Research Trip Phase III: National Library of Singapore

It may seem as though this trip was just an excuse to be a tourist. But this week was hard-core research week as I spent all day Monday-Thursday in the 11th Floor Reference Room (Southeast Asian Collection) of the National Library of Singapore. I’ve had a blast reading old texts and contemporary histories relevant to my story, and the library is a beautiful space that has made this work a pleasure.

The library offers some wonderful services to researchers. A few weeks ago, I emailed some specific questions I wanted to look into and they emailed back with a long list of resources I might be interested in, so that was my starting point. When I exhausted that list, I found some more, including some that were on microfilm or in digital form, and kept going. I was amazed at how much material I got through. (I may pop in there next week before I leave to take a look at one more thing.)

I took about twenty typed pages of notes, single-spaced, and have a much better feel for the subject than I did before. How I thought I was going to be able to write this book without doing this work, I don’t know.

The library building is new. On a bit of a meta note, my novel’s main character also visits the library to do some research (the same research I’m doing!), but — and this is a little problematic for my purposes — she does it BEFORE this building was built. So I have to rely on pictures of the old building and my imagination, plus some educated guesses. (The archives she’s looking for aren’t digitized, for example, but they are on microfilm, a technology that’s been around a very long time.)

So Phase III is done, and I’m beginning the last phase before heading home. More about that soon.

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