[Vision2020] Citing Primary Sources via Secondary Sources

[Jeff Harkins]

At 10:27 AM 9/17/2008, you wrote:
>Greetings:
>
>"I've not followed the exchange between Andreas and Jeff in complete 
>detail ..."


That more or less covers my response.


>I'm preparing for a keynote address that I will give on Gandhi's 
>birthday on Oct. 2 at San Diego State University.  When I first 
>started doing my Gandhi research in the early 1990s, it was very 
>difficult to get the primary sources, even through interlibrary 
>loan.  Until I went on sabbatical to India, I relied on secondary 
>sources, especially very fine anthologies of passages arranged by 
>subject and fully documented.
>
>When I finally got to India, I was able to sit down and check out 
>references and read for context in Gandhi's Collected Works (100 
>volumes!) and the journals Young India and Harijan.  Very few Gandhi 
>scholars read every page of these huge volumes. That is why we have 
>bibliographers.
>
>Gandhi kept meticulous records of everything that happened in his 
>ashrams, and most of that does not make for very edifying 
>reading.  The Collected Works have a very good index, so that was 
>very handy to find the passages that I needed for a particular topic.
>
>As soon as finish this post, I will go downstairs to my reading 
>couch and re-read the fabulous anthologies that take me right to the 
>passages that I want to review, and perhaps I'll find some new good 
>ones.  The Collected Works are now on line, but they are even more 
>clumsy to use than the actual books themselves.  For crucial 
>passages I will double check the original references again on line.
>
>I believe this is what Andreas did, and if I'm right, then I'm just 
>as guilty of plagiarism as he is.  I wouldn't be invited to San 
>Diego if that is what my colleagues think I did.
>
>Nick Gier
>
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