Although the various general methods of searching discussed so far are all applicable in any subject area, some topics present unusually complex arrays of research materials and require more particular overviews of individual sources. Those discussed in this chapter have proved themselves useful in providing answers to many specialized inquiries.
Two excellent starting points for biographical information on individuals, prominent or obscure, living or dead, worldwide, are Biography and Genealogy Master Index and Biography in Context. Both are subscription databases from Gale Cengage. The former is a cumulative index to more than 13.6 million biographical sketches in more than 1,600 biographical dictionaries and “Who’s Who”–type publications, with hundreds of thousands of new citations added each year. It is not a full-text database, but if you have a person’s name it will tell you where he or she is written up. (A printed set of this Index, with ongoing supplements, also exists.) Biography in Context, in contrast, is a full-text database with actual biographical articles; but it is much smaller in scope. Its articles are taken from more than 350 periodicals and newspapers and more than 170 reference sources.
EBSCO offers two important biographical databases. Biography Past and Present is a combination of indexes formerly produced by the H. W. Wilson Company, covering more than a million biographical articles, books, obituaries, memoirs, interviews, and other sources back to 1946. Biography Reference Bank is an index and full-text source providing online versions of Current Biography, World Authors, and the biographical content of Junior Authors & Illustrators, as well as indexing of other sources.
World Biographical Information System (De Gruyter) is another subscription database indexing all of the individual names in thousands of old biographical encyclopedias and other reference works; it is especially strong in its coverage of foreign-language sources. It currently lists information on more than 6 million people from the eighth century b.c. to the present, with 8.5 million full-text articles from a wide range of national/ethnic Biographical Archive indexes that are available individually, with corresponding microfiche sets. (These microfiche sets provide the full texts for the database, but not all of the fiche sets have yet been digitized.) These sets (in both printed and database formats) include the following:
A full subscription to the World Biographical Archive database would search all of these at the same time; it enables you to search not just by the name of an individual but also by years of birth or death, and by individual occupations or subjects (using all of the variant language terms in the particular sets) or broad occupational classifications (using English language categorizations). The searchable subjects include terms such as “murder victim,” “accomplice to murder,” “fire-eater,” “photographer,” and “embezzler”; the indexing terms, however, are not applied consistently or uniformly.
There are, of course, many free biographical websites beyond Wikipedia and Biography.com; a good overview of the others can be found at the Internet Public Library www.ipl.org; just type “biography” into the search box. Refdesk also points to many free websites at www.refdesk.com/factbiog.html.
The standard biographical encyclopedia for biographies of deceased Americans is American National Biography (Oxford University Press), which exists both as a multivolume print set and as a subscription database (www.anb.org). Its predecessor, the printed Dictionary of American Biography (DAB) (Scribners, 1928–1996), is not superseded, however, since it has many biographies not picked up or revised by the later set. The DAB is full-text available in Biography in Context. The comparable (although much larger) biographical encyclopedia for deceased individuals from the British Isles, or those who lived in territories formerly connected to the Empire (and some others connected to Britain), is the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is also available both in print and online via subscription (www.oxforddnb.com). (The British encyclopedia includes even legendary figures such as King Arthur and Robin Hood.) Both the American and British databases can be searched by occupations, realms of renown, or fields of interest as well as by sex, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and so on. Cambridge University Press produces a comparable 9-volume Dictionary of Irish Biography.
The National Cyclopedia of American Biography (James T. White Co., 1892–1984) is a 63-volume set that is especially good for picking up noteworthy people who are otherwise neglected by history books (e.g., business executives, lawyers, military officers, clergy). The articles are based on questionnaires sent to the families of the subjects, or to the subjects themselves, so they should generally be regarded as authorized or approved by the biographees. Not all of the names in the National Cyclopaedia are directly indexed in Biography and Genealogy Master Index—the latter, however, indexes Biography Index, which in turn indexes the National Cyclopaedia. What that means in plain English is that you cannot rely on Biography and Genealogy Master Index to provide direct references to all of the Cyclopaedia articles; if you are looking for an American, you still have to check the printed Index volume of the Cyclopaedia.
