English Research

Need to find an author's archive of primary resources but not sure where to look?

Try these tips in Google!

• Use your author as the main keyword and make sure to keep them in quotes! (Quotes tells Google that you want those words to stay together)
• Use the author's full name
• Most archives are stored on university websites or governmental websites. In Google, to search for a university's site just add site:edu at the end. For government, add site:gov.  Make sure there are no spaces between site and the ending.
• Be careful with adding archive. It can open up a whole can of worms and include internet and newspaper archives.
• You can try "digital archive" for varied results. 

For this particular project--the work of a 19th century woman's artists--you will need to follow a detailed research process to find the work and examine its cultural and critical history.

Follow these steps to guide you through this assignment:

1. To locate the work, use one of the sites listed below in Resources or find an archive using the search tips in Finding Archives Online.
2. Once a work has been located, visit a database that houses scholarly journals. In this instance, I highly recommend Literature Resource Center, MLA Bibliography, and JSTOR.
3. Enter the title of the work--in quotation marks!--into a search field in the database.  Examine the results to see if they fit the definition of canon (for example: are there many articles written about this text? Does the text seem to appear only as a reference? Are the articles or references similar? Are these articles in major journals?)
4. Just to make sure it has not been canonized, head on over to Google Scholar. Enter the title (quotation marks!) again and outside of the marks add the author's name. Ex: "Parson's Horse Race" Stowe.
   1. Examine Google's results. Do they look similar to what you found in the library databases? Are there more in Google?  Be careful here because Google Scholar will also link to Google Books if a scholarly book is available.
5. Finally, check Google Books--same search terms. How often does this text crop up? Is it in any of the author's collected works? If so, how often does it appear? When were these books published? Are they all from the same era or are there many modern books writing about this text?

After completing these steps, you will have determined whether the text occupies a place in the canon or is just considered an author's minor work.

WEB RESOURCES

Making of America (Cornell University)
A digital library from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. Use the Help pages for tips on searching and browsing the collections. 

Note: Be sure to also search the Making of America (University of Michigan) collection, as it holds different resources from the Cornell collection. For best results with searching this collection, click on the "Other searches in MOA" link.

American Memory
The Library of Congress houses an extensive online digital archive of  manuscripts, films and photos from America's history. It also links to other online archives.

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1836-1922 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published from 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.

LIBRARY RESOURCES
The library has access to several useful databases for primary resource research.

Literature Resource Center
An online encyclopedia that provides access to full-text biographies, articles and publication histories of authors from every era and discipline. Covers almost 90,000 authors, poets and essayists.

MLA Bibliography
This database from the Modern Language Association indexes drama and literature journals back to the 1960s. Please note that search results include only citations and abstracts, not full-text articles.

JSTOR
An excellent database to search the scholarly history of a work. It is an full-text database that houses many journals, including many of the leading journals in a particular field. The coverage for each journal varies.

New York Times Historical via ProQuest
Available through ProQuest. Offers full-text and full-image articles beginning with the newspaper's first issue in 1851. You can access news, editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, historical photos, stock photos and advertisements. 

Dissertations & Theses Global via ProQuest
A comprehensive collection of scholarly research, this database covers more than 1 million dissertations and theses. 
 

Just a few reminders as you start your research:

• Databases scan articles for the exact search terms that you type.
• Pull keywords out of your search question. Changing the keywords changes your results.
• Look for up-to-date information (Within the past 5 years) Check the date of the article or the date last updated for a website (usually at bottom or sidebar).
• Plural vs. singular = various forms of the word will give you different results.
• Use “OR” to increase results. If you are searching for information specifically in the United States, try using the keywords (United States OR America) to search both terms simultaneously.
• Truncation: take the stem of any word, example teach* and add an asterisk. This will search for every form of the word simultaneously. For example: teach, teaches, teaching, teacher.
• If you aren't sure why the asterisk isn't working (because sometimes it doesn't), use Help in the databases. Help is usually found in the upper right.
• Use Quotes! This works really well when searching for a person or phrase. For example, “Mark Twain” or “obsessive compulsive disorder”. Keeping words together makes your search more exact.