ENGLISH R1B: Memoirs of Twentieth Century Black Social Movements

Please note: this course guide was created during a previous semester, and is no longer being actively maintained. For a list of current course guides, please see http://lib.berkeley.edu/alacarte/course-guides.

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After you make a one-time change in your web browser settings, the proxy server will ask you to log in with a CalNet ID or Library PIN when you click on the link to a licensed resource.

"It's all free on the Internet, right? Why should I go through the library's website to find sources for my paper?"

The Web is a great source for free, publicly available information. However, the Library pays for thousands of electronic books, journals, and other information resources that are available only to the campus community. Through the Library website, you can access hundreds of different licensed databases containing journal articles, electronic books, maps, images, government and legal information, current and historical newspapers, digitized primary sources, and more. 

You access these resources through the Internet, using a browser like Firefox, Chrome or Internet Explorer -- but these databases are not part of the free, public Web. Resources like Lexis-Nexis, Web of Science, Academic Search Complete, and ARTstor are "invisible" to Google. You will not see results from most library databases in the results of a Google search.

Want to find out more? Get started exploring the Library's electronic resources, or find out how to get access to licensed resources from off-campus.

Choose a topic.  It's OK if it's vague, or too broad; you can get more specific later.

Do a brain dump: Note down what you already know about your topic, including:

• Names of people, organizations, companies, time period you are interested in, places of interest (countries, regions, cities, etc.)

Fill in the gaps in your knowlege: get background information from encyclopedias (online or in print) or other secondary sources.  Wikipedia can be good here.

Select the best search tools to find information on your topic.  Look under the Finding Articles tab of this guide for article database suggestions, or click here to see all the article databases available for your subject.  Or use a catalog like Oskicat or Melvyl to search for books and other resources.

Use nouns from your brain dump as search terms.

Evaluate what you find.  Change search terms to get closer to what you really want.

Refine your topic - Using the information you have gathered, determine if your research topic should be narrower or broader. You may need to search basic resources again using your new, focused topics and keywords. 

For more ideas, take a look this short tutorial on beginning your research!

Unsure how to start a paper or research project? Think maybe you could stand to brush up on search strategies?

If this sounds familiar, Library Workshop: Research 101 has you covered. This interactive tutorial explores six stages of the research process. You can view it from start to finish, or focus on specific sections as needed:

1: Begin Your Research

Starting strategies, from choosing a topic to finding the right keywords.

For many research papers, students need to find secondary sources, quite often scholarly books and articles. 

Since you will use different tools to find books, articles and book chapters, it's helpful to think in advance about what you want to find.

Here are some criteria to think about:

Books:

• longer than articles and chapters
• take longer to write and publish, so are less current
• subject matter tends to be broader than articles or chapters
• you find them using a catalog, such as OskiCat or MELVYL

Articles:

• briefer than books
• more current than books, though scholarly articles are less current than newspapers or popular articles
• subject matter is more focused than that of books
• you find them using an article database, such as JSTOR

Book chapters:

• briefer, like an article
• take longer to write and publish, so may be less current than articles
• subject matter is more focused than that of books; similar to articles
• you find them using an article database covering the appropriate discipline

For more information, view the Library Workshop tutorial on the Knowledge Cycle.

If you have questions about the types of sources you should be using in your research, please ask for assistance in person or online.

Your instructor may want you to use scholarly (or "peer-reviewed") sources. What does this mean?

There are two main types of scholarly sources:

1. Articles published in scholarly journals (print or electronic), which are usually peer-reviewed.   
2. Books (print or electronic) intended for an expert or specialized audience.

Scholarly sources are:

• Specialized: written by scholars for an informed, academic audience, at a level that requires some background knowledge in the subject
• Build upon the work of other scholars, often including extensive bibliographies.
• Examples: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,  Journal of African American History, and JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association)

Popular sources, on the other hand, are intended for the general public. These sources are more introductory, may not be written by experts in a field, and often do not cite any other sources. Examples of popular magazines include National Geographic, The Economist, Time, Newsweek, and People.

How can you tell if an article or book is scholarly? Look for:

Use OskiCat to locate materials related to your topic, including books, government publications, and  audio and video recordings, in the libraries of UC Berkeley. OskiCat will show you the location and availability of the items that we own.

• Using OskiCat (but not Melvyl) you can also renew your books online, look up course reserve materials by course number or instructor name, and place holds on items that other library users have already checked out.

