these issues, a survey was sent to 102 library biographers to identify the extent of their work in biography and to garner information regarding funding, sites visited in conducting research, and problems encountered. Although financial and collegial support are frequently lacking, biographers are more concerned with problems intrinsic to their research than with external problems. Funds are apparently available if the biographer is able to write a strong proposal to the appropriate agency. Negative comments indicate that historical research is not valued highly in LIS schools and that professional history may be virtually lacking in the curriculum.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Annotation: Survey given to biographers regarding "funding, sites visited in conducting research, and problems encountered." Most biographers concerned for intrinsic and not external problems, and historical research not valued in LIS schools.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">(LO) Citation: Case, D. O. (1991). The collection and use of information by some american historians: A study of motives and methods. The Library Quarterly, 61(1), 61-82.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Full text: http://www.jstor.org/pss/4308543

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Abstract: Describes a study of 20 American historians that was conducted to better understand the nature of research in history. Highlights include choice of research topics, use of archives, writing habits, use of computers, the classification of historical knowledge, implications for libraries, and suggestions for future studies. (43 references) (LRW)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Annotation: Focuses on motivations and results of information needs of historians. Study surveys 20 historians, asked about research topics, specific projects, use of archives, categorizing materials, writing habits and computer use. Suggestions for future use discussed.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> (LO) Citation: Dalton, M. S., & Charnigo, L. (2004). Historians and their information sources. College & research libraries, 65(5), 400. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Full text: http://crl.acrl.org/content/65/5/400.full.pdf+html <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Abstract: This article reports on a survey of historians and a citation analysis undertaken to revisit the questions treated in Margaret F. Stieg’s 1981 article published in College & Research Libraries. It examines which materials historians consider to be the most important and how they discover them. Their attitudes toward and use of electronic materials were also studied. Many characteristics of historians’ information needs and use have not changed in a generation: informal means of discovery like book reviews and browsing remain important, as does the need for comprehensive searches. Print continues to be the principal format. What has changed is that the advent of electronic resources has increased historians’ use of catalogs and indexes in their efforts to identify appropriate primary and secondary sources of information. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Annotation: Article "examines which materials historians consider most important and how the discover them" including use of electronic materials. Print format remains most popular, though electronic resources "increased use of catalogs and indexes…to identify appropriate primary and secondary sources of information." 278 surveys were returned (27% of those sent out); 33 followup surveys were returned (out of 66). Many cited AV materials were important to their work, but very few ever cite them. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Note: This sounds exactly like what we are doing.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> (LO) Citation: Delgadillo, R., & Lynch, B.P. (1999). Future historians: Their quest for information. College & Research Libraries, 60(3), 245-259. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Full text: http://crl.acrl.org/content/60/3/245.full.pdf+html <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Abstract: This paper examines how history graduate students at one research university seek information and how they use the university library in their information-seeking process. The general question framing the study was whether graduate students in history demonstrate the same infor­mation-seeking behavior as established scholars. Related questions explored the use of new technologies and the reliance that history gradu­ate students place on reference librarians and librarians in special col­lections. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Annotation: Limited in scope to one program at one university (22 history graduate students at UCLA in 1995), investigates whether graduate students exhibit the same information-seeking behaviors as established scholars and questions how they use new technologies vs. reference services at the university library. General assumption from students is that library will have what they need, whether or not the library does. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Notes: This may be kind of too specific, but paper is extremely well designed and easy to read.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> (EF) Dunaway, D. K. Citation Method and Theory in the Oral Biography [|(Autumn, 1992)][|. Oral History] 20 (2), Making Histories, 40-44 [|Oral History Society] <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> Full text: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40179286 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> Abstract

