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+---
+title: Advocating
+date: '2006-01-24T07:44:01-05:00'
+permalink: /advocating/
+tags:
+    - research
+---
+
+I spent much of yesterday in the East Baton Rouge Parish Public Library, reading through the microfilm archive of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, the predecessor of today’s [Advocate](http://www.2theadvocate.com), the sole remaining daily outlet here. I’m doing this at the East Baton Rouge Parish Public Library, wherein I have not set foot since high school, because they have the only complete set of the paper’s microfilms. The LSU Library has weirdly [spotty](http://lsu.louislibraries.org/uhtbin/cgisirsi/HoTSd5jKT3/MIDL-MAIN/315910108/9) holdings, and is completely missing the first year that I need to read. Which is just bizarre. That said, it’s been cool, if time-consuming and mildly nausea-inducing, going back through these papers and watching history unfold. But I’m really wishing there were a better way to get the stuff I’m looking for. And so I’ve got this running dialogue in my head:
+
+— Do I really need to read the entire paper, for the whole year?
+
+No. There’s a particular set of stories that I’m trying to track.
+
+— Couldn’t I do that electronically, by, like, figuring out what days the stories I’m tracking appeared, and then just hop on the microfilm to get the stories themselves?
+
+No. The Advocate’s own electronic [archive](http://www.2theadvocate.com/archives/) only dates from 1995. And Lexis-Nexis, which happily does index the Advocate, dates all the way back to 1994.
+
+— What year does the story you’re trying to track start?
+
+1953\.
+
+— So, you’re, like, loading up the machine with the film of Jan. 1- Jan. 20, 1953, and paging through the entire thing, looking for relevant headlines?
+
+Yep.
+
+— How long is that taking?
+
+About an hour per month.
+
+— How many years do you want to cover?
+
+Twenty.
+
+— Twenty?
+
+Not wall-to-wall. But the stories I’m looking at extend at least over that period of time.
+
+— Isn’t there a better way of doing this?
+
+…
+
+That’s where I pretty much stall out, every time through this little dialogue. And I stop, and I search around for another index that might help me, and I grind my teeth and go back to the microfilm.
+
+The good news is that there’s a dissertation out there that covers much of what I’m interested in, and that will probably help me narrow down the post-1953 work I need to do. The bad news is that the dissertation has been checked out, and isn’t due back for another three days, assuming it comes in on time.
+
+Of course, it’s also available on microfilm.
+