HIST 101: Betwixt and Between in the United States: Seminar in Historical Research and Writing

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.

All libraries on campus are equipped with "bookscan stations," which allow you to scan documents and save them to a USB drive, or to scan documents and then send them to a printer.

In order to scan documents, you must have the following:

1. A Cal 1 Card, with money loaded onto it (go here to make a deposit to your Cal 1 Card account). This is not the same as meal plan points! Your Cal 1 Card debit account is a separate fund on your card.
2. A USB drive (you cannot email a scanned document from a bookscan station; you must save your document to a USB drive)
3. Scanning and saving to a USB drive is 5 cents a page for students.
4. Scanning documents and sending them to the printer is 10 cents a page for students. Color printing is 60 cents a page.

In order to send documents to the printer from any of the public computers in the libraries, you must have the following:

1. A Cal 1 Card, with money loaded onto it (see above)
2. A document that's on the Web or attached to your email (the public computers in the libraries will not open files from a USB or other drive)
3. Printing is 10 cents a page for students (black and white). Color printing is 60 cents a page.

Have more questions? There's more info here.

The UC Berkeley History Collection News blog will keep you informed of new digital collections, trials of resources, workshops, events related to History collections, and other news of interest to researchers in History. It is maintained by Jennifer Dorner, History Librarian in Doe Library. Options for accessing the blog include:

• Visiting the blog  (there are new posts a few times a week)
• Subscribing to the RSS feed for the blog
• Following Jennifer on Twitter at @ucbhistorylib where she tweets links to the blog posts

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.

Lower-division prize winners are awarded $750; upper-division prize winners are awarded $1000! Click here for eligibility requirements and more information.

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

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.

A large part of the library's collection is stored off campus in an environmentally secure building called the Northern Regional Library Facility [NRLF].

Submit online requests via the REQUEST button in OskiCat to borrow material shelved at NRLF. To receive electronic or paper copies of book chapters or journal articles, submit an online request via the "Request an article from NRLF (photocopy or web delivery)" link that appears in eligible titles in OskiCat. Staff at public service desks of any campus library can assist you with further questions. 

Log in to Request with your Calnet ID and fill out the screens.  Choose the volume you want, for periodicals:

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:

HathiTrust (Hathi is pronounced hah-tee) is a partnership of libraries that works towards the goal of developing a shared digital access, preservation, and storage solution for the materials held in the member libraries. The contents of HathiTrust are similar to that of GoogleBooks, but the collecting focus is on scholarly materials and the resource includes content and features (such as indexing and manipulation of results) not available in Google Books.

Downloading PDFs

Creating Collections

1. On the Collections page, click on login.
   
2. Choose the University of California, Berkeley from the drop down list and click on login.
3. Enter your CalNet ID and passphrase.
4. Click on Create a New Collection and name your collection (the description is optional).
5. Indicate whether it is a "Private" or "Public" collection.
6. Click on Add.

In the future if you want to edit, change the private/public setting, or delete the collection, your collections will always be listed in the "My Collections" tab whenever you are logged in to HathiTrust.

Find Dissertations by searching Dissertations and Theses (Dissertation Abstracts) Full Text, which indexes graduate dissertations from over 1,000 North American, and selected European, graduate schools and universities from 1861 to the present. Dissertations published since 1980 include brief abstracts written by the authors and some feature 24-page excerpts. The database offers full text for most of the dissertations added since 1997 and some full text coverage for older graduate works.

Also see Find Dissertations and Theses for other specialized sources. Dissertations completed at UC Berkeley can be found in OskiCat, using the feature allowing you to limit to dissertations/theses:

Older dissertations not available full text may be obtained through Interlibrary Loan or using the "Request" option in Melvyl.

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 broader topic or using fewer terms, 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. Uou can combine more than one term for a more focused search. Using the default Keyword search in OskiCat will usually give you the best results.

Now that you know the types of articles you need, you can choose a database, also known as a periodical index, to find them. Databases are collections of thousands of articles organized by subject. The Libraries have hundreds of databases covering every academic discipline. Some are multi-disciplinary, covering a broad range of subjects and including popular and scholarly sources, and others are subject-specific, and include scholarly and specialized articles. A complete list is available at Find Articles.

The following multi-disciplinary databases are good places to start your research:

• 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.
  
• Google Scholar
  Lists journal articles, books, preprints, and technical reports in many subject areas (though more specialized article databases may cover any given field more completely). Some listings include links to related articles and to other sources that cite the item. Includes content from free resources (such as ArXiv.org and university websites) as well as subscription resources (such as electronic journals from selected publishers). Use the UC-eLinks option, when available, to find the UCB access to a publication.
  
• 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.
  

These databases index secondary sources in history, American studies, and cultural studies - if the PDF of the full text isn't available in the database, look for the UC-eLinks button ().

• 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.
  