Use Melvyl to locate materials related to your topic located at other campuses in the UC system, or worldwide. You can use the Request button to request an item from another library, if we don't own it.

• Using Melvyl (but not OskiCat) you can find articles as well as books, easily format a citation for copying into a bibliography, and see images of book covers, when available. Melvyl will also show you the location and availablity of items that we own.

Melvyl has changed as of January 2012, and now includes many more articles.  Detailed Melvyl help

Google Books contains millions of scanned books, from libraries and publishers worldwide. You can search the entire text of the books, view previews or "snippets" from books that are still in copyright, and read the full text of out-of-copyright (pre-1923) books.  Want to read the entire text of an in-copyright book?  Use Google Books' Find in a Library link to locate the book in a UC Berkeley library, or search OskiCat to see if UC Berkeley owns the book.

Why use Google Books?

Library catalogs (like OskiCat) don't search inside books; using a library catalog, you can search only information about the book (title, author, Library of Congress subject headings, etc.).  Google Books will let you search inside books, which can be very useful for hard-to-find information.  Try it now:

Try these terms in OskiCat to find books on your topic. Remember, OskiCat only lets you search brief information about the book - you're not searching in the full text of the book itself! If you're not getting enough results, try searching for a less specific topic, leave out some search terms, or try Google Books.

Most of these terms are Library of Congress subject headings -- which means you'll get the most complete results if you enter them exactly as typed (African Americans, not African American).

• African Americans
• African American authors
• Biography
• Autobiography or autobiographies
• Memoirs
• Personal narratives
• Slave narratives (this will find books which contain reprints of primary source material, usually oral histories of former slaves)

You can use these terms in combination, using the default Keyword search. For example, try african americans personal narratives or african american authors biography.

• MLA International Bibliography
  Scholarly articles on literary topics. Use UC-eLinks button to get to the articles themselves.
  
• Literature Resource Center (LRC)
  Includes biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of more than 120,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and other writers. Scope is international. Full text.
  
• Project MUSE
  Several hundred scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences. Topics include literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics and many others.
  
• JSTOR
  Easy to use, full text, multi-disciplinary scholarly article database. Note: the most recent 3-5 years of the journals are usually not available through JSTOR.
  
• Academic Search Complete
  A multi-disciplinary database that includes both scholarly and popular articles. Most articles have pdfs.
  
• Literature Online
  Includes more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, 131 full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources. Includes reference works on literary criticism and biographical information.
  

• Alternative Press Index
  Includes more than 450 alternative, radical, and left magazines, newsletters, and journals in North America which report and analyze issues of cultural, economic, political, and social change. Approximately 90% of publications included are not indexed elsewhere. Indexes editorials, regular columns, essays, fiction; speeches, interviews, statistics, reprints; bibliographies, biographies, obituaries, memoirs; and reviews.
  
• Black Studies Center (BSC)
  Includes three modules: The Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience which includes interdisciplinary essays on the Black Experience; International Index to Black Periodicals (IIBP), a database covering some 150 scholarly and popular Black Studies journals, many of them in full text; and the full text backfile of the influential black newspaper The Chicago Defender (1910-1975).
  
• Ethnic News Watch
  Indexes over 200 ethnic, minority, and native press publications.
  

Many article databases contain information about articles (citations or abstracts), not the entire text of the article.  Once you've used an article database to find articles on your topic, you may need to use this button: in order to locate and read the full text of the article. The UC-eLinks button appears in nearly all the databases available from the UCB Library website.

UC-eLinks will link you to the online full text of an article if UCB has paid for online access; otherwise, UC-eLinks will help you locate a print copy on the shelf in the library. If UCB doesn't own the article in print or online format, UC-eLinks can also help you order a copy from another library.

For more information, watch this video tutorial (about 4 min.)

You can also set up UC-eLinks to work with Google Scholar.  For more information, watch this video tutorial (about 2 min.)

The Library has a subscription to a database of primary sources from the 1960s: The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives. This database documents the key events, trends, and movements in 1960s America (1960-1974), including 70,000 pages of letters, diaries, and oral histories, more than 30,000 pages of posters, broadsides, pamphlets, advertisements, as well as rare audio and video materials.

This database is restricted to the UC Berkeley community; don't forget to set up off-campus access if you're accessing it from off-campus.

