HIST 103: Religion in the 20th Century United States

Read an introduction to the campus libraries for undergraduates.

Set up your computer for off campus access to library databases.

Need a map of the campus libraries?

Each library has its own hours.  Click on the calendar for each library to view a month at a time.

Looking for a location in Doe, Main Stacks or Moffitt?  Try the floorplans, or ask for assistance!

The Library Prize for Undergraduate Research recognizes excellence in undergraduate research projects that show evidence of significant inquiry using the library, its resources, and collections and learning about the research and information-gathering process itself.

The Graduate Theological Union is "is the largest and most diverse partnership of seminaries and graduate schools in the United States", located a few blocks north of UC Berkeley.  The GTU Library is one of the most comprehensive theological libraries in the country. 

Read information for UC Berkeley students on using the GTU Library.

To find materials, search the GTU Library online catalog, GRACE.

Map and directions.

Choose a topic.  

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]

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

Select the best places/ databases to find information on your topic.  Look under the History Databases tab of this guide for article database suggestions. 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. 

Take a look this short tutorial on beginning your research for more ideas.

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.

"I'm writing a paper on World War II." 

Often students start their research with a very general topic, even though they may realize the topic is too large to deal with in a 10-15 page paper.  Faculty and librarians tell them, "You have to narrow this down."  But how do you narrow a topic?

Ask yourself--

• What discipline am I working in?  If you are in a sociology class, ask a sociological question about World War II, like "How did WWII affect women?"  If it's a political science class, your question might be something like "How did WWII affect presidential elections in the US?"

• What are some subsets or aspects of your topic.  Some good aspects are:
  • by place, such as a country or region
  • by time period, such as a century, decade or year 
  • by population, such as men, women, ethnic group, youth, children or elderly

You can combine these ideas, "What were the major impacts of WWII on women in France, in the decade after the war?"

More ideas in our brief tutorial on topic selection and narrowing. 

• Reading, Writing, and Researching for History: A Guide for College Students
  A comprehensive but easy-to-skim web guide to writing history papers. Recommended by History Dept faculty.

Reference sources may be a good place to browse for topics, get an overview of a subject, find names, places, dates and facts that you can use in your research.

To find reference sources, try these strategies:

• Library home > Electronic Resources > Electronic Resources:  Subjects A-Z

Select a subject and browse "Other Resources for this Subject" in the left column (ex: dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.)

• or search Oskicat by official subject heading and add appropriate subheadings, ex:

       religion united states encyclopedias

ALSO:  search for bibliographies

Jews United States Bibliography
Mormon* United States Bibliography

Examples of a few sources for background information, names, places, and possibly titles of primary sources:

To find books, DVDs, maps, sound recordings, manuscripts, and much more - everything except articles - use a library catalog.

OskiCat = most UC Berkeley libraries

MELVYL = all UC campus libraries, including all UC Berkeley libraries

What's the difference?  more details here

For each item make sure you know the name of the physical library, call number, and whether or not it's checked out, library use only, etc.

Call numbers are on the spine of the book; learn how to read them so you can find what you need on the shelves.

Search an article database to find citations (title, author, title of journal, date, page numbers) for articles on a particular topic.  The Library gives you access to over 200 article databases covering different disciplines.

1.  Think about which academic disciplines might write about your topic.  Examples:  literature, film, anthropology, history...

2.  Find the appropriate article database by subject (academic discipline or department).  Look for "Recommended" databases.

Library home > Articles > Article Databases by Subject

• ATLA Religion Database
  Indexes scholarly journals, books, edited volumes worldwide, and book reviews related to religion and theology, representing a wide selection of Christian traditions (including Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Evangelical, and Pentecostal), Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto, Taoism, Confucianism, and other religious traditions.
  
• America: History and Life
  Indexes over 2,000 journals published worldwide on the history of the US and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes all key English-language historical journals; selected historical journals from major countries, state, and local history journals; and a targeted selection of hundreds of journals in the social sciences and humanities.
  
• 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. For more sophisticated search capabilities, go directly to JSTOR advanced search.
  
• 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 in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Portuguese; full-text is available for over 5300 journals.
  

