Category: Tools of the Trade

Tools of the Trade: More on Interlibrary Loan

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You might be a frequent patron of your local library, but have you ever taken advantage of their interlibrary loan services? NO? If you haven’t, my earliest post on ILL can help you learn more about this essential service. I have several ILL books sitting on my desk at the moment as I work on my next project and, in order to share more on this important service, I thought I would ask my local ILL librarian, Misty Perkins, about her job at the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library. Go for it, Misty!

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Tools of the Trade: More on the Keeneland Library

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The Keeneland Library is a valuable resource for anyone who works in the sport of horse racing in literally any capacity. For writers, it is the home of the richest collection of publications, photographs, and other resources that one would need to create any book on the sport. For anyone working on breeding or a fan who wants to find more on their favorite horses, the Library will help any patron find the information necessary to answer nearly any question out there. As a follow-up to my post on the Library, I wanted to find out more about the Library experience from Roda Ferraro, the head librarian at the Keeneland Library. Read on!

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Tools of the Trade: More on the Daily Racing Form Archive

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Becky Ryder, director of the Keeneland Library, supervised the creation of the Daily Racing Form archive in 2007, overseeing everything from scanning the fragile pages of more than a century’s worth of the DRF to creating the digital archive for anyone to use. To follow up my earlier post on this important tool, I wanted to find out more about the archive and its creation from Ms. Ryder. Read on to learn more about this important repository of racing history!

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Tools of the Trade: The Keeneland Library

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As a reader, a student, and now as a writer, I have spent my share of days in a library. As a child, I searched for books on horse racing and other interests, the shelves and shelves of tomes on all sorts of subjects my sole source of research in the pre-Internet days. My days of writing research papers from high school to graduate school meant that I spent hours pouring over shelves and through journals, seeking the right sources for whatever argument I was making. Writing this book on Sir Barton meant that I needed to seek THE library in this country that contains 99.9% of what an author like me would need: the Keeneland Library, the single greatest collection of books, photographs, and publications about horse racing in the country.

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Tools of the Trade: Interlibrary Loan

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Libraries are the greatest resources any society can create for itself: a repository of books, documents, visual media, and more that anyone can access either for free or for minimal cost. When we were kids, our school libraries were fun places to find books that sated our thirst for knowledge or imagination. In high school and college, libraries became the source of necessary information for expanding on our ideas, to prove or disprove any argument that we needed to make for that all-important research paper. For this writer and for you guys, my readers, the library provides another amazing resource: Interlibrary Loan.

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Tools of the Trade: Daily Racing Form Archive

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When I started researching Sir Barton’s career, I knew I had to start with the individual races themselves before I worked to connect the dots between them. The best place to find all of the details of his starts was the Daily Racing Form, the source of form charts and articles about the previous day’s races and other news going back to 1894. The only problem? The Keeneland Library is five hours away! Yikes! How was I going to do this research? Cue the Daily Racing Form archive.

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