History 97D Undergraduate Seminar: Americans' Empires Library Research Guide Ellen Broidy    Librarian for Anglo-American History 825-1324

This guide is designed to introduce you to some of the critical resources, online and in print, vital for conducting research at the UCLA  Library. It is extremely selective in scope and coverage, focusing on those materials that will lead you to journal and newspaper articles, books, and contemporary accounts (primary sources) detailing the ways in which Americans engaged in and with the colonial/imperial endeavors of other nations.

1. UCLA Library Homepage

This is the front door to the wide variety of resources in the UCLA Library, including online library catalogs to identify print and electronic resources, databases, and general information about the library system.

2.  Finding Books / Monographic Publications: UCLA Library and MELVYL® Catalogs

Identifying and locating books on your topic is most conveniently done through a keyword or subject (heading) search using the UCLA Library Catalog or the UC systemwide MELVYL® Catalog. Keyword searching (when available) is the most flexible, usually producing the largest retrieval (often including "false drops"), while subject searching can often be more precise since it relies on authorized Library of Congress Subject Headings.

2.1. Library of Congress Subject Headings

Although the advent of online catalogs with keyword search capabilities has sounded the death knell for rigidly structured subject heading/classification schemes, it is still worth considering how language is used to organize materials in a research library. For example, it is possible (and frequently extremely beneficial) to do a subject search in ORION2 or MELVYL® using Library of Congress subject headings.

A subject heading is a word or term that describes, often quite broadly, the contents of a book, journal article, videotape, dataset, etc. All nonfiction books and media are assigned one or more subject headings, allowing for multiple points of access to the same item. "Authorized" headings are found listed in Library of Congress Subject Headings, a four-volume set with a bright red cover located in YRL Reference (Z695.Z8 L524a   ).

One of the best and most efficient ways to identify subject headings for your topic is to do a keyword or title search in the UCLA Library Catalog or MELVYL and then display results in a format that shows subject headings. Note subject headings for the most promising items, click on subject heading to execute a search on that subject.

[top]
 

3.  UCLA Library Catalog

The UCLA Library Catalog provides quick and efficient access to the holdings of the UCLA Library. The catalog should be your first stop for books, periodicals, media and other monographic materials.

• The UCLA Library Catalog is directly accessible from the UCLA Library homepage;  Click on the "search and find" tab. The catalog is the first item on the drop-down menu.
  
  The UCLA Library Catalog offers the following unique features:
  
  Circulation status of material -- the catalog tells you whether a book is available (on the shelf), checked out (and date it's due back), or missing;
  Serials information -- catalog lists both print and electronic serials publications with UCLA holdings
  Personal circulation data -- the catalog allows you to keep track online of materials you have checked out of the Library. Click on My Account and key in your UCLA Bruin Card number.
  Electronic reserves -- from the Services button at the top of the page you can go to course reserves and from there link to a specific course and check to see what, if anything, is "on-reserve" for the class  in electronic format.

[top]

4. UC MELVYL® CATALOG

If your UCLA Library Catalog search does not produce the desired results, you may want to search the holdings of other libraries, particularly other UC libraries. The UC MELVYL® Catalog opens doors to worlds beyond UCLA (yes, rumor has it that there is intelligent life out there!). In addition to providing bibliographic access to the holdings of other UC libraries through the MELVYL®Catalog, the California Digital Library (CDL) contains a large number of indexes to periodical literature, some with abstracts or full-text of articles available online.

To use the MELVYL® Catalog, click on Search and Find and the Other Catalogs.  To research a topic, you may use either the default Basic Search screen or click on Advanced in the gold bar at the top of the page.  Subject searches require word(s) from authorized LC subject headings but word order does not matter.  If you are unsure of a subject heading, try a Keyword search instead.
 

5.  Finding Articles: Periodical Indexes and Abstracting Services

Periodical indexes and abstractring services are the tools we use to identify articles in journals. They are equivalent to a table of contents or index, but instead of focusing on one publication, they cover the contents of many, allowing for a single keyword or topical search across a large number of journals. The most convenient direct access to periodical indexes and abstracts is through the UCLA Libray Homepage. Click on search and find and then on article databases or electronic resources. If you know a particular title, you can search for it here.

Here are some indexes on the web you might find particularly useful for your research:

America: History and Life.
Index and abstracts for articles on the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present, published since 1964.  

Historical Abstracts
Index and abstracts for articles on the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada, which are covered in America: History and Life) published since 1967. 

Periodicals Archive Online
Indexes thousands of periodicals in the social sciences and humanities from 1770-1995, and currently offers full text of articles for 200 complete journal runs.

Expanded Academic Index
Provides selected full-text articles and images from 2,600 scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers, with the earliest citations dating back to 1980. Spans all academic disciplines from arts and humanities to social sciences, science, and technology.    

Nineteenth Century Masterfile [formerly Poole's Plus]
Index to 19th century periodicals and resource for the study of 19th century cultural and intellectual life
 
New York Times, 1851-1922, Historical Index
Historical Index to the New York Times contains data from the years 1863 to 1905, and 1913 to September 1922. Same link will take you to Palmer's Index to the Times, 1790-1905.

6. Full-Text Journals on the Web

 

Expanded Academic Index
Includes many full-text journals; click on pdf file for full-text online or UC-elinks to connect either to electronic version held by UC or to find out whether UC/UCLA subscribes to the journal in which the article appears.

JSTOR
Online access to full back-runs of academic journals across the disciplines.   
 

Project Muse

Full text of current issues (from about 1990) of scholarly journals published by university presses, chiefly in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

Nation Digital Archive
Full-text of articles from the Nation beginning in 1865. This is an excellent resource for articles on material culture, economics, politics, and all shapes and sizes of imperialism and colonialsm.

New York Times
America's "newspaper of record," this site provides searchable access to the full-text of the New York Times from 1851 to 2001. 

[top]