New career - Independent researcher, part one.

 

Since retiring from public service a year and a half ago I’ve relabeled myself as a self-employed independent researcher. Based on the number of people asking me for advice on being an independent researcher there seems to be a lot of interest in the transitioning process.  My path, however, will be different from anyone else, but I can pass on some useful information.  Like everyone else my journey started with a curiosity in my family history. I loved the research process and that led me to library school and working in a public library for over twenty years, 12 of those in a local history room. It turns out the research skills learned serving the public are a great foundation for being an independent researcher but someone else may have followed a different path that led them to a similar set of skills. 

I like the term independent researcher because family history is a small part of what I am hired to research but more about that later.  First, some thoughts about the level of research skills an independent researcher needs to have.

1.       1. . Expert research skills:

Most clients have already used the keyword searchable parts of Ancestry.com so the independent researcher skills need to go beyond keyword searching to include unindexed database/print records, record group searches, historical newspapers, ILL, Wordcat, Hathitrust, government resources, Internet Archive, DPLA, finding aids, print indexes, and more.  The list is jargony on purpose. If someone isn’t familiar with the jargon it might be a good place to start beefing up those research skills.  Concise writing skills are also important.  A business writing class was my way to improve the writing skills needed for client summary reports.

There are ways to improve research skills. Samford Institute or GRIP are immersive research workshops in specific topics and worth every dollar to attend. Volunteering opportunities for research are also available.  For example, researching veteran descendants for DNA authentication. Other opportunities can be found by looking through historical society newsletters. A few years ago, through the Southern Association for Woman Historians newsletter, there was a call for volunteers to prepare 300 word biographies of  women involved in the US suffrage movement for an Online Biographical Dictionary of the Women's Movement. Working on that project was invaluable. It required researching different resources to come up with enough material to fill a 300 word essay.  Here is one I wrote about Virginia Watson Walker.

Because this is “pay by the hour” work researchers have to be efficient in using many different types of records and knowing where those records are kept online or on-site (or efficiently locate those records).  Library science theory is founded on five Ranganathan laws. The fourth law, save the time of the user, tweaked a bit, applies to the independent researcher, save the money of your user.  The client shouldn’t pay for the time it takes a researcher to learn how to use a resource so be an expert. 

I'll start working on a post about getting clients for next week.