What to do Before you Take a Research Trip

You will find that the amount of content you have access to from home is surprising. The library system at any major research university, such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, contains millions of documents, with additional access to hundreds of millions more. Before you plan any research trip, it is crucial to first identify which research material you have access to at the university and which material you can only get abroad.

Above all, get to know your friendly university librarians. Trained and “contractually obligated” (in their own words) to answer any question you may have for them, university librarians are specially trained in discipline-specific research fields. They will provide expert analysis of your research topic, work with you one-on-one to locate the resources you need, and offer a critical eye to help you find any you might have missed.

If the university does not have the resources you require, the librarian staff will more than likely be able to find it for you via inter-library loan.  UW-Madison has agreements with libraries worldwide and can arrange access to periodicals, journals, microfilm, and even special book collections from libraries across the globe. Furthermore, UW-Madison subscribes to a host of large database and online collections, each of which places pre-scanned, word-searchable research material from major research centers at your fingertips.  These databases include: digitalized newspapers from the past 400 years, a dissertation databases with access to virtually every dissertation from a US institution since 1990, and Web of Science.

Finally, if the document you want is available digitally, but the University does not subscribe to the digital resource in which the document is located, do not despair. Work with the librarians, they may very well be able to find a nearby research library that does subscribe to the resource. A quick trip and a hotel stay at a nearby university will almost certainly be cheaper than a research trip abroad.

Finally, if our library cannot retrieve hard-copy of a document you need, they may be able to help you contact a holding library that does. If you only require a few items from a research center, ask if they would be willing to send them to you electronically. Many centers from around the world are willing to scan and email to you a limited number of documents: some for free, others for a nominal fee.