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> (EF) Citation: J. Woodford Howard, Jr. (1971) Judicial Biography and the Behavioral Persuasion. [|The American Political Science Review]. 65(3), 704-715 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> Full text: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1955515 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> Abstract: and less on character, legal content, and ethical valida- tion-the who, what, and for what questions <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> which scholars past and lawyers present regard as legitimate parts of the biographical task.18 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> In blunter words, judicial biographies are ba- sically case studies in judical politics.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> (EF)Citation: Hudson, Lynn M. (2009). Lies, secrets, and silences: Writing African American Women’s Biography. Journal of Women's History 21(4), 138-140. Retrieved September 21, 2010, from Project MUSE database. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Full Text: http://muse.jhu.edu.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/journals/journal_of_womens_history/v021/21.4.hudson.html#f3 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Abstract: As far as subjects go, I chose poorly. She was dead with no known descendents. Many of the relevant records burned in the 1906 blaze that engulfed San Francisco. And although she helped to finance one of the most significant rebellions in U.S. history—John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry—few historians had ever heard of her. Some existing records, cited in footnotes, were privately owned and could not or would not be shared.1 What could I possibly “know” about her given the sources to which I had access? What would a feminist biography of a woman accused of voodoo, inside trading, and murder look like? These questions haunted me and shaped my study of the nineteenth-century African American entrepreneur and abolitionist Mary Ellen Pleasant (1814–1904). My journey of discovery took me to expected sites: archives, public libraries, microfilm reading rooms, and the like. But I also learned about her from audience members at book signings, bed and breakfast owners, and the men and women who collected pieces of California’s African American history. I quickly discovered that the public investment in Pleasant’s past far exceeded the interest of academics. From the minute she landed in gold rush San Francisco, Pleasant created a sensation; the story goes that men in the city crowded the dock to bid top dollar for her services as a cook. To unravel her history, I encountered a different but no less determined crowd that gathered around her memory. Their interest in preserving her legacy as a feminist foremother, a voodoo queen, or a freedom fighter forced me to confront the differences between hagiography and critical feminist biography. Rather than “overemphasizing the recuperative and celebratory aspects of earlier women’s history,” feminist biography is now able to do just the opposite, probing the messier, less heroic aspects of women’s history and answering difficult questions about race, gender, capital, and power. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Annotation: This article discusses some of the problems a biographer encountered when dealing with a historical figure whose life was rather risque, so the task of uncovering what fits the eulogistic demands of "feminist biography" is more difficult. She found that the sources had either "dried up" in disapproval, or were be skewed in the direction of sensationalism. Notice what she considers the expected places for a biographer: "archives, public libraries, microfilm reading rooms, and the like." Therefore her other sources are coded as more unusual: "audience members at book signings, bed and breakfast owners, and the men and women who collected pieces of California’s African American history."

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> (EF) Citation: Labaree, Robert V. (2006). Encounters with the library: Understanding experience using the life history method. Library Trends 55(1), 121-139. Retrieved September 21, 2010, from Project MUSE database. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> Full text: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/library_trends/summary/v055/55.1labaree.html <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> Abstract: Drawing on the author's own research, this article explores the use of life histories as method and the ways in which this research can contribute to new understandings about the experiential relationships between libraries and users. The article is divided into four parts. Part one defines the essential elements of a life history research study. Part two describes how to design a life history research study. Part three examines ethical, methodological, and interpretive issues related to issues of organizational insiderness and internal validity and textual authority. The author concludes by outlining the potential benefits and pitfalls of using life histories and discusses how life history research, and qualitative research in general, can enrich and broaden our understanding of library science theory and practice.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> (EF) Citation: Lee, H. (2009). Biography: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> Abstract: Biography is a story of someone's life, and biographies have been written for as long as people had been interested in lives of others. This very short introduction takes us on a trip throughout centuries at exploring the genre, it's ever evolving conventions and the basic requirements that we expect from all good biographies. The main focus of the book is the British biographies, with a few others used as examples. There are no biographical examples from non-western sources, unless you count those from the Bible. Nonetheless, even with these constraints we get to see a vast variety of approaches to biography. Some biographers had intimate first-hand knowledge of their subject, while other wrote from a vast spatial and temporal distance, relying solely on secondhand sources. Another big difference that biography as a genre has undergone is the change of mores that nowadays puts a stronger stress on disreputable and salacious aspects of one's life. This is a far cry from "exemplary lives" model that had been popular in the past, which had presupposed the purpose of biography to be enlightenment and edification of the public.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> Reading about biography in abstract can be rather boring. Luckily, this book is replete with examples from various notable biographies. However, if you are not interested in biography as a genre you may not get too much out of reading this book.