ENGLISH R1B: Victorian Crime

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.

Before you can access Library resources from off campus make sure you have configured your computer with proxy server settings.

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.

1.  Read an introduction to the campus libraries for undergraduates.

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

3.  Need a map of the campus libraries? Doe and Moffitt floor plans are here.

4.  Each library has its own hours and they may change on holidays and between semesters - click on the calendar for each library to view a month at a time.

5.  Information about citing your sources and links to guides for frequently used citation styles here.

"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.

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:

ebrary is our largest collection of full text ebooks, with nearly 50,000 titles on a wide range of subjects. Find them in the UCB catalog, OskiCat (keyword: ebrary or limit to "Available Online"), or search the ebrary site directly:

Here are some terms you can use in OskiCat or Melvyl that may help you find books on your topic. Remember, these search engines only let you search brief information about the books - you're not searching in the full text of the books themselves! If you're not getting enough results, try leaving out some search terms, searching for a less specific topic (crime in literature instead of Newgate novel) using Google Books, or asking a librarian.

All 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 (19th century, not nineteenth century). Using the default Keyword search in OskiCat will usually give you the best results.

• American fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism (NOTE: You do not need to include the dashes, just enter your terms like this: american fiction 19th century history and criticism).
• English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
• Capital punishment in literature
• Crime in literature
• Criminology -- History
• Criminology -- 19th century
• Detective and mystery stories -- History and criticism
• Detective and mystery stories, English -- History and criticism
• Gay men in literature
• Gothic revival (Literature) -- History and criticism
• Homosexuality in literature
• Homosexuality in literature -- 19th century
• Homosexuality -- History
• Literature and society
• Social problems in literature
• Sensationalism in literature
• [Author's name] -- Criticism and interpretation (e.g., bram stoker criticism and interpretation)

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

• 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.
  

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?

These databases index mostly peer-reviewed journals in the field of history. To see the full text of articles, use the UC-eLinks button.

• America: History and Life
  U.S. focus. 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.
  
• Historical Abstracts
  Non-U.S. focus.Indexes over 2,000 journals, as well as historical book reviews and dissertations, published worldwide about all aspects of world history (excluding US and Canada) from 1450 to the present.
  
• 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.
  

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.)

Can't find an article database in this guide that's relevant for your topic? Use the Library's Article Databases by Subject page to find and search recommended databases for your subject area. Or try the general Find Articles page to see a complete listing of all article databases, including news databases and book and film review databases.

19th Century British Newspapers

Contains full runs of 49 papers selected by the British Library; contains regional and national papers in England as well as papers from Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Content comes from penny papers read by the working class and papers advocating political or social movements such as Reform, Chartism and Home Rule.

• 19th Century U.S. Newspapers
  Images of both full pages and clipped articles for hundreds of 19th century U.S. newspapers. For each issue, the newspaper is captured from cover-to-cover, providing access to every article, advertisement and illustration.
  
• C19: The Nineteenth Century Index
  Comprehensive coverage of nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives. C19 Index draws on the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index, Poole's Index and Periodicals Index Online to create integrated bibliographic coverage of over 1.4 million books and official publications, 64,891 archival collections and 15.6 million articles published in over 2,500 journals, magazines and newspapers.
  
• Historical Newspapers Online
  Indexes newspapers covering all aspects of British life and world affairs in the 19th and 20th centuries. Contains four major historical resources: Palmer's Index to the Times which covers The Times (London, 1790-1905); The Official Index to the Times (1906-1980); The Historical Index to the New York Times (1863- 1922); and Palmer's Full Text Online (1785-1870).
  
• HarpWeek
  Full-image reproductions of Harper's Weekly from its beginning in 1857 to 1912. Provides access to information about 19th and early 20th century advertising, illustrations, culture, history, literature, and notable figures.
  

Want to find scanned articles from major U.S. newspapers, going back to the mid-19th century?  You can do this through an easy-to-use online database: ProQuest Historical Newspapers.  This database includes articles from the Chicago Defender (1905-1975), the Chicago Tribune (1849-1987), Los Angeles Times (1881-1987), the New York Times (1851-2007), the San Francisco Chronicle (1865-1922), the Wall Street Journal (1889-1993), and the Washington Post (1877-1994).

Trying to use Historical Newspapers from off-campus? Be sure to set up off-campus access. Use of this resource is restricted to UC Berkeley students, faculty and staff.

Certain words and phrases (part of the Library of Congress Subject Headings classification system) will find primary sources in library catalogs.  You can use these in OskiCat or Melvyl:

-correspondence
-sources
-diaries
-personal narratives
-interviews
-speeches
-documents
-archives
-early works to 1800
-newspapers

Examples:

puerto rican* interviews
women 19th century personal narratives
irish american* newspapers

Can't find what you're looking for on this page? Click here to see a list of all the digitized primary source databases available from the UC Berkeley Libraries.

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.

• MLA Formatting and Style Guide from Purdue University's OWL (Online Writing Lab)
• 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.

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.

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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. 

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.

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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.

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