What I Learned Today

In the preface to a book I am reading on medieval book curses (“Anathema!” by Marc Drogin), the author notes, “I am a researcher and not a scholar.”

That comment brought me up short, because if asked, I’d have been hard-pressed to come up with a distinction. A scholar studies things; so does a researcher. Given my personal research activities and inclinations, I’d probably distinguish them in that a researcher (in computer science, say) also strives to come up with new solutions to problems. “Scholar,” a term we don’t use nearly as much, might bring to mind a more static image of someone who’s accumulated a lot of historical knowledge and expertise. But these boundaries seem blurry.

And that isn’t at all the distinction Drogin meant! It turns out that to him, a scholar is an expert on a particular subject, studying it directly (using primary sources, perhaps?). A researcher comes along afterwards and studies the scholars’ output, collecting and analyzing it (secondary sources?). My world did a 90-degree turn and suddenly brought into focus what “research” must be for the humanities (and others?). What do those folks think when I say I am a “researcher”? Are we even speaking the same language?

This also solves a niggling question that’s been in the back of my mind since spending more time in the library world. When librarians talk about doing “research,” they almost always mean “hunting down a piece of information in existing sources” like databases, dictionaries, texts, etc. In my world, that’s not research; that’s information retrieval. So I frequently misunderstand the term when it comes up in my reading. This encounter in “Anathema!” may provide another experience to help me properly interpret the term in the world of library and information science.

P.S. I am still a researcher.