oh the library

İstanbul, Turkey

Today was one of those very frusterating days. It mostly has to do with my trip to the library, more specifically the Atatürk library in Taksim. I managed to find it easily which was exciting, and then after asking people found the small room with the İstanbul collection. So far, so good. The librarians didn't seem to speak any english, but the student of one of the librarians did and so they gave me the catalogue (or book listing the titles) and let me look through it. I found a bunch of things that looked interesting after going through the entire catalogue. But then they closed for lunch and made me leave for a while.

Upon returning from lunch I figured out their shelving system and found most of the things I wanted. After skimming all of them I had decided that 5 were really good. But at that point I had already spent 4 hours there, which had used up an attenion span or two, was feeling ucky and couldn't concentrate, and didn't really have time (since I now have four more research days) to really read them and take notes. So I asked if I could photocopy things. Simple request right, the books are all available to the public, nothing private. So the nice old man librarian went off to find the form and about half an hour later I got it. They wanted not only my name and university and project, but my place of birth, the names of my mother and father and my passport number. Since I haven't memorized my passport number and I didn't have it with me they made dissapoving sounds and told me that maybe if I brought my passport in tomorrow they might let me photocopy some things. So I may be able to get permission to photocopy, and even if I do they might not let me photocopy as many pages as I would like. Darn the beurocratic library! gahhh!

My mother tells me that this is unfortunatly normal for doing research in Turkey, and that I have now been initiated. I guess that makes me feel slightly better. And apparently without knowing it I visited one of the hardest libraries for foreigners to get into when I was here last year and Efdal took me to the library at the Sulimaniye.

And I've just had two people call me because they heard I had a frusterating experience and one knows someone at the Atatürk library and is going to go back with me, and another has a friend that worked for the municipality that I can talk to. I guess maybe I'm getting back on the up part of the research rollercoaster. This is crazy. I really need another week. I think that toward the end of the week I'll finally have contacts in the municipality and then I'll have to leave. Ah well