If these sources don’t cover the individuals you want, the many full-text databases of newspapers are often useful; they frequently contain not just obituaries but regular articles containing information of biographical interest. Genealogical databases and websites are also useful. (See the Genealogy and Local History and Newspapers sections below.) The large, foreign-language national encyclopedias of various countries can also turn up biographical information not accessible elsewhere.
Another good source is Robert B. Slocum’s two-volume Biographical Dictionaries and Related Works (Gale Research, 1986, 2nd ed.), which is well described by its subtitle: An International Bibliography of More Than 16,000 Collective Biographies, Bio-bibliographies, Collections of Epitaphs, Selected Genealogical Works, Dictionaries of Anonyms and Pseudonyms, Historical and Specialized Dictionaries, Biographical Materials in Government Manuals, Bibliographies of Biography, Biographical Indexes, and Selected Portrait Catalogs. Each entry is annotated, and all are categorized by country/subdivision and by vocational area. This set can alert you to biographical dictionaries not indexed by either Biography and Genealogy Master Index or World Biographical Information System.
Old city directories, such as those published by the R. L. Polk Company, can sometimes be used to construct mini-biographies of individuals. Among the questions they can often answer are: Is the individual married? If so, what is the spouse’s name? If a widow, what was the husband’s name? Who else resides at the same address? Who are the neighbors? What is the individual’s occupation, and where is he or she employed? Is the individual a “head of house” or a resident? Retrospective searching of earlier volumes can also indicate how long an individual has been employed at a job, what his previous jobs or business associations were, how long the person has resided at an address, who were previous neighbors, and so on. (Researchers who want to milk old directories to the last drop should study pages 158–160 of Harry J. Murphy’s Where’s What: Sources of Information for Federal Investigators [Quadrangle/New York Times Book Company, 1976]; Murphy quotes a previous publication listing about 50 questions that the old city directories can answer.) The drawback is that Polk directories are no longer published for large cities; they are mainly good for small towns and suburbs—or for older decades of the large cities. The various directories now published tend to be strictly “criss-cross”: you have to start out with either a phone number or an address, and the directory will give you the names connected with either (without any biographical or occupational information). Note that Google offers somewhat similar capabilities for current phone numbers, although, as of this writing, the service is usually clogged with unwanted advertisements and commercial sites. The subscription databases ReferenceUSAGov (InfoUSA) and Mergent Intellect (Mergent) provide excellent criss-cross information without all the clutter.
Many book reviews lie beyond the coverage of Amazon.com. Virtually all of the commercially available databases that cover journal articles—whether from ProQuest, EBSCO, Gale, Thomson Reuters, et al.—have search features that enable you to “limit” your search to only book review formats. Many of these same databases provide full texts of the reviews themselves. Book Review Digest Plus (EBSCO) is a popular source among students; it covers all of the reviews picked up by more than 5,000 journals since 1983 (more than 2 million citations, with more than 270,000 full text). Book Review Index Retrospective extends coverage back to 1905 (with fewer sources covered in these earlier decades). Book Review Index Online (Gale) indexes more than 5 million reviews of more than 2.5 million book titles as far back as 1965, with links to hundreds of thousands of the reviews in full text.
A good source for older book reviews (going back more than a hundred years) is Periodicals Index Online, indexing more than 6,000 periodicals back to the seventeenth century. Retrospective decades are also covered by the Science Citation Index (1900– ) and Social Sciences Citation Index (1900– ), both of which are included in Web of Science—if libraries choose to subscribe to these components. (The Arts & Humanities component of the Web goes back only to 1975.) They not only cover book reviews directly, they enable you to see if any book has been cited in the footnotes of any of the thousands of journals covered. Some of these citations may provide substantive discussions of a book, even if not formally a “book review” of it.