• click on the title to see full record (including abstracts and descriptors)
• to limit by publication type (peer-reviewed journals, conferences, books, etc.) click on the appropriate tab or link
• if necessary,look for other limits (latest update, journal articles only, english only) and more advanced searches
• select records to save to your personalized list; lists may be e-mailed, downloaded, printed

Primary sources can be found in a variety of library tools:

• Catalogs:  OskiCat and Melvyl
• Online book and text collections
• Primary Source databases provided by the Library
      includes databases for finding newspaper articles, such as Historical Newspapers (ProQuest) or magazine articles, such as Reader's Guide
• Vetted sites on the web:
  
  • Library of Congress
  • Online Archive of California or Calisphere
  • History Matters

For specific search strategies, see the Library's Guide to Finding Historical Primary Sources

Learn more about your topic in advance:

• names of relevant individuals and organizations
• dates of events
• places
• what terminology was used at the time by participants and observers? (ex:  negro or colored instead of african american)

Use the bibliographies of secondary sources and reference sources to find citations to specific primary sources; search OskiCat to locate them on campus, or ask for assistance at the Library.

For a complete list, start with the Library home > Electronic Resources > Electronic Resources, Types A-Z > Archival Collections and Primary Sources

• Historical Newspapers (ProQuest)
  Indexes articles from Chicago Defender (1905-1975), Chicago Tribune (1849-1987), Los Angeles Times (1881-1987), New York Times (1851-2007), San Francisco Chronicle (1865-1922), Wall Street Journal (1889-1993), and Washington Post (1877-1994).
  
• Readers' Guide Retrospective
  Covers more than 500 leading American magazines and journals from 1890 to 1982. Platform change: All WilsonWeb databases have switched to the EBSCOhost interface.
  
• Ethnic News Watch
  Indexes over 200 ethnic, minority, and native press publications. Contains news, culture, and history searchable in both English and Spanish. Also includes a retrospective backfile of titles (1960-1989).
  
• American Social History Online
  Provides access to 175 digitized library collections related to U.S. social history.
  
• Discovering American Women's History Online
  A gateway of digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States.
  
• Nation Digital Archive
  Full text access to The Nation, a weekly news magazine covering U.S. politics and society since 1865.
  
• North American Women's Letters and Diaries
  Include approximately 150,000 pages of published letters and diaries by more than 1000 women. Represented are all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions. Also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography.
  
• 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. Enhanced by dozens of scholarly document projects, featuring annotated primary-source content that is analyzed and contextualized through interpretive essays by historians.
  

Search OskiCat for primary sources using keywords and adding terms that denote primary sources, such as:

-correspondence
-sources
-diaries
-personal narratives
-interviews
-speeches
-documents
-archives
-newspapers

Examples:

puerto rican* interviews
african american soldiers personal narratives
irish american* newspapers

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.

The UCB Library Guide to Citing Your Sources discusses why you should cite your sources and links to campus resources about plagiarism.  It also includes links to guides for frequently used citation styles.  Also:

• 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.

If you've never used Zotero before, use the QuickStart Guide to get started.

Change your preferences if you want  Zotero to

• set your default citation style
• search the full text of pdfs you save
• Automatically attach associated PDFs and other files when saving items

To use Zotero to find specific articles in our library's databases, set up the Open URL resolver with this link: http://ucelinks.cdlib.org:8888/sfx_local? 

An in-depth discussion of the relative virtues of Endnote and Zotero,

Google Scholar is an easy way to do interdisciplinary research, and with some settings changes can become even more useful.  You may need a Google account to use some of these features.

• Set up Google Scholar to display links to full text of articles that Berkeley subscribes to:

Open Scholar.  Click on scholar preferences [upper right corner]. Under Library Links, enter the word Berkeley.  Choose  UC Berkeley eLinks and Open WorldCat - Library Search and Save your preferences.  UC e-links will now appear in Google Scholar search results.

• Set up a Google Scholar Alert to be automatically notified when new articles are added to Google on topics of interest: 

Do your search in Google Scholar. Look in the green toolbar for the envelope icon, and click it.  New items will be sent to your email account as they are found by Google.

• Ever wanted to trace an article’s impact? Google now permits searching within citing articles.

Do a Google Scholar search. Click on the "Cited by" link under a citation and select the "Search within articles citing..." checkbox.

You already know that you should evaluate anything you find on the Internet.  Here are some reminders of what to look for.

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Other ways to get help:  in person, by e-mail, using specialized chat services

And of course:  e-mail Corliss or email Theresa (Bancroft Library)

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 (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.

• Gender and Women's Studies
• Library Subject Guides
• Library Course Guides