These days I spend a fair bit of my time emailing libraries in order to get access to research materials for a project I'm working on, and I'd like to share what has become a very typical experience for me and one that I think more people should know about.
It all started in the way most things do these days: with a search and a random recommended result.
At the time, I was looking into several different genres of music played during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (1600-1700) across Europe and the Middle East. Specifically I was looking into English/American Colonial and Romanian Folk. I came across several incredible melodies—including one that immediately stole my heart even though it wasn't at all what I was looking for—and I eventually stumbled on this tune captured by a visitor to Colonial Williamsburg:
This was precisely what I was looking for, but the song came in with no introduction and the video itself contained no further clues as to what this song even was. I wanted to know more about it (and potentially find the source of the melody and others like it) but I was starting from a pretty bare slate.
I started my research by trying to find any information on the Colonial Williamsburg site as to the kinds of music their performers play, but that went nowhere. So, I headed over to my piano and deciphered the tune by ear so that I could potentially look up the sheet music. However no music search engine I could find could tell me what the song was. I was running low on options now, so I did what I've now done several times: I emailed the Colonial Williamsburg Research department and simply asked if they could help.
A few days later I had a response:
[Our] Performing Arts dept [says] that the clip you have is a medley of songs. They're from the John Playford English Dancing Master collection of tunes, and are called, ‘Cockleshells,’ and ‘Oranges and Lemons.’ (emphasis mine)
Perfect. I had a source. Even better: that source is on the Internet Archive.
Now, some readers might be asking why I am telling this story at all. Didn't I simply send an email and get a reply? Yes. I did. But that's precisely why I feel so compelled to tell it.
These days the internet is a beast with two heads: seemingly everything is available on it, yet we have trouble finding anything. Mathematicians sometimes refer to this phenomenon as the problem of finding the hay in a haystack
. We're surrounded by information and yet overwhelmed by any ability to actually navigate it to find what we want.
Amidst this chaos, I have continued to find guidance and help in the form of the under-appreciated experts who staff our libraries and research institutes. There is only so much that independent research can accomplish and it's hard to remember that you can ask for help.
In the past few years I've sent dozens of emails like this one and always received helpful responses. Increasingly, in our ever-connected world, data may exist on the internet, but we might find that we will end up relying on the knowledge of the experts in the physical realm to find it.
The internet has made so much content and information available at our fingertips, but perhaps the most powerful fragment of that content is a simple email address.
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