One
caveat, however: books will still be difficult to acquire copies of, unless
they’re in the public domain. Articles may be printed out and distributed for
various purposes (under the rules of “fair use”), but for obvious reasons books
are a different breed of animal altogether. Having said that, inter-library
loan at your local library may or may not be able to help (as I write this, I
am planning an experiment which should be done by the time I’m finished with
this blog post).
There are
three phases to academic research (at least, the way I do it): 1. Finding what sources you need, 2.
Actually reading/studying those sources, and 3.
Putting your findings into a coherent frame of an argument (this all precedes
the actual task of writing a paper or article). This blog post will try to help you
with the first part of this process.
In less
than a minute I have access to a primary source. Since primary sources like
Josephus are public domain, you should have no problem (never underestimate the
power of the Google!!!!). The more obscures source the more difficulty you
have, but you never know. [note to students: your instructor might prefer you use a published, physical copy of a primary source; check first. For Ph.D. students, you need to be citing the original language of a primary source if at all possible. See if your schools has a subscription to the on-line Thesauras Linguae Graecae, which has been incredibly helpful to my own research--I have my own subscription].
For
secondary sources, including journal articles by top Bible scholars, join a
public library. Seriously, a public library membership will give you access to
powerful search engines such as Ebsco (thanks to my buddy Alex, soon-to-be NC
State engineering graduate, for pointing this out to me). So, with my
membership in the Wake County Public Libraries system, I go to their website,
log in with card number and pin number (no, you can’t have mine! It only takes
a couple minutes to get your own library membership). Then I click on
“OneSearch,” and then (this is very important), I click on the link to
“Academic Search Career” which will take you to Ebsco; searching for a term
just by clicking on a box is virtually worthless for some reason—you need
Ebsco’s own search engine.
Now that I'm on Ebsco, I just do a simple search by typing in “Atonement” at the top
and hitting “enter.” Immediately I have a ton of articles to look at, some of
which I can download the full text. For example, at the very top, we have
“Tertullian and Penal Substitutionary Atonement” by Peter Ensor in the most
recent edition of Evangelical Quarterly, and you can
download the full text. In other words, with just a simple membership in a
local (non-academic) library, you have access to the full text of a recent
scholarly article in one of the top evangelical journals. For those articles
that you don’t have access to, at least you know that they’re out there and you
can explore options for inter-library loans (this may very from library to
library). One very important caveat: Ebsco through this particular local
library will not yield the same range of results that Ebsco through a full
theological library will (for example: I can access articles from the Journal
of Biblical Literature but not Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society in the Ebsco database
for Wake County. Utilizing Ebsco at Southeastern's library has a much better list of results since it utilizes different databases).
Once you have
access to Ebsco, play around a bit with the search parameters and explore its
potential. One problem I had early in my doctoral studies is that I kept
getting numerous “hits” for book reviews on the same book when all I was
interested in was journal articles. Consequently, I had to learn how to limit my results
to exclude book reviews.
Now let’s
have a little experiment. There’s a book, an expensive monograph, that I
desperately want to take a look at for an article (hopefully!) that I’m writing
on the meaning of a particular word in the Pastoral Epistles. The book I need
is Claire Smith, Pauline Communities as “Scholastic Communities”: A Study of
the Vocabulary of “Teaching” in 1 Corinthians, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. The book is not
available at Southeastern’s library (a 20 minute drive for me), and since I
graduated from there I no longer have inter-library lone privileges at SEBTS (though I can
still check stuff out). It is, however, at Duke Divinity’s library (about a
30-minute drive for me); since it is not currently checked out, so we’ll call that
“Plan B.” For “Plan A,” I want to see if I can get it via inter-library loan at
my local public library. I do not know the results of the experiment, which I
am starting . . . now.
Update! And I have indeed acquired a copy of Claire Smith's very thorough and expensive book Pauline Communities as "Scholastic Communities"! Utilizing the "WorldCat" database at my local library's website, I was able to request this expensive and technical monograph via inter-library loan, and I picked up it up about a week and a half after I ordered. Kudos to the Wake County library system!
One final
note: if you just want some commentaries or something and don’t care how old
they are, “Google Books” may have what you’re looking for. For instance, I can
read a significant number of pages in Colin Kruse’s commentary on John by going
here.
You may or may not get the part of the book that you need, but obviously if
this is something that you’ll be using often, just buy it.
Furthermore,
even for more recent and expensive books, “Google Books” will have a limited
number of pages available for free viewing. For instance, if I go here, Ican read a surprisingly large number of the pages in Andreas Köstenberger’s
essay “The Destruction of the Second Temple and the Composition of the Fourth
Gospel” in what would otherwise be a difficult-to-acquire book of essays
(Amazon list price for the book Challenging Perspectives on the Gospel of
John is
$100+). It’s a bit “hit-and-miss” with what you can read on Google Books, but
it may cause otherwise un-acquirable resources to become accessible (at least
partially).
