Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GDJMSP, post: 1919834, member: 112&quot;]Yes of course authors use previously published works as part of their source material. A quick look at the bibliography listed in any books clearly shows that. And some bibliographies are many, many pages long. But &quot;part of&quot; is the key in the statement above. Previously published work is secondary source material. To write a book you also need primary source material, in other words information that comes from research done by you - not research done by somebody else. </p><p><br /></p><p>And you don&#039;t get primary source material from other books, you get it from studying the coins themselves, from visiting, viewing, and photographing the collections in museums and private collections, from viewing &amp; studying coins at coin shows and various auctions and photographing them when possible, from reading and studying original historical material like letters, mint reports and documents, etc etc. And then you compile all of this information, all of the photographs and document scans, and organize it and come to conclusions about the coins. All of that is the hard part. All of that is what takes years.</p><p><br /></p><p>Then there is what I consider to be the hardest part of all. All of those other books that you are going to use as source material, do you have any idea how much of, and specifically what parts of, that information is bad or inaccurate information ? </p><p><br /></p><p>You see, that&#039;s the thing about using other, previously published books as source material. The authors of those other books, they did the same thing you are going to do. They relied on information from other books themselves, and if there was a mistake made, they copied/repeated the same mistake for the same reasons you will. Because they didn&#039;t know that it was a mistake. And they didn&#039;t know it was a mistake because they didn&#039;t do enough primary research.</p><p><br /></p><p>Mistakes get repeated over and over and over again, in books, magazine articles, and especially on the internet. Because copy/paste and bibliographies are an author&#039;s best friends. But it is the person who does the primary research, finds those mistakes,and explains them, and points them out in his new book, that is remembered and recognized.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now you&#039;ve acknowledged the time it would take. But have you considered what you would do or how you would gain access to all of the primary source material ? It&#039;s not always easy to do that for much, perhaps most, of it is not even available to public access. You don&#039;t just walk up to the US Mint building and say - I&#039;d like to search through all of your historical documents from such and such a year to such and such a year. Or to a museum or private collector and say I&#039;d like to photograph all of your coins - and expect them to let you.</p><p><br /></p><p>But what makes it even harder is that you have to live while you are doing all of this. You have to pay for all of your travel expenses to get from wherever you live to where the documents are, and be able to take the time off from your job to allow you to do that. And even if you had permission to study the documents, how many trips would you have to make to do so ? The cost of all that alone can be huge, and almost certainly beyond the ability of the average person to pay it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now can you do all of this ? Yeah, you can - if you can. I wish you all of the luck in the world with your efforts.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in