Title Text

HIST 4P36

Library Workshop

Me, your librarian

Finding and evaluating information

John Dingle

Help with....

Refining a research topic

Managing and citing sources

  • 10+ secondary sources
    • ​2 from 2016 - 2018
  • Primary sources
    • no set number, but "must be at your paper's core"
  • ​Final paper: 4000 words, March 22 

Essay Proposal, due Feb. 8

  • Starting points for secondary research
  • Search strategy and techniques
  • Primary source collections
  • Managing your sources

Today:

Activity

Find two good books on the history of women in colonial America

 

Be prepared to demonstrate and explain your process

Broadest search

 

Get to know the filters

 

Ask Button for help

Books and ebooks

 

Best way to find related books

 

Subject-specific search engines

Find under "Research" tab

America: History and Life

Mostly journal articles

 

Primarily US and Canadian History

Proquest Dissertations and Theses

PhD and MA theses

 

All subject areas

Search Strategy

1. Search techniques and keywords

2. Finding related items with subject headings

 

Activity

Go to America: History and Life

With a partner, compare the results of each pair of searches.

Which returns more results? Can you explain the difference?

 

1. colonial america VS "colonial america"

2. america VS america*

3. indigenous OR native VS indigenous AND native

Techniques

  1. Use quotation marks for phrase searches:  “colonial america”
  2. Use truncation for variant word endings: child* retrieves child, children, childhood, childlike, childish

  3. Use OR for synonyms:  indigenous OR native

  4. Use AND to combine two different concepts:  slaves AND missionaries

 

Subject Headings

Subject headings are a powerful way to find related items 

Activity

Locate subject headings related to these seminar topics:

Seminar 3: Religion and Political Ideas

Seminar 4: Colonial Relations with Britain

Seminar 7-8: Constitutional Thought

Seminar 9: Race, Slavery, Political Thought

Seminar 10: Education and American Political Ideas

 

Post your headings here: goo.gl/vtoDtq

 

Primary sources

  • Collections of sources

 

  • Full-text databases

Primary sources

Add one of the following terms to your search in SuperSearch or the catalogue. They work best when you add them to a "subject" box:

  • personal narratives
  • sources ***
  • diaries
  • letters
  • correspondence
  • interviews

Primary sources

~40,000 searchable monographs, pamphlets, broadsides, government documents and ephemera

1639-1800

~6500 periodicals, 100s of thousands of individual issues

1693-1877

By Krokodyl (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Use proximity searches:

taxation NEAR5 representation (Imprints)

taxation N5 representation (Periodicals)

 

Use wildcards (esp. in Imprints)

taxation AND repre?entation

 

In Periodicals, must change field to TX to search full-text

 

Limit by date range

 

 

Tips for full-text search

Activity

Locate at least 2 sources related to these seminar topics:

Seminar 3: Religion and Political Ideas

Seminar 4: Colonial Relations with Britain

Seminar 7-8: Constitutional Thought

Seminar 9: Race, Slavery, Political Thought

Seminar 10: Education and American Political Ideas

 

Post links here: goo.gl/vtoDtq

 

Managing your sources

Zotero

  • Add sources as you find them
  • Store, organize, take notes on them
  • Generate and format citations in Chicago style

Research Guide

Research Help

Thank you!

Questions?

HIST 4P36

By jdingle

HIST 4P36

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