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> (EF)Citation: Levasseur, Audrey. (2000) Film and Video Self-Biographies. Biography 23.1: 176-192. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Full Text: URL: http://muse.jhu.edu.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/journals/biography/v023/23.1levasseur.html <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Abstract: Biography is a multimedia genre; it exists in oral, written, and audiovisual forms. Since the late 1960s, a sizable corpus of biographical films and videos has steadily grown, spurred by the popularity of television documentaries about celebrity subjects. The most familiar example of cinematic biography, what I term "traditional," typically celebrates the accomplishments of the subject in a chronological structure using photographic stills, film footage, and accounts of contemporaries or experts, with a narrator providing voice-over bridging commentary. Increasingly, directors are inserting sequences of dramatic reconstructions as well. Subgenres of cinematic biography include the biographical sketch, a brief account of a subject's life, focusing on factors that contributed to the subject's present state; self-biographies, hybrid forms combining traits of biography and autobiography; investigative biographies, works that examine the guilt or innocence of the subject, or attempt to get at the truth of some inquiry; biographical concert performances, a specialized form that captures a star's experiences during a concert tour; ethnographic films and videos, works that seek to document the culture of a specific geographic or cultural region; mixed or hybrid forms, newly evolving formats that combine the characteristics of two or more genres or subgenres, such as autobiography, investigative biography, and self-biography; biographical docudrama, biopics that use performers and recreations to simulate actual people and events; and moc docs, which are "documentary parodies, fake documentaries, and invented biographies and autobiographies" (Muhammad 36). <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Annotation: Although this article concentrates primarily on the types of subjects that film biographies take on, rather than the techniques used to gather information, some technical information is inherent. For example, self-biographies imply information taken from "self-filming." Likewise, "biographical concert performances," would imply that that footage of a star at a concert is used. This article has limited use for our subject, but may be a place we could begin to look for more "film-bio" information.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> (EF) Citation: Julie Rak. (2008). Pop life: An introduction. Canadian Review of American Studies 38(3), 325-331. Retrieved September 21, 2010, from Project MUSE database. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> Full text:http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/canadian_review_of_american_studies/v038/38.3.rak.pdf <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> Abstract: This collection of essays deals with an important form of representation in American culture today: popular auto/biography. Popular auto/biographical discourse appears in a dizzying array of forms in North America, including personal documentaries, graphic books, song lyrics, personal zines, and celebrity memoirs. It is worth considering that, during a time when it is becoming hard for the general public to trust political and spiritual leaders, auto/biographical representations by celebrities and by “ordinary” Americans are on the rise: there are thousands of memoirs and biographies in print, and memoirs like Tuesdays with Morrie stay at the top of bestseller lists for years at a time. The scholars in this special issue examine a mix of popular and everyday auto/biographical practices and texts—from Eminem to the commemorative monuments of violent acts against women—in order to consider what life narratives mean in a public sphere where, more than ever, the personal is political. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Annotation:

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> (EF) Citation: W. Boyd Rayward (1991) THE CASE OF PAUL OTLET, PIONEER OF INFORMATION SCIENCE, INTERNATIONALIST, VISIONARY: REFLECTIONS ON BIOGRAPHY. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 23,(September), 135-145 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Full Text: http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~wrayward/otlet/PAUL_OTLET_REFLECTIONS_ON_BIOG.HTM <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Abstract: The author takes as his point of departure his studies of Paul Otlet, co-founder of the present International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID) and The Union of International Associations, developer of the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), theorist of "Documentation", and pioneer of information science. Drawing on these studies his purpose is to examine aspects of the art and scholarship of biography, of the processes of research and imagination that it involves, especially: recognising an appropriate subject and determining an approach to it, the problem of evidence and the frames of reference within which evidence is deployed, the personal involvement that develops between the subject and the biographer, and biography's final goal of historical and personal understanding. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> Why do some of us write biography? What are some of its challenges and difficulties? How does it help develop of and give shape to historical understanding? Why, as a kind of obverse to all of this, do we want to read it? In what ultimately does the biographical imperative subsist, for it seems to me it has undeniable and wide-reaching power? <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> These questions are examined in the context of my biographical study of Paul Otlet. This was published for the International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID) in 1975 (1), was translated into Russian in 1976 (2), and will be published in Spanish in 1991 (3).An annotated translation into English of a selection of Otlet's papers appeared in 1990. This presented a brief re-evaluation of Otlet's career and achievements (4).

