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The Researcher

9 courses, in the order they are meant to be taken. You can start anywhere, and they build.

How to read the course codes
  • -00 means start here.
  • -01, -02 are steps on one path, in order.
  • A letter (-T1, -P2) marks a track. Tracks run in parallel: take any track you like, in any order, without taking the others.
  • -99 is the capstone. Take it last.

Start here

  1. RSRCH-00

    Research as a Job, Not a Mood

    Start here. Everything else in this series assumes it.

    The difference between being curious and being paid. A brief you can be held to, a budget of hours, a negative result you can deliver, and a file somebody else can build on without calling you. The start of the Researcher track, for people who already know how to look things up.

The path

  1. RSRCH-01

    Search Craft

    Step 1 on the single path through this series.

    Most people were never taught to search. This is the trade version: what a database actually indexes, why controlled vocabularies find what free text misses, how to read a failed search for information, and how to harvest the vocabulary of a field from the first document you find. The biggest speed multiplier in professional research.

  2. RSRCH-02

    Archives, and How a Collection Is Actually Organised

    Step 2 on the single path through this series.

    A library is arranged by subject so you can find a known thing. An archive is arranged by origin so you can understand an unknown thing in context, and searching one like the other is why capable researchers conclude a document does not exist. Finding aids, provenance and original order, the hierarchy from fonds to item, reading-room practice, and what a catalogue's silence means.

  3. RSRCH-03

    Tracing a Person Through Records

    Step 3 on the single path through this series.

    Nobody documented your subject. Institutions documented their own business, and the person appears as a by-product: in a census, a payroll, a deed, a docket, a passenger list. How to build a life from records made for other reasons, how to handle a name that changes spelling every time it is written, and what to do when the records were never made at all.

  4. RSRCH-04

    Fact-Checking as a Discipline

    Step 4 on the single path through this series.

    The checker's job, done properly: annotate every assertion, back-check each one to its actual source rather than to another article, grade what cannot be confirmed, and hand it back in a form the writer can act on. A defined role with a defined method, and the most directly hireable skill in the Researcher track.

  5. RSRCH-05

    Rights, Permissions and Clearances Research

    Step 5 on the single path through this series.

    Who owns this image, is it really free to use, what does the licence oblige you to do, and who do you write to. The research method behind clearing archival material, taught from the real refusals a working image project ran into: the public-domain tag that was wrong, the iconic photograph nobody can publish, and the difference between having the right and having the file.

  6. RSRCH-06

    Documents Against People

    Step 6 on the single path through this series.

    A record says one thing and a witness says another. The instinct is that paper wins, and it is wrong often enough to be dangerous. What a document can and cannot establish, what testimony can and cannot establish, why a confident document is more hazardous than a vague one, and a method for reporting a conflict you cannot resolve.

  7. RSRCH-07

    The Research File

    Step 7 on the single path through this series.

    The operations of handing work over: capturing a citation at the moment you find it, notes that survive a year, confidence grades applied consistently, the research memo that says what it all means, and a handover somebody can actually pick up. The course that turns everything you found into something usable by a stranger.

Finish here

  1. RSRCH-99

    Capstone: Build a Handoff-Ready File

    Capstone. Take it last: it works by using what the rest of the series taught you.

    One subject, worked end to end, producing a file a stranger could pick up and continue. Scoping something you can actually finish, planning by institution rather than by hope, a mid-project checkpoint that catches the usual failure, a self-review against the handoff test, and the finished file as the first item in a portfolio.