Research: Boon, or Bust?
I'm one of those people who delights in "torturing" librarians with incessant pleas for better research books, hitting the card catalog, and nearly murdering library computers with my intense search methods.
I delight in a printout that's a mile long. I'll take it and gleefully shred it until I find exactly what I'm looking for. If I find something strange along the way, it only fuels my greed. I must find the buried treasure! That nugget that no one has seen or thought of or paid attention to for 30 or more years!
The Internet surely helps, especially when it comes to tracking down people. Thus, I shall explain to you my current dilemma: hunting down every soul that ever worked on Star Trek the Original Series, and bugging them for an interview. "This, I can do!" I thought.
But no, I've gotten fifty names in and I'm hitting the wall. There are too many dead, deceased, passed on - and those that haven't are increasingly hard to find! Sure, they're retired, but to where? One may still be in jail, others - vanished off the planet (or at least off the Internet) with nary a sigh.
That's where I am right now - and I had to take a break.I find it easier to sit here and type about it as therapy than to continue today. I've worked through the morning into the evening and now I just can't...do...one...more!
The upside of this is that I'm very happy with some of my results. It doesn't really matter that I've been turned down already (yes, I've fired off several emails already, requesting a chat). It's that I actually found some people! Not stars, not crazily of note people but people who worked on Star Trek and actually made a difference in someone's life.
Even if I can't find someone to interview, I'll at least post my results for the websites that I can find, and compile them into a nice page for Trek fans to ogle and click to their hearts' content.
Photo by Square87 and Ubcule; Wikipedia.
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