AFR AM 117: African Americans in the Industrial Age
Contact Your Librarian
Jason M. Schultz
Office Hours: By appointment or Wednesdays 1:30pm-2:30pm, 675A Barrows
Office Location: 438 Doe Library
Contact Info:
(510) 984-3012
AFR AM 117
Aspiration by Aaron Douglas, 1936.
Off Campus Access
Before you can access UCB Library resources from off campus or via your laptop or other mobile devices, make sure you have configured your machine using one of two simple methods (Proxy Server is the quickest and easiest):
VPN (Virtual Private Network) After you install and run the VPN "client" software on your computer, you can log in with a CalNet ID to establish a secure connection with the campus network.
Campus Library Map
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Library Hours
Library Catalogs
OskiCat Finds 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. Does not include Law Library holdings.
Melvyl Locates titles found at other campuses in the UC system. Melvyl also allows you to expand your search to libraries worldwide. Clicking on the REQUEST button in the detailed view of a catalog record prompt you to fill out a form to request the item through our Interlibrary Loan office. Requires Proxy login for when accessing off-campus.
WorldCat on FirstSearch Another catalog to access records of materials in libraries worldwide. It can be used for interlibrary loan requests. Good for advanced researchers.
E-Book Resources
ebrary A database of more than 37,000 complete e-books covering 16 key subject areas including: business and economics, computers and IT, literature and linguistics, history, political science, and more.
Google Book Search Searches the full text of books on many subjects, including some from the University of California libraries. The full text of a book can be displayed only if the book is out of copyright (generally, published before 1923) or if the copyright holder has given permission. Includes some important African American periodicals including the NAACP's The Crisis, Ebony, and Jet among others.
HathiTrust Pronounced "hah-tee", this cooperative system contains millions of books scanned from UC and other major research libraries, including those digitized by Google and the Internet Archive. Search on information about the book (such as author or title), or words in the text. Full text is available for items that are not protected by copyright. Items in the HathiTrust catalog can be grouped into collections and shared online. For details, see the FAQ page.
Dissertations and Theses (Dissertation Abstracts) Indexes graduate dissertations from over 1,000 North American, and selected European, graduate schools and universities. Dissertations published since 1980, and master's theses since 1988, include brief abstracts written by the authors. Offers full text of most of the dissertations added since 1997.
eScholarship: University of California, Berkeley eScholarship provides a suite of open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide
UC Press E-Books Collection (eScholarship Editions) 1,400 online titles from the University of California Press covering a wide range of subjects. About 30% of the UC Press books, both in print and out-of-print are represented in this collection.
Article Databases
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).
JSTOR Includes over 1000 scholarly journals with access to more than 2 million articles. JSTOR is an archive which means that current issues (generally the most recent 3-5 years) of the journals are not yet available.
America: History and Life Indexes over 2,000 journals published worldwide on the history of the US and Canada from prehistory to the present.
Project MUSE 250 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.
Academic Search Complete A multidisciplinary index to articles in more than 10,900 journals and other publications; full-text is available for over 5300 journals.
Book & Text Collections
Oxford African American Studies Center More than 7,500 full text articles from major reference works, including the Encyclopedia of African American History, Black Women in America, African American National Biography, the Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, and more. Also includes images, maps, charts, tables, timelines, and primary source documents.
Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896-present Contains approximately 1,200 references covering the transition from the Reconstruction Era to the age of Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement up through the election of Barack Obama.
American Slave: A Composite Autobiography A digitized collection of over 2,300 narratives of former slaves. Interviews were conducted by writers and journalists as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s.
Black Drama Contains the full text of 1,200 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than by more 100 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. The database is includes drama of the Harlem Renaissance and drama, the Black Arts Movement and 20th century African and Caribbean drama. Complements the other Alexander Street Press database Black Drama, 2nd edition.
Black Drama, 2nd edition Contains almost 1,500 plays by more than 200 playwrights. Includes information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library Consists of more than 7 million digital items from more than 100 historical Library of Congress collections. The primary source and archival materials relating in the project cover topics from art and architecture to performing arts to technology and applied sciences.
American Slave: A Composite Autobiography A digitized collection of over 2,300 narratives of former slaves. Interviews were conducted by writers and journalists as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s.
Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives Documents the key events, trends, and movements in 1960s America. Includes 70,000 pages of letters, diaries, and oral histories; more than 30,000 pages of posters, broadsides, pamphlets, advertisements, and rare audio and video materials.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (WASM) Collects and analyzes more than 1,000 documents and almost 400 images on the history of women and social movements in the United States between 1600 and 2000. Also includes links to other websites and a dictionary of social movements and organizations.
Newspapers
African American historical and current newspapers are also available electronically through subscription databases from UC Berkeley. More are available through general U.S. current and historical newspaper databases.
