Open AccessThe Alert Collector: Dark Tourism: A Guide to Resources
Author(s) -
Rebecca H. Price
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
reference and user services quarterly/reference and user services quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.443
H-Index - 34
eISSN - 2163-5242
pISSN - 1094-9054
DOI - 10.5860/rusq.57.2.6525
Subject(s) - tourism , column (typography) , dark tourism , sociology , destinations , great rift , novelty , media studies , history , psychology , computer science , archaeology , social psychology , telecommunications , physics , frame (networking) , astronomy
When I began receiving topic ideas for the Alert Collector column in 2016, Rebecca Price’s submission for a column on “dark tourism” caught my attention, mostly because of its novelty. I had a sense of what the topic entailed, and it turns out to be even more fascinating than I suspected. Why do some people like to visit the sites of tragedies? What is the attraction of ghost tours? Why are memorials popular destinations for tourists? This relatively new field of dark tourism crosses into many different disciplines, as you will see in the column that follows. While not all librarians may be rushing to create collections around this topic, the items may fill other collection needs in sociology, anthropology, and other areas. Price is an adjunct research and instruction librarian at Duquesne University and a doctoral candidate in social and comparative analysis at the University of Pittsburgh. As a member of a University of Pittsburgh research team studying children’s experiences at dark sites, Price has published several peer-reviewed articles about dark tourism.—Editor