Research Topic and brief

Within the broad subject area of "the history of books and libraries", I would like to research the topic of "the development of early national libraries" and focus on four in particular; the Library of Congress, the Russian State Library, The British Library and the Bibliotheque Nationale.

I will look at how national libraries in general developed and the history and establishment of each of these four, largest, national libraries in the world today. 
I will look at each in their historical context, how their collections came in to being and where they came from. 
For each, I will also examine the buildings which house the collections, the present day collections, how they have met the challenge of storage space with ever growing collections and how each has entered the new digital age and adapted to electronic resources and digitisation of their collections.

My search strategies to find relevant, accurate and current information will involve using the online library catalogue of my local council public library as well as the Swinburne Library and Monash University academic library for the historical information I am looking for in monograph format.
I will also use the online catalogue at Swinburne and Monash to search for relevant eresources, namely journal articles through the online databases available, in particular Library Journal in Gale and Library and Information History and Library Trends in EBSCOHost.  I will also check the databases available through the State Library of Victoria online.
As I will predominantly be searching databases online, I will need to start by thinking about the topic and identifying the key concepts and break them down into the main ideas. I will then need to make a list of appropriate synonyms for the different concepts and think about the controlled words that might have been used by the cataloguer in order to retrieve the information.  When searching, I will truncate keywords to their root form so as to include all variant forms of the word.  This is a method that I often forget to use.  Also, I will use the advanced search function with the use of the Boolean operators OR, AND & NOT to broaden and narrow my searches as I need to if I am not retrieving the information I am looking for. This will also be a more efficient method of searching.
By using these search strategies, I hope to retrieve more relevant information more efficiently and become more familiar with Library journals I was not previously aware of and which databases can provide the most relevant information for library subjects.