• ProQuest Social Sciences
  An interdisciplinary metasearch through 22 of the the social sciences indexes on the ProQuest platform. Includes EconLit, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts, PAIS, PsycInfo, Sociological Abstracts, Worldwide Political Science Abstracts and more.
  
• 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).
  
• Bibliography of Slavery and World Slavery
  A searchable database of references to over 25,000 scholarly works in all academic disciplines and in all western European languages on slavery and slaving throughout the world. It includes most known print and digital materials published since 1900 covering historical and modern times.
  
• Chicano Database
  Indexes materials about Mexican-American topics since 1967, and materials about other Latino cultures (Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Central American immigrants) since 1992. Coverage includes art, language, sociology, public policy, economics, history, literature, politics, and law.
  
• Women's Studies International
  Indexes books, journals, magazines, and other resources related to research and commentary on women and women's issues, feminism, and gender.
  

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 the UC-eLinks 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.)

Google Scholar provides easy access to a lot of full text content paid for by The Library, as well as other scholarly or professional content available freely on the Web. Their Help pages describe more fully what is included in this resource.

With a Google account you can exploit special features in Google Scholar.

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.

Make Google display links to full text of articles that Berkeley subscribes to. Open Scholar.  Click on the gear icon in the upper right corner, and choose 'scholar preferences'. In the new window, scroll down to 'Library Links', type the word Berkeley.  Choose University of California, Berkeley-- UC eLinks, and Open Worldcat Search.

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.

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.

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:

• history victorian britain sources
• women 19th century personal narratives
  

The texts of primary sources are available online in two different ways:

• Freely available on the Internet  (example: American Memory from the Library of Congress, or The David Rumsey Map Collection). It is important to carefully consider how you find and evaluate primary sources on the Internet. 

• Available via library databases (example:  Gerritsen Collection of Women's History Online)  that may be used from any computer with access to the campus network.  Off-campus access is limited to UCB faculty, staff and students; see Connecting from Off Campus for instructions for using the proxy server.

Comprehensive list of library databases of primary sources in US History   

• Selected list, US History
• Historical newspaper and magazine articles, US History

Selected list of library databases of primary sources in European history 

• Historical newspaper and magazine articles, European history

Primary Sources by country or continent    

Comprehensive list of library databases of primary sources worldwide

Guides to over 20,000 collections housed in 200 libraries, archives, historical societies, special collections and museums across California are searchable at the  Online Archive of California (OAC). Collection guides, also known as finding aids, are descriptive guides to archival (primary source) collections. These collections may be physically located in archives or digitized on the web. The guides help users learn more about the scope of a collection so they know if it is likely to meet their research needs.

Digitized versions of photographs, documents, newspapers, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, and other cultural artifacts that are contributed by these California institutions to the OAC make up the content included in Calisphere.

• Access World News
  Provides full-text information and perspectives from over 600 U.S. and over 700 international sources. Offers strong regional coverage, indexing more than California newspapers such as Contra Costa Times (1995-current), Sacramento Bee (1984-current), San Francisco Chronicle (1985-current), and San Jose Mercury News (1985-current). Search categories include: California newspapers (121 titles), Greater Los Angeles (54 titles), major metropolitan titles (13 titles), Spanish-language news sources (48 titles), the World (almost 2000 titles), US (855 titles).
  
• Accessible Archives
  Provides access to the Pennsylvania Gazette (1728-1800), the paper called 'The New York Times of the 18th Century', Godey's Lady's Book (1830-1898), the Philadelphia magazine intended to entertain, inform and educate the women of America, and a collection of Philadephia papers. Offers social, political and cultural perspectives of colonial America, the American Revolution, and the New Republic.
  
• California Digital Newspaper Collection
  Offers over 200,000 pages of California newspapers spanning the years 1849-1911: the Alta California, 1849-1891; the San Francisco Call, 1893-1910; the Amador Ledger, 1900-1911; the Imperial Valley Press, 1901-1911; the Sacramento Record-Union, 1859-1890; and the Los Angeles Herald, 1905-1907. Additional years are forthcoming, as are other early California newspapers: the Californian; the California Star; the California Star and Californian; the Sacramento Transcript; the Placer Times; and the Pacific Rural Press.
  
• Chronicling America
  This site allows users to search and view newspaper pages from 1880-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. To date, over 200,000 pages of California newspapers have been digitized.
  
• Early American Newspapers
  Access to hundreds of historic newspapers, providing more than one million pages as fully text-searchable facsimile images. Based largely on Clarence Brigham's "History and Bibliography of American Newspapers,1690-1820." (Archive of Americana allows cross-searching of several databases: Early American Imprints , Series I and II; Early American Newspapers; American State Papers; US Congressional Serial Set.)
  
• 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).
  
• Historical Newspapers (ProQuest)
  Includes Chicago Defender (1910-1975). Chicago Tribune (1849-1988). Los Angeles Times (1881-1988). San Francisco Chronicle (1865-1922). New York Times (1851-1994) with Index (1851-1993). Wall Street Journal (1889-1994). Washington Post (1877-1995).
  
