Indexes scholarly journal articles, books, and dissertations in the history of U.S. and Canada from prehistory to the present.
It's important to try the catalog and a few different databases, plus a few different search terms--searching in different places and with different words will give you different results.
Where should I search? |
How can I search it? |
What will I find? |
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WorldCat (Preus Library Catalog) |
Search box on the library homepage |
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Databases | Select a database from the All Databases list |
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The Web | Google, Duck Duck Go, etc. |
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A database is a collection of scholarly journals and articles that lets us search many potential sources at once. Databases can be general and cover many subjects, or be specific to one or several subjects.
Browse the All Databases list to see the databases Preus Library has access to.
Is your topic a string of words or phrases? To search for a phrase in which word order matters, put quotation marks (" ") around your search term.
For example: "social media" ; "higher education" ; "reality television"
Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT can help you combine and exclude terms from your searches.
Remember Venn Diagrams? They're a great way to visualize what the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT can do for your research.
You can combine phrase searching and more than one Boolean operator to make complex, specific searches.
Use the terms librarians use to classify and organize information! As you browse the catalog or a database and find a resource that looks promising, look for hyperlinked subjects, also called subject headings. In the catalog, you'll have to expand the View Description section to see these. An example of subjects from the catalog is shown in the image below.
Clicking on one of these subjects will start another search that shows all results that are tagged with the same subject - it's a great way to find similar research to something you've identified as useful!