This is a guest blog post from Laura Keizer, one of our volunteers working in the Centre for Research Collections.
Archives are delightful places. Working in such a place regularly puts you in touch with a motley crew of visiting researchers who merrily toil away to complete diverse portfolios of original research. We help out where we can, provide documents, answer queries, and generally solve all sorts of interesting little mysteries. But despite our best efforts, we don’t often get to see where their local research takes the visitors afterwards, making the precise impact of the archive sometimes difficult to gauge.
This is where I came in. Having volunteered at the CRC for the past couple of months, I have attempted to trace the outcomes of research undertaken within these walls through reference analysis in Google Scholar. By examining and cataloguing every single digitised publication mentioning our university library for 2013, a handy account of authors, articles and associated archival sources appears (although itself absent of alliteration). Continue reading