• Citing Your Sources - a brief online guide to the main citation styles and a brief discussion on what constitutes plagiarism.
  
• MLA handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7th edition. New York : Modern Language Association of America, 2009.
  Doe Reference Reference Hall LB2369 .G53 2009
  Main Gardner Stacks LB2369 .G53 2009
  Many older editions available throughout the UCB libraries.
• The Chicago Manual of Style (UCB-only access)
  15th ed. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003. Searchable, online version of the Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition).
  Many print editions available throughout the UCB Libraries.
• Cite Right: A Quick Guide to Citation Styles--MLA, APA, Chicago, the Sciences, Professions, and More (UCB-only access) Charles Lipson. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006.
  Many print editions throughout the libraries.
• Columbia Guide to Online Style (UCB-only access)
  Janice R. Walker and Todd Taylor. 2nd ed. NY: Columbia Univ. Press. 2006.
  Many print editions throughout the UCB libraries.

Finding a citation in a bibliography (online or in print) is a great way to find more resources on your topic.

However, you have to be able to read the citation in order to find the item in the UCB Library.

The most common citations are for books, articles, and book chapters. Can you tell which citation below is for a book?  For a chapter?  For an article?

• Orbe, Mark P. "Representations of Race in Reality TV: Watch and Discuss." Critical Studies in Media Communication 25.4 (2008): 345-352.

• Winters, Loretta I., and Herman L. DeBose. New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century. Thousand Oaks:  Sage Publications Inc., 2003.

• Fine, Michelle, and Adrienne Asch. “Disability Beyond Stigma: Social Interaction, Discrimination, and Activism.”  The Culture and Psychology reader. Eds. Goldberger, Nancy Rule; Veroff, Jody Bennet  New York:  New York University Press. 1995. 536-558

Citation management tools help you manage your research, collect and cite sources, organize and store your PDFs, and create bibliographies in a variety of citation styles.  Each one has its strengths and weaknesses, but all are easier than doing it by hand!

1. Zotero: A free plug-in for the Firefox browser: keeps copies of what you find on the web, permits tagging, notation, full text searching of your library of resources, works with Word, and has a free web backup service. Zotero is also available as a stand-alone application that syncs with Chrome and Safari, or as a bookmarklet for mobile browsers.
   • Zotero help from the UCB Libraries
   • Zotero help from zotero.org
2. RefWorks - web-based and free for UC Berkeley users. It allows you to create your own database by importing references and using them for footnotes and bibliographies, then works with Word to help you format references and a bibliography for your paper. Use the RefWorks New User Form to sign up.
   • RefWorks help from the UCB Libraries
   • RefWorks help from RefWorks
3. EndNote: Desktop software for managing your references and formatting bibliographies. You can purchase EndNote from the Cal Student Store. 

Tip: After creating a bibliography with a citation management tool, it's always good to double check the formatting; sometimes the software doesn't get it quite right.

In order to avoid plagiarism, you must give credit when

• You use another person's ideas, opinions, or theories.
• You use facts, statistics, graphics, drawings, music, etc., or any other type of information that does not comprise common knowledge.
• You use quotations from another person's spoken or written word.
• You paraphrase another person's spoken or written word.

Recommendations

• Begin the writing process by stating your ideas; then go back to the author's original work.
• Use quotation marks and credit the source (author) when you copy exact wording.
• Use your own words (paraphrase) instead of copying directly when possible.
• Even when you paraphrase another author's writings, you must give credit to that author.
• If the form of citation and reference are not correct, the attribution to the original author is likely to be incomplete. Therefore, improper use of style can result in plagiarism. Get a style manual and use it.
• The figure below may help to guide your decisions.
  
  

This content is part of the Understanding Plagiarism tutorial created by the Indiana University School of Education.

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If the librarian can't answer you well enough, your question will be referred to a Berkeley librarian for follow-up.

Have fun chatting!

Research Advisory Service for Cal Undergraduates

Book a 30-minute appointment with a librarian who will help refine and focus research inquiries, identify useful online and print sources, and develop search strategies for humanities and social sciences topics.

Schedule, view, edit or cancel your appointment online (CalNetID required)

This service is for Cal undergraduates only. Graduate students and faculty should contact the library liaison to their department or program for specialized reference consultations.

"There are no dumb questions!" 

That's the philosophy of reference librarians, who are here to save you time and trouble. If you get stuck, you can talk to a reference librarian at any campus library. 

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