In undertaking extensive Internet “background checks” on the men and organizations involved in the publications making up this small digitization project, I found myself doggedly adopting a purist “digital” investigation. I am not sure why, except that as I pursued online resource after resource, web page after page, Google digitized book after digitized book, I came to realize how much could actually be done this way. And what could not be done this way was, well, unlikely to get done at all, if you know what I mean.
A popular definition of obsessive behavior is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Yet given the speed of online search – a couple dozen Google searches and skimming six or seven result screens in the same time it might take just to find one likely source in the stacks — circling back and back again takes on a less crazy sense. Obsessive research might sometimes be validated in Google because, as has often been noted, search results there change from day to day, even hour to hour. Google’s ‘bots are ceaselessly depositing their booty in the server farms in Mountainview. I think though that more often than not our “sensibility” changes — we ourselves are never the same from day to day. We see new and different and better things all the time, based on who knows what?
How about a concrete instance? Here is a link to a tract from the St. Anne’s Temperance Society (India)
I would swear on a stack of our temperance pamphlets that I had checked its author, a P. W. O’Gorman, as thoroughly as possible in Google and circled back and back again doggedly. I certainly found data about the man but no dates. Catalogers really, really love being able to pin down birth and death for their prey, and I had neither.
Then under some odd combination of searching or skimming or the meanderings of the Google ‘bots, a breakthrough…. Eureka! A copy of the British Catholics Who’s Who & Yearbook for 1908 has been digitized by Google. Our Dr. O’Gorman was in born 1860.
When and if I find out when he died — I know he was still writing articles as late as 1940 but perhaps not long after that — I will let you know.