I've had a lovely day today! For once, I've allowed myself a WHOLE DAY to work on the database. Since January I've been trying to map the touring schedule and repertory of Frank Benson's company, using just resources which are available on line and during the long summer holiday I've been spending an hour or two every day (or more accurately, every night - I'm nocturnal during the hols!) 'topping up' the information I'd already found.
I'm mainly using the British Library's online Newspaper Archive. I'm an annual subscriber, which works out very much more efficient and actually very inexpensive when compared with paying by view. I'm an amateur researcher and I've evolved my own method of searching. It has four basic levels. Level 1 was the research I'd already done for my MA using the Stage newspaper archive to get a rough outline of the touring schedules for each of Benson's companies. Level 2 involved using the British Library archive to start fleshing out the skeleton - I managed about 10% of the rep using the approach of targetted searching for place and date. I'm at Level 3 at the moment - taking a year at a time and doing some close searching, using Benson's name as my starting point, and with this approach I've managed to fill in around 70% of each of the years I've done so far. That leaves Level 4 - the tough-nut category which may well take me off the sofa and into the actual archives to find the last few remaining details for each year.
Today, I had a dental appointment at 1.30pm, so I decided to spend the morning working my way through 1890 and 1891. And when the dental appointment was cancelled it seemed to make sense to keep working! It's now 5.30 and I've 'completed' the 3nd level search on '90, 91 and 92, unearthing twelve new 'dates', three undiscovered venues and a whole mountain of performance data.
There's still a long way to go to reach my goal, but today I feel I've really made huge progress! 30% complete is on the horizon...!
