HISTORY DEPARTMENT

 

How to Find History Materials in SOU's
Hannon Library

by
Todd F. Carney
Southern Oregon University

(Copyright 1996, 2005 Todd F. Carney. This material may be used for instructional purposes without permission, but all commercial rights are reserved.)

The Len and Dixie Hannon Library at Southern Oregon University is small compared to many academic libraries, but its history collections are well-developed and cover most of world history. Students facing the task of locating useful and important source materials can find themselves confused and lost in a maze of books, journals, and reference materials.

      Nevertheless, most student research will require at least some use of off-campus or electronic delivery of books and articles. The Summit Union Catalog Consortium, of which the Hannon Library is a member, can provide most of what you need from off-campus with only a few days wait. Items not held within the Summit system can be requested by ILL with delivery times in most cases of one to two weeks. Given the short academic terms at SOU, early planning and preparation in your research is a must.

      Here are a few suggestions that may make your research easier and more productive.

      1. Develop a list of search terms. You will use these to search on-line in the Hannon Library Catalog, in the Summit union catalog, and to search in printed indexes, bibliographies, and other finding aids.

      Suppose you are doing a paper on the Japanese internment during World War Two. Here are some of the terms you will need to use:

Second World War
Japanese Americans
Japanese Internment
Japanese Relocation
Relocation Camps

Why would you need to use all these (and there may be more)? Because each of them applies to your topic, but each is slightly different. The first one, "Second World War," is an overall subject that may or may not be useful. You would dredge up so much material that a narrower focus may be necessary. But remember this: "Second World War" will almost certainly be broken down into sub-topics on the computer or in a printed index. You might, therefore, find useful items under:

Second World War--Japanese Americans
Second World War--Japanese Relocation
Second World War--Relocation Camps

Worse yet, some catalogs or indexes may use "World War Two," "World War II," or "World War 1939 to 1945" instead of "Second World War." How can you know? You will know by paying attention to each catalog's or index's organizational scheme and terminology. Is all this confusing and inconsistent? Yes, but if you have no tolerance for these variations and peculiarities, then you have no tolerance for research and you should consider taking another course or major.

      One very instructive exercise is to try to find your topic in the Library of Congress Subject Guide located near the reference desk. Its four volumes contain a classification scheme used by the Library of Congress and most academic libraries. It represents a complete and expert systematization of knowledge, and it may be arranged in ways that surprise you. Keep this in mind: not everyone sees the world as you do, and knowing this will help you find materials you need.

      In short, pay attention to how different catalogers and indexers do things, and conduct your search from as comprehensive a list of terms as possible.

      2. Develop a list of search sources. A search source is a catalog, or index, or bibliography in which you hope to find citations to books and articles. Since you need to use both book and journal article materials, a minimum list would look like this:

Hannon Library Catalog
Summit Union Catalog
American: History and Life --or-- Historical Abstracts
AHA Guide to Historical Literature (Ref. D20 A55)

Depending on your topic, you may need to use many others as well. If it is a topic in United States history after 1851, you can find useful newspaper citations in the New York Times Index. Our library has the Times on microfilm from 1851 on.

      In some cases, you will need to broaden your search to find materials not found in Northwest library collections. Two important on-line services are available for this purpose. One is the University of California library catalog Melvyl. You can access Melvyl from the "Other Libraries" menu on the SOU Library Catalog homepage. The University of California collection of books exceeds 14,000,000, so it is a good source of citations for what may be available via interlibrary loan (ILL).

      A more comprehensive but more-difficult-to-use catalog is available on-line as part of the FirstSearch collection of on-line databases: WorldCat. This is a kind of "union catalog" of materials generally available by ILL in the United States. Both Melvyl and First Search can be quirky, so feel free to ask Professor Carney or a librarian for help.

      There are other sources of citations you may need or want to consult for possible book or journal articles. Bibliographies (in book form) such as the American Historical Association Guide to Historical Literature are invaluable since they represent a topical selection of both book and articles made by leading scholars. Often, as is the case with the AHA Guide, citations will be annotated and contain a brief description of the book or article and its subject.

In addition to general bibliographies such as the AHA Guide, there are specialized bibliographies available for many subject areas. Examples include:

Richard Dean Burns, Guide to American Foreign Relations since 1700. ABC-Clio, 1983. 40 Sections of annotated citations.

John R. Wunder, Historians of the American Frontier: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook. Greenwood Press, 1988. Biographies of fifty-seven historians and a bibliography of their works.

William M. Clemens, Native American Folklore, 1879-1979: An Annotated Bibliography. Swallow Press, 1984.