The Library's Newspaper & Microforms Room holds a number of primary source African American newspapers from throughout the U.S. Papers on microfilm are shelved in title order by state. Currently received print titles are shelved by title. Some titles are also available in the Bancroft Library. See selected titles in the UC Berkeley collection below. Click on newspaper titles below to link to its OskiCat record.
The Stanford Library has one of the largest collection of newspapers in print and mircofilm in the United States. They are available for on-site viewing by UCB afilliated persons.The Center for Research Libraries lends newspapers on microfilm to UCB patrons. Many titles are listed on the Melvyl Catalog where you can request film by sent to UCB for use.
American Song Includes approximately 50,000 digital music tracks documenting genres such as jazz, blues, gospel, ragtime, folk songs, and other forms of African American musical expression. Part of Alexander Street Press's Music Online.
American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library Consists of more than 7 million digital items from more than 100 historical Library of Congress collections. The primary source and archival materials relating in the project cover topics from art and architecture to performing arts to technology and applied sciences.
NYPL Digital Gallery Provides access to over 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.
AP Images Includes Associated Press's current-year photo report and a selection from a 50-million image print and negative library dating from 1844-present. Currently contains about 700,000 photos, most of which are contemporary images made since late 1995.
Online Archive of California (OAC) A searchable and browseable resource that brings together historical materials from a variety of California institutions, including museums, historical societies, and archives. Contains over 120,000 images; 50,000 pages of documents, letters, and oral histories; and 8,000 guides to collections.
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.
Citation management tools help you manage your research, collect and cite sources, and create bibliographies in a variety of citation styles. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses, but any are easier than doing it by hand!
Zotero: A free plug-in that works exclusively with 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.
RefWorks - free for UC Berkeley users. It allows you to create your own database by importing references and using them for footnotes and bibliographies. Use the RefWorks New User Form to sign up.
It's always good to double check the formatting -- sometimes the software doesn't get it quite right.
Ask a Librarian 24/7 Chat
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You can type your question directly into this chat window to chat with a librarian. Your question may be answered by a reference librarian from Berkeley, from another UC campus, or another academic library elsewhere in the US. We share information about our libraries to make sure you get good answers.
If the librarian can't answer you well enough, your question will be referred to a Berkeley librarian for follow-up.
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 (examples of research 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.
Library Workshop: Research 101
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:
Specialized search strategies for targeting specific topics.
What is Peer Review?
Your instructor may want you to use "peer reviewed" articles as sources for your paper. Or you may be asked to find "academic," "scholarly," or "refereed" articles. What do these terms mean?
Let's start with the terms academic and scholarly, which are synonyms. An academic or scholarly journal is one intended for a specialized or expert audience. Journals like this exist in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Examples include Nature, Journal of Sociology, and Journal of American Studies. Scholarly/academic journals exist to help scholars communicate their latest research and ideas to each other; they are written "by experts for experts."
Most scholarly/academic journals are peer reviewed; another synonym for peer reviewed is refereed. Before an article is published in a peer-reviewed journal, it's evaluated for quality and significance by several specialists in the same field, who are "peers" of the author. The article may go through several revisions before it finally reaches publication.
Magazines like Time or Scientific American, newspapers, (most) books, government documents, and websites are not peer-reviewed, though they may be thoroughly edited and fact-checked. Articles in scholarly journals (in printed format or online) usually ARE peer-reviewed.
How can you tell if an article is both scholarly and peer-reviewed?
Is the article about a very specialized topic? Is it written for a knowledgeable, expert audience, or does it seem to be written for the beginner or general public?
Does the article have an abstract or summary at the beginning? Are there footnotes or endnotes? Is there a list of references?
Does the article present the author's original research?
Is it peer-reviewed? Look at the journal:
What journal was the article published in? Look on the journal's website (or inside the front cover of a printed copy) for a description of the journal. Is it described as "peer-reviewed" or "refereed"?
Try looking up the journal's title in ulrichsweb.com (an online database of information about magazines and journals). If it's a peer-reviewed source, a referee's jersey icon will be shown next to the title:
If you're still not sure, ask your instructor or a librarian.
Want to learn more? Watch a tutorial about identifying peer-reviewed sources on the Web.
Using Boolean Operators & Truncation
BOOLEAN OPERATORS
AND, OR, NOT, W/# (for within or nearby a certain number or words in the full-text)
Example: Migration AND African Americans
Ex: African Americans OR Blacks
Ex: African American NOT African
Ex: Randall Robinson W/10 Reparations
TRUNCATED SEARCHES
Most catalogs & databases use*, ?, # symbols to truncate (shorten) words
Be careful not to truncate a word too short, some entries will be unrelated to your search
Can be used at the end of a word and internally too
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Aspiration by Aaron Douglas, 1936.
n search strategies?
"academic," "scholarly," or "refereed" articles. What do these terms mean?