In earlier discussions I warned about overreliance on federated or “discovery” searching of multiple databases at the same time, because many of the files may use entirely different subject descriptor terms, but searches for book reviews are a good use of federated search capabilities, whether in ProQuest, EBSCO, Gale, or other aggregations of databases.
For scholarly purposes the IBR-Online (De Gruyter) subscription database is good for identifying reviews in multiple languages worldwide in social sciences and humanities fields. The electronic version indexes reviews in more than 6,800 journals back to 1985; the printed version Internationale Bibliographie der Rezensionen wissenschaftlicher Literatur/International bibliography of book reviews of scholarly literature goes back to 1971.
Two excellent sources for scholarly reviews of older books are the printed sets Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Scholarly Journals 1886–1974, 15 vols. (Carrollton Press, 1979–1982) and Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Humanities Journals 1902–1974, 10 vols. (Research Publications, 1982–1984). To date, neither is available online. I have found many reviews listed in these two sets that I could not identify in any database.
Note that book reviews are generally not the best sources for students who want literary criticism or scholarly analyses of individual books, stories, plays, or poems. This is because such reviews are always contemporary with the first publication of the sources that are reviewed and usually lack historical perspective. (See the section on Literary Criticism, below.)
The Web is now the first place to check for at least basic information about individual companies, nonprofits, organizations, or industries, since so many corporate bodies maintain their own websites. These are other good starting points, however, beyond such individual sites, for providing overviews of Internet resources:
In spite of the myriad business information sources on the free Internet, the best sources are provided by subscription databases available only through libraries. Among these are the following:
ABI/Inform Complete (ProQuest), Business Abstracts with Full Text (EBSCO), and Business Source Complete (EBSCO) are three of the best databases with full-text articles from business journals and other sources. See the descriptions in Chapter 4.
ALA Guide to Business and Economics Reference (American Library Association, 2011; ca. 500 pages) is another printed volume that provides a good starting point for business inquiries. It lists and minutely categorizes both Internet and print sources and provides directory information on organizations and associations.
Business Monitor International (Business Monitor International) is a huge subscription database covering tens of thousands of full-text business sources. It can be searched by country, by market, by company, or by industry. The 179 country reports provide political, economic, outlook, and SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analyses. Market reports are frequently more than a hundred pages long. Company reports focus on multinational enterprises. Rankings of industries and 5- and 10-year forecasts are included.
Encyclopedia of Business Information Sources (Gale, annual) is one of the directories included in the Gale Directory Library database; it also exists in a printed volume form that is in some ways easier to look through. It is a listing of electronic and print sources, websites, and people contacts listed alphabetically under more than 1,100 very specific subjects, such as:
Advertising Specialties, Building Materials Industry, Chemical Marketing, Dismissal of Employees, Economic Indicators, Financial Ratios, Grocery Business, Honey Industry, International Monetary Fund, Job Hunting, Knit Goods Industry, Landscape Architecture, Men’s Clothing Industry, Narcotics, Office Furniture Industry, Packaging, Quality Control, Relocation of Employees, Sexual Harassment in the Workplace, Technology Transfer, Uniforms, Vending Machines, Women’s Clubs, Yarn, and Zoning. Under each heading, insofar as sources are available, the following are listed: General Works, Abstracts and Indexing Services, Almanacs and Yearbooks, Bibliographies, Biographical Sources, CD-ROMs, Directories, Encyclopedias and Dictionaries, Financial Ratios, Handbooks and Manuals, Internet Databases, Online [i.e., subscription] Databases, Periodicals and Newsletters, Price Sources, Research Centers and Institutes, Statistics Sources, Trade and Professional Associations, and Other Sources.
Phone numbers, web URLs, and e-mail addresses are usually provided. This Encyclopedia is often a good starting point for getting an overview of important resources in any area of business, even at very specific levels—something that is often hard to see when one goes directly to the large business databases.
