Search Help

As TBI is a volunteer project, we cannot provide readily available help with search problems. An email to us will be answered, but we cannot guarantee how quickly. The TBI search engine is virtually identical to most commercial or library search systems. A librarian or other experienced researcher may well be able to answer a search question without knowing anything particular about TBI.

If you have questions about how to make searches, about making searches using criteria the current search system doesn't allow or anything else about The Baseball Index project, email inform@baseballindex.org.

Finding Your Source

Once you have your list of sources, how do you find the sources themselves? This may be a problem for any researcher regardless of the sources he or she is trying to use. The Baseball Index contains many cataloged materials that are not easily obtained and the researcher may have difficulty locating them.

The logical first place to go is one's local libraries; the larger, the better. An excellent guide to library holdings in the United States and Canada is OCLC's WorldCat. This electronic resource is available through many libraries, public or academic. Academic libraries, particularly those at large universities, often house excellent collections of books and periodicals. State historical societies are also fine sources for baseball publications. But even if you live far from large population centers, there is still the option of Interlibrary Loan Services through your local library system. This can be a time-consuming process taking weeks to fill your request, but many sources can be obtained in this fashion and at low or no cost.

Another option may be to hire a research/document delivery service, such as Rational Pastimes (www.rationalpastimes.com) to retrieve your sources. Finally, there is traveling to the source itself. You may be able to locate a library or archive in another city that has your source, but may be unable to borrow it. In such events, there may be nothing for it but to travel to that city to view the source.

Technical Help

If you come across problems in the site of a technical nature, we would appreciate hearing about them. Our technical team will be monitoring the site for errors, but your input can be very useful in locating errors and helping us to create an effective and usable site. Please send your comments to support@baseballindex.org.