MY RESEARCH BOOKS by Elizabeth Chadwick

A brief blog this month as by the time you read this, I shall be in South Wales taking a partial break but also researching locations for my latest work in progress, The Irish Princess.

I am sure everyone has different methods of shelving their physical reference books so they (hopefully) know where to find them.  My research shelves go by subject order (loosely) and that order is not alphabetical.  So I begin with food, then health, life and death, medicine, childhood, motherhood, fatherhood, lifestyle, women's issues, sex, law, cats and dogs etc. There are different shelves for primary sources and for over-sized books.  The ones in current use - Medieval Ireland at the moment - have a shelf to themselves on my study desk. That's my organisation in physical reality.

In the digital world  it's slightly different.
Every day on my author Facebook page, I list a research book of the day with a scan of the book cover and these are stored alphabetically by title.  I had scanned my core books some years ago but in too small a resolution, so currently I have a grand rescan project going on  to upgrade the resolution and also to incorporate books acquired since that original scan.
The fruits of this project come in very useful for discussion groups online.  I can now just copy and past the book cover into the discussion if I need to mention it or make a suggestion.  It is time consuming, but done in increments, it's steady progress and once complete, it's there for posterity.  Here are some screen snips of the works so far.  These are not all of them, I have many more to scan in, but this is part of the ever-growing collection!