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> (EF)Citation: Taylor, Ula. (2008). Women in the Documents: Thoughts on Uncovering the Personal, Political, and Professional. Journal of Women’s History 20 (1), 195. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Full Text: @http://muse.jhu.edu.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/journals/journal_of_womens_history/v020/20.1taylor.html <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Abstract : African American women have been placed on the periphery of most historical documents. In fact, the material traces holding the clues to their experiences are limited, heavily tainted, or virtually nonexistent. Given these circumstances, locating African American women's individual and collective identities is difficult and thus requires intensive and critical work in archival sources. It is usually under the most challenging archival conditions, however, that one must call most creatively and rigorously upon historical methods and theoretical ideas. This essay details my personal archival encounters as well as efforts to follow a trail of documents. Evaluating the claims of an alleged experience as well as theorizing from these same documents is an effort not only to recover voices but also to disrupt those canonical discourses that have too often rendered African American women invisible. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Annotation: With a focus on a very specific type of biography, this article may seem excessively skewed towards the theoretical. Nevertheless it does have a strong emphasis on the methodology of research; how to approach archives, and learning how to discover the right documents has bearing on our topic.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> (EF) Citation: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> Tibb, Helen R. (2003) Primarily History in America: How U.S. Historians Search for Primary Materials at the Dawn of the Digital Age. American Archivist 66(1), 9-50. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Full Text: http://archivists.metapress.com/content/b120370l1g718n74/fulltext.pdf. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Abstract: The Primarily History project is the first international, comparative study to examine historians' information-seeking behaviors since the advent of the World Wide Web, electronic finding aids, digitized collections, and an increasingly pervasive networked scholarly environment. Funded by the Gladys Kriebel Delmas Foundation, Primarily History is a collaboration of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) and the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. This article reports on a survey that asked historians teaching American history at sixty-eight top-ranked institutions how they located primary resources for their research. Information-seeking behaviors identified range from traditional print approaches to use of on-line databases, Web searching, and virtual repository visits. Implications are drawn for archives and special collection repositories. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Annotation: Are advances in descriptive markup languages now employed by librarians and information professionals really helping biographic historians? This very useful article gives a history of studies that have been done on historians information seeking behaviors, and then reports the new study's finds. Could be a winner.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> (EF) Citation: Wengraf, T. (2001). Qualitative research interviewing: Biographical narrative and semi-structured. Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Full Text:http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=c2b6jQ8g3sAC&oi=fnd&pg=PR15&dq=biographic+techniques&ots=pCsPJvzB3M&sig=FOnK1LcLX3IlVkmeI93v4tCNT9w#v=onepage&q=biographic%20techniques&f=false <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Abstract:Unique in its conceptual coherence and the level of practical detail, this book provides a comprehensive resource for those concerned with the practice of semi-structured interviewing, the most commonly used interview approach in social research, and in particular for in-depth, biographic narrative interviewing. It covers the full range of practices from the identification of topics through to strategies for writing up research findings in diverse ways. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Author's review: Since writing the book, I've realized more of its strength and of its weaknesses. What I still think is good about it? If you are a postgraduate/PhD candidate or a professional qualitative researcher about to design and do, analyse and write-up, research interviews, I think this is a good step-by-step manual with lots of examples of good and bad practice. It goes all the way from designing to writing up, either as regards semi-structured depth interviews in general or as regards biographic-narrative interviews in particular. I wrote it because there wasn't an equivalent, and there still isn't. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> Weaknesses? I've realized that it is rather like a video-manual: the sections and the chapters need to be read just before or while you're doing the work that the chapter is about. Apart from Part 1, which can be read at any point, the other chapters are not 'about' qualitative in-depth interviewing, they are a D-I-Y manual for each quite complex stage. If you are doing that stage of work, you will find it very useful; if you are not doing that stage, then the chapter will be experienced as too detailed. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> So: as a conceptual and practical manual for advanced undergraduates, for postgraduates and professionals, I think it works well, and deserves the 4 stars I've generously given it. As a book 'about' designing and doing and analyzing and writing up, it doesn't work unless you are yourself doing and grappling with those tasks. For non-practitioners, it gets 1 star at best! <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Annotation: This could be useful as a a way to see how biographers construct interviews. It is highly technical, so it would be interesting to see to what degree our interviews match this sort of methodology.