• LexisNexis Academic
  Includes over 6,000 individual titles of international, national and local newspapers and wire services; radio and television transcripts; and business, medical, industry, and legislative magazines, journals, and newsletters. Wide geographic coverage and translations from foreign-language sources, as well as news services like the Associated Press, Agence France Press, El Pais and Xinhua (New China) News Agency.
  
• San Francisco Chronicle (historical archive)
  Full page article images of the San Francisco Chronicle starting with the first issue (1865) through 1922.
  

Before digital storage became easy and cheap, microfilm was a way for libraries to maintain large collections of newspapers, government documents, and historical documents while saving physical storage space. The UC Berkeley Libraries still have extensive microform (microfilm and microfiche) collections, containing valuable information for researchers.

Since each roll of microfilm contains thousands of tiny images of the original pages of a document, you'll need a microfilm reader to magnify the images enough to read them. The UC Berkeley Newspapers and Microforms Department (40 Doe Library) has machines that read, print, and scan images from microfilm and microfiche.

Microfilm and microfiche owned by the UC Berkeley Libraries can be found through OskiCat; use Advanced Keyword Search to limit your search to "All Microforms." In the News/Micro collection, microfilm rolls and microfiche cards are shelved with their own numbering system; click here for a PDF of the collection's floorplan.

The Bancroft Library is one of the treasures of the campus, and one of the world's great libraries for the history of the American West.

Some Bancroft materials are available online via Calisphere, which includes primary sources from many California libraries and museums.

Before you go:

1.  Be prepared! Read secondary sources and know something about your topic.

2.  Search OskiCat so you can bring call numbers with you. Use the Entire Collection pull-down menu in OskiCat to limit your search to the Bancroft Library only. (Remember that there are primary sources in many other campus libraries as well.)

• If the item you want is in storage (the location is NRLF) and it's owned by The Bancroft Library, do not use the Request button in OskiCat.  Instead, use the Bancroft's online request form at least 72 hours in advance (they prefer a week.)
• If you have 72 hours in advance, you can also use the online request form for Bancroft materials that are not in storage; that will speed things up when you arrive. 
• If the OskiCat record mentions a finding aid (an index) to a manuscript collection, you should use it to help you find what you need in the collection.  If the finding aid is online, there will be a link from the OskiCat record. The finding aids that are not online are near the Registration Desk at the Bancroft Library.

3.  Learn about the Bancroft's policies: read about Access (bring a quarter for lockers) and Registration (bring two pieces of ID).  You may want to read about the new camera policy ($10/day, no flash) or about getting photocopies.

As a UC Berkeley student, you also have access to the special collections at Stanford.

The Online Archive of California searches the digitized and non-digitized archival collections held by libraries and other institutions around California.

ArchiveGrid helps you find out which manuscript and archival collections are owned by institutions around the world.

The Chicago Manual of Style includes two slightly different documentation systems: (1) notes and bibliography (NB) and (2) author-date. The notes and bibliography style is preferred by many in literature, history, and the arts.

In the NB system, you mark within your paper where you have cited something by adding a number, which refers to a detailed reference either at the bottom of the page (footnote) or at the end of the paper (endnote). These notes indicate the specific place in your source you are referencing.

The bibliography includes complete information for each item, with the items arranged in alphabetical order by author's last name.

Purdue's Writing Lab provides an example of a paper formatted using Chicago NB style.

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.

History Research Guide from the UC Berkeley Libraries

Primary Sources Research Guide from the UC Berkeley Libraries

RefWorks help | Zotero help

Some reference questions can't be easily answered over e-mail; we are happy to talk with you in person or over the phone if your question is more complex or if you'd like a more in-depth consultation. Trying to schedule appointments via email is time-consuming. Here are some alternatives:

1. Call Jennifer Dorner (History Librarian) at 510-768-7059.

2. Use bCal to find Jennifer's calendar or Heather's calendar (dorner@berkeley.edu; thams@berkeley.edu) and locate a free slot between 9-5, Mon-Fri for Jennifer, and between 9-5, M/T/Th for Heather. You can propose an appointment in bCal or contact one of us by email to confirm the appointment time.

3. If you don't use bCal yet and you have a gmail address, you can send that to Jennifer or Heather and we'll grant you access to our calendars.

Reading, Writing, and Researching for History: A Guide for College Students (Patrick Rael, Bowdoin College) - This is a really detailed, step-by-step guide to writing a serious history paper, from asking good questions to keeping a research journal to citing archival sources.

Purdue Online Writing Lab

History 101 Manual, UC Berkeley History Department (from 2002 - library information is outdated)

Resources for Reading and Writing History (Mark Brilliant, UCB - lots of good strategic info, some library information is outdated)

History Department: Faculty Office Hours and History 101 FAQ

"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. 

• Finding Historical Primary Sources
• History
• Library Subject Guides
• Library Course Guides