Two books about modern events related to Korea show up.
I hit my local library’s web site and enter “ancient korea” under the catalog search. Let’s say I’d like to emulate the culture, society, holidays, religions, and other aspects of ancient Korea. Let’s give it a try on my local library system. Come into the library with a general world or setting concept. If you type “history” into the search, you’re probably not going to find anything directly useful. Focused AreasĮven with the computerized systems, it’s good to come in with a focus. This might allow you to find resources you’d never thought about searching for. They allow searching by all the different criteria books can be organized under, and a good system will even provide related material. (Author note: I can smell the paper and wood/graphite in my memories as I describe this.)Īt modern libraries, the bulky, hard-to-update, sometimes missing cards have been replaced by computerized terminals that allow more precise searching. You had to write down the Dewey Decimal System classification number and sub-category information on these little slips of paper using pencils like you find at mini-golf locations. You could search by author, topic, or book title in the highly organized physical cards that lived in really long drawers. In my heady days of almost living in the library, I knew the card catalog system inside and out. That’s where the card catalog comes into play. It’s also difficult to know where to start.
Smell of old library books crack#
If you have a great library, you might even get upwards of a million (or more!) books to crack open and learn from. If you have a good library, there are going to be tens of thousands of volumes. There are sub-categories in each of the 10 major classes of books, and even more sub-sub-categories below those.
Books are classified using numbers that range from 000 (Computer science, information, and general works) through 999 (History of other areas extraterrestrial worlds). Libraries organize their collections according to the Dewey Decimal Systems. Maybe even take your gaming group with you and see what they can discover. If you happened to have a family or partner, take them with you and cut them loose in the library.
Plan for hours and hours of wandering the stacks, making piles of books, and delving into the wonderful, musty smell of old tomes. This was in the nascent days of the Internet where search engines were rudimentary, Wikipedia didn’t exist, Encyclopedia Britannica wasn’t online yet, and the billions of resources at our modern fingertips had not been imagined yet, let alone created.Įven though we have those billions of resources ready for access from the comfort of our home, I’m going to encourage you to head off to your local library for a field trip. Sure, there were some “crossover years” where I tried to do research on the Internet, but eventually found myself at the library again. In the days of yore (e.g.: prior to my introduction to the Internet in 1994), I’d spend countless hours at the library doing world research for RPGs and game design and generally educating myself.
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