Sports conferences have become the expansion teams of academia, stocked with professors who would rather jog to tenure through sunny ball parks than dusty archives.

This was the tiring, tedious part of the process; hours spent in dusty archives, following trails that dead-ended as often as not.

"Enjoy yourself in those dusty old archives," said Pitt humorously.

Such facts come to light only when a biographer spends years reading his way through dusty archives in order to dig them out.

As luck would have it, I found this 1931 gem of a Comment, by White, tucked away in our dusty archives:

Many of her recent books were devoted to the black oral tradition; she combed dusty archives for early manuscripts with long-forgotten songs, riddles and stories.

M. run to his office in the Jewish Quarter to scour his dusty archives.

Because of the nature of the evidence, you can never just go away and look up the answer you're after in some dusty archive.

Our new weapon has sat unnoticed too long in the dusty archives.