Gale Business Insights: Global (Gale) is a subscription database covering more than 7,000 business magazines, journals, and newsletters (with full texts of most) and a variety of other sources including millions of investment research and brokerage reports. Domestic and international companies and associations are covered. The database’s self-description lists its features:
Gale Directory Library (Gale Cengage) is a composite subscription database that searches all of 16 different Gale directories, singly or in combination:
An interesting feature of this database is that it also enables you to search backfile editions of these directories, if that component of the database has been purchased by your library.
Hoover’s (Dun & Bradstreet) is another good subscription source for business researchers. Its Company Information component provides detailed information on 85 million public, private, and international companies; Industry Analysis covers more than 900 industries. The data on companies include (according to the database’s self-description) “Company overview, Company history, Officers and board members, Competitors, Products and operations, Auditors, Rankings, Related industry information, Historical financials, and Industry analyses.”
Kompass (Kompass North America) is a full-text subscription database with information on more than 3 million companies in more than 60 countries, covering company activity, products and services, trade names, and executives and members of corporate boards—about 40 data fields are searchable per company in a wide variety of industries: Agriculture and food, Extraction industries, Utilities and waste management, Manufacturing, Chemicals/pharmaceuticals/plastics, Building and civil engineering, Information technology, Wholesale and distribution, Transport and storage, Business services (marketing, financial, insurance, legal), Technical services/R&D/training, Telecommunications/news/media, Leisure/entertainment/hospitality, Repair and maintenance, Health care/social services, and Public administration/associations. Company phone numbers are provided, and it is possible to send an e-mail Request for Quotations through this database. Kompass is more than just a database with company information; it is also tool for direct business-to-business communications worldwide.
LexisNexis and Factiva are huge full-text databases covering much business information; see the descriptions of these files in Chapter 5.
Leadership Library and Carroll Publishing Company directories both provide extensive directory information for companies and individuals; see Chapter 12.
Mergent Archives (Mergent) is a subscription database with several components, among them all Moody’s Manuals digitized since 1909 and hundreds of thousands of historical annual reports from more than a hundred countries as far back as 1925. The company also offers many other huge business databases: Mergent BondViewer, Mergent Intellect, Mergent WebReports, and Mergent Online. Full descriptions can be found at the company website, www.mergent.com.
Plunkett Research, Ltd.(Plunkett Research) provides analyses of companies, market research reports, and industry statistics and trends. Its reports can be purchased through its website at www.plunkettresearch.com.
PrivCo (PrivCo Media) is a subscription database providing much hard-to-find information on more than 225,000 privately held companies, primarily in the United States and Canada, that bring in more than $10 million in annual revenues; it also provides data on more than 12,500 private market investors. The database covers financial statements, venture capital funding deals, mergers and acquisitions, private equity deals, family ownership breakdowns, bankruptcies, and related topics; it is updated daily.
ReferenceUSAGov (InfoUSA) is a subscription database that has several components; individual libraries can choose which parts they wish to subscribe to. Its “Business Databases” section contains several subsections:
Its “Consumer Databases” section also has several parts:
The data in ReferenceUSAGov is collected from a variety of sources including Yellow and White pages, corporate annual reports, SEC 10K filings, Chamber of Commerce directories, and other public listings. Businesses can be searched not just by company name but also by name or title of chief executives, assets, sales volume, location, number of employees, and year established. (I have heard from more than one professional business researcher that the Dun & Bradstreet D&B International Business Locator database is “riddled with mistakes”; the information in ReferenceUSAGov is more consistently reliable, although the financial data provided there for private companies are generally estimates.)
In researching any individual company it is useful to approach the task with some basic distinctions in mind, which may not be obvious to those just starting out in this area. The first thing to do is to situate the firm into one of four categories: those that sell stock and are publicly owned; those that don’t sell stock to the public and are privately held; those that are nonprofit organizations; and those that are foreign-owned. Private companies are not required to disclose as much information on their operations as are public companies; the databases and websites (above) may have much less information on them, especially if they are small or locally owned. Another distinction to keep in mind is that information can be of two general types: what the company says about itself, and what others say about it. The former is contained in annual reports, in filings with governmental regulatory agencies, and on companies’ websites. For the latter you will want to read articles in business (or other) magazines, journals, newsletters, and commercially prepared research reports and analyses—many of them full text online via the various databases listed above.
