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Headaches and Brainwaves: Libraries, Evidence and Research Across the Disciplines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2022

Christopher Cramer*
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, London
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Extract

Once upon a time, my brother was working in the Dominican library in Paris. This was in the early 1980s and he was doing research for his PhD - on the subject of baptism in the ninth to twelfth centuries. Another man often worked there and they would talk now and then but they never actually introduced themselves. The other man sometimes gave my brother a lift across town when they left the library. He seemed rather authoritative. One day he asked my brother, ‘Who are you working with?’ and my brother said ‘Jacques le Goff’, a very renowned medieval historian. ‘Ah, le Goff, yes, he's very astute’, the man said, and my brother thought my goodness, who is this man to pass judgement so confidently on le Goff. Another day, when the news was full of the Pope, John Paul II, coming to Paris, my brother asked the man if he was going to see the pope.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2009

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Footnotes

Keynote Address at the Third meeting of the European Librarians in African Studies (ELIAS), Liepzig, 3 June 2009

References

Notes

1 See, for example, Chapter 2 of Christopher Cramer, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries, London: Hurst (2006).

2 Hirshleifer, Jack, “The Dark Side of the Force”, Economic Inquiry, 32 (1994), pp.1-10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques, Le Défi Americain, Paris: Editions Denoel (1967).Google Scholar

4 Borges, Jorge Luis, “The Library of Babel”, in Collected Fictions, London: Penguin (1998).Google Scholar