Potential Research Topic

Hi Blog Group!

I wholeheartedly agree with Akash’s comment about it being difficult to narrow down my various interests to just one potential research question.  I think this is, in large part, why I’ve decided not to pursue the thesis option in the MI program!  It’s also what attracted me to the prospect of working in libraries in general.  As someone who has always has a tough time trying to focus on just one area of interest, it seemed like a career that would allow me to continually learn about a variety of topics.

When I tried to carry out the exercise that Luker suggests at the end of Chapter 1, I was able to come up with dozens of questions, but found myself tripping over a number of potential roadblocks.  Most notably, the question of who my research might benefit – who the ‘stakeholders’ might be.  I could easily prattle off a list of research questions that sound like fun to me, such as:  How many books are there in the Fisher library that have been banned over the centuries, and why?  What are the intellectual, political or even aesthetic links between materials that have been considered dangerous throughout history?  What are the most expensive or extravagant bindings to be found in the same collection, and to what extent does a book’s material beauty influence the experience of the reader?  Is it possible to gauge the age of a book from its smell?  What is it about some books that make people cherish them forever (The content? The cover art? The feeling of the pages?  An emotional relationship with the person who gave it to them?), while other books are sold off, given away, or used as doorstops and to prop open windows? What do the notes in the margins of a book indicate to us about its reader?  I could go on forever, but the problem with these kinds of questions, for me, is that I suspect that the answers might also only be interesting or beneficial to me, or at best to a limited, rather esoteric circle of likeminded bookish nerds.  The questions themselves also seem rather limited in their scope.

So in an attempt to come up with a research idea that would be of some benefit to a larger portion of the population, I began thinking about oral history and its place in libraries and archives.  A very cursory google search seemed to indicate that there is no archive or other form of repository for personal accounts or oral histories in Toronto, or even in Ontario.  There are storytelling events and festivals, but these seem to be more focused on personal anecdotes, or fictional tales, or reading existing books aloud, rather than a documentation of history from the perspective of an individual.  I feel like it might be an interesting project to try to record people’s accounts of events in Toronto’s history, or perhaps to tie the accounts to physical locations in the city.  The end product could perhaps be a website, where the user could click on a variety of interactive locations on a map of Toronto, and hear an account of what it was like to work on the construction crew that built the Bloor viaduct, or to have arrived at the Toronto harbor after having fled Europe during WWII, or to have lived in Kensington Market in 1930?  It could also serve as an educational tool for teaching students about Toronto history.

It’s a very preliminary idea at the moment, and I have no idea yet what sort of methodological framework I might use to carry out this research.  But hopefully the next few classes and further reading of Luker and Knight will point me in the right direction.  I also welcome any comments or suggestions that the discussion group may have.