In researching company histories, specifically, there are a few shortcuts to be aware of. In addition to the above databases there is the International Directory of Company Histories (Gale), which is available as an ongoing series of printed volumes (more than 140 so far) and as a subscription database, available individually and also included in the Gale Virtual Reference Library. It provides 3- to 5-page histories of public, private, foreign, and international companies, with listings of additional sources for further reading. Of course, for companies not covered by this International Directory, many of the databases listed above will be useful. A good researcher’s trick in doing company histories is first to find the founding date of the firm (often provided in standard directories such as Standard & Poor’s Register or Ward’s Business Directory), then to check for articles in business journals or local newspapers at important anniversary years for the company (especially their twenty-fifth, fortieth, and fiftieth years); often there will be write-ups on a company’s history at these points. For very old firms founded in the United States between 1687 and 1915, Etna M. Kelley’s The Business Founding Date Directory (Morgan & Morgan, 1954), available in research libraries, may be helpful; its Supplement (1956) covers foundings up to 1933.
The best guide for job hunters is the annual What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles (Ten Speed Press). Although there are tons of Internet sites for job hunters, the basic advice offered by this book still provides a crucial insight that is otherwise easily lost in the shuffle: first, decide where you want to be, then get to know the person or persons who can hire you—so that they know you personally. (This really does work much better than sending out scores of résumés or relying on want ads or posted job vacancies. I’ve gotten three jobs myself—including my current one—by following what this book says to do.)
The field of business research is very large—the sources discussed elsewhere in this book on statistics, newspapers, associations, and country studies will also be relevant. When you are doing work in this field, don’t just go to the open Web, or even just to the subscription databases listed above; be sure to talk to the business reference librarians at your library, too, and ask them for other suggestions. And seek out people to talk to who actually work at the particular businesses you’re interested in.
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, along with the University of Reading, maintains the WATCH (Writers Artists and Their Copyright Holders) website at http://tyler.hrc.utexas.edu/; this is a directory of sources providing information on the copyright holders for works by writers, artists, and “prominent figures in other creative fields.” It will not tell you the copyright status of individual works, but it may help in directing you to the people who hold the rights. The Copyright Clearance Center at www.copyright.com is another site to check. The copyright slider website at www.librarycopyright.net/digitalslider/offers an easy mechanism for navigating the changes in U.S. copyright law for works published at different time periods. As helpful as these sites may be, there is simply no easy way to determine the copyright status of all books, journals, or photographs. The only overall source for this information is the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress (www.copyright.gov), but its older card catalog files are not all online as of this writing. Searches of the manual catalogs can be done for free by onsite researchers; those done by Copyright staff cost $165 per hour with a two-hour minimum. Information on British copyright regulations can be found at the British Library website www.bl.uk/copyright.
Europa World (Taylor & Francis) is both a printed annual 2-volume set and a subscription database. For each country in the world it provides a lengthy “Introductory Survey” covering recent history, government, defense, economic affairs, and education, followed by a “Statistical Survey” with tables covering Area and Population, Health and Welfare, Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, Mining, Industry, Finance, External Trade, Transport, Tourism, Communications Media, and Education. A “Directory” section then provides either a description or, in some cases, the full text of the country’s Constitution; this is followed by names, titles, and contact information for current top government executives and legislators. Extensive contact information is then given for political organizations, religious groups, the press, publishers, broadcasting and communications companies, financial institutions, trade and industry groups, transport companies and departments, and tourism contacts.
The Economist Intelligence Unit Ltd. (EIU) produces databases that go into much greater detail about individual countries (and cities) in a variety of heavily used subscription databases, such as:
The China database, unlike the others, allows the creation of statistical tables on the fly (e.g., Energy consumption in China, by Province).
The best book for genealogists to start with is Val D. Greenwood’s Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy (Genealