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Second List of Addenda to a Guide to Manuscripts Relating to America in Great Britain and Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2011

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Extract

This list follows that published in this Bulletin, New Series No. 5, December 1962, and should be used with the same reservations: space does not allow the detail given in the Guide; few of these reports have been compiled by direct inspection, nor have proper names and life-dates been checked. So this is part, as it were, of a “first draft” of some speculative Second Edition of the Guide. Two years after the Guide appeared I wrote to all major libraries, archives and other repositories asking to be notified of addenda; this type of enquiry is no longer practical, both on grounds of expense and of “diminishing returns”. So future lists of addenda will be more infrequent and will depend upon scholars themselves notifying me of new finds. Perhaps this will be a chance to recoup academic honour. For in compiling the Guide we all found that, with some few fine exceptions, scholars were the least helpful of all people, often having surprisingly little knowledge of related materials in their own field outside one particular library or archive – certainly compared to librarians or archivists; and also many scholars seem absurdly secretive about and jealous of papers they are working on – once again it is archivists who do most to maintain free trade in the Republic of Learning. I hope this aside causes some offence; for I have been mildly smarting for some years under the observation that those who are the most helped by guides to sources are commonly the most reluctant to help each other.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © British Association for American Studies 1963

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