>>On the other hand, 2 weeks ago, I e-mailed about 25 various zoo's, museums etc.. around America, Europe etc.. and am disgusted by the response. I had 1 person reply, apologising that they cannot help, which I thanked for replying. However, that is it, I know for a fact that those particular people have information I would like, either for sale, or for free, but not a single person could appear to care less.
>>
>>Is there a trick? Am I supposed to pretend to be someone I am not, to make them take notice?

Hi,

I have not seen what you have written to anyone, and I am not making any assumptions, so don't take any of this as criticism of what you have or have not written. I just want to lay down the realities of the situation most academics find themselevs in, why your response rate may have been disappointing, and how you can try to improve it.

Firstly, you need to understand that (i) these people are very busy, as Wulf also said; (ii) that they probably get a large number of requests for info and literature on a regular basis; (iii) that there simply are not enough hours in the day for people in those institutions to follow all the requests they receive AND do the work they HAVE to do (curation, teaching, admin, whatever) AND to do the things they actually WANT to do, such as research (which is why I owe Wulf a response to the last couple of e-mails he sent me, for instance - sorry Wulf, I haven't forgotten!); and (iv) that everyone is entitled to expect you to do all you can to help yourself before asking them to help you.

You don't have to pretend to be something or someone you are not, but you do need to demonstrate why someone who is probably overloaded with work anyway should take time to help you. Now, I can't speak for anyone else, but I can tell you what makes me either help or not help someone who asks me.

First, you need to introduce yourself, what you are doing, and why you are approaching that particular person - anyone who simply sends an email saying "please send me a copy of paper X" will probably get the delete key without further response. Make your letter/email individual - if it's not worth your while to make that effort, why should it be worth anyone's while to make the effort to help you? Nobody owes you anything, so if you want anyone to help you, you need to make them *want* to help you.

Second, remember it's YOUR research, and therefore YOUR job to make YOUR OWN efforts to gather material, and to do the research under your own steam. There is no reason why anyone should do for you what you can reasonably be expected to do yourself. Many people will be pleased to help you if you can show that you have already made a lot of effort to get most of the relevant material, but are stuck with something specific that you can't get hold of. The web, your local library, and then your University library should be your first ports of call, and museums, zoos, individual academics etc. your last resort when you have demonstrably done everything you can. There are plenty of free literature sites - for instance, Breck Bartholomew's excellent http://www.herplit.com includes a searchable literature database, the PubMed site is free at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Entrez/index.html
Local or certainly University libraries should be able to obtain a lot of literature via inter-library loans, although you may have to pay a few bucks. A web search should reveal the e-mail address of the authors of recent papers - most will be pleased to mail you either paper reprints or PDF files of their own publications. Only when you have done all that should you consider emailing other individuals for further information or especially publications.

Third, be specific in your requests. Something along the lines of "I have tried to obtain paper X from several libraries and by interlibrary loan without success. The paper is important to my research for reason YYY, so I was wondering whether you might be able to help" will go down a lot better than "Do you have any papers on species X, and could you photocopy them all for me".

As I said, I am not assuming or implying anything about what you did or wrote, so none of this is intended as criticism of what you may or may not have said or done. I am merely summarising my own experience in dealing with requests for information from the amateur sector, and how I respond do different kinds of requests. I hope this is of help both to you and to others who are embarking on projects such as yours.

Cheers,

Wolfgang
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