Specialized bibliography of this type abound. To find them, look in the library catalog under your general topic (i.e., World War Two, or African American History, etc.) and find the entries for "bibliography." Example: you will find the Burns bibliography listed above under "United States--Foreign Relations--Bibliography."

Another useful source of both historical information and bibliography are specialized historical dictionaries. Examples include:

Dictionary of the Middle Ages. 13 vols, 1982. Ref. D114 D5.
Dictionary of Twentieth Century History: 1914-1990. 1992. Ref. D419 T44.
Historical Dictionary of Revolutionary China, 1839-1976.

In addition to alphabetized articles on various aspects of the dictionary's subject, many of these specialized dictionaries contain bibliography, usually at the end of each article.

      3.Create a working bibliography. With your list of search terms and sources to search, begin to collect a bibliography of books, articles, and perhaps primary sources on your topic. It is usually most convenient to use blank or lined index cards to record each citation you wish to pursue. Adopting a standard format for your citation cards will help you later. Each card should include the following information:

For books:
Author(s)
Full title
City of publication
Publisher
Year of publication
Chapter or pages of interest (if less than whole book)

For journal articles:
Author(s)
Full title of article
Journal title
Volume, issue number, and date of publication
Page range of entire article

Additionally, for both books and articles, you should include a brief annotation on why the item will be a useful and important source. Also, placing some kind of key or index word in either the upper-left or upper-right corners will help you sort your cards later.

      Here is an example of a typical book card you might create:

Background--racism Dower, John W. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Very good background racial attitudes and anti-Japanese feeling in the United States.

Here is a sample card for a journal article:   

Legal aspects Rostow, Eugene V. "The Japanese American Cases: A Disaster." Yale Law Review 54(3)(June 1945): 489-533. Goes mostly into the handling of the Koromatsu v. U.S. case that ended the internment in late 1944.

Note that book titles should be underlined (or, in print, italicized) and that articles or book chapters should be enclosed within quotes. The titles of journals should be underlined. The example above indicates that the Rostow article is in volume 54 of the Yale Law Review, issue 3 of that volume, published in June, 1945. Journals are usually issued four times a year. One year's worth of issues usually makes up a "volume" and are typically bound together. Following the colon in the example is the range of pages for the entire article.

      It is absolutely essential that you record all the needed bibliographic information when you make up your cards. You will need most of the information to properly find or order the items, and you will certainly need it when you prepare the citations in your paper and its bibliography. Failure to get the information now will cause you grief and frustration later.

      How many source citations should you collect for your paper? There are no easy answers to that question, but here are some suggestions to keep in mind.

• For student papers, it is more important to be comprehensive than to be exhaustive in your research.
  
• Each topic has a natural "shape." As you discover the shape of your topic, make sure you have sources that deal with its most important parts.
  
• The citation examples used above address two important parts of the Japanese relocation experience: racist attitudes regarding Japanese Americans, and legal aspects of the relocation and internment. There are, of course, many other parts: white reactions to the relocation, the actual experience in the camps, loss of property and other goods by those relocated, and the like. These parts of the "shape" of the topic suggests you will need to use at least a few items on each.
  
• As you begin collecting citations, you will find authors who have written more than one thing on aspects of your topic. These are obviously important scholars in that field. It is a good idea to know a half dozen or so such names as you proceed with your research.
  
• Begin searching for materials of recent scholarship and work back to older materials as needed.
  
• It is wise to not limit yourself to a narrow interpretive perspective. Make sure that your selected sources contain significantly different points of view regarding your topic.
  
• It would be difficult to be comprehensive and to collect sufficient material for a good paper with less than a dozen books or articles. You probably would not have to read each one in its entirety, but fewer sources make for thinly supported and weak papers.

      4.Sort your sources. Make two piles of your sources cards: one for items the Hannon library owns, and one for items you must request from Summit or ILL. Once you have the two piles, run, don't walk, to the library to enter your requests. The sooner you get sources ordered, the more time you'll have to deal with them intelligently.

      5. "Mine" for Citations. Once you start working with the materials you found as a result of steps 1 through 4, you will find many more citations waiting for you in their footnotes and bibliographies. You can "mine" them for additions to your own working bibliography. In a sense, what you are doing it tracing the filaments of an elaborate "web" of writings and knowledge. It is a model for knowledge itself, built as it is on interconnections and work done by others in the present and in the past.

      6. Create Final Bibliography. Remember that what you are doing in steps 1 through 5 is building a working bibliography. In your final paper, you will cite only those works you have actually used. For this reason, your final bibliography will be shorter than your working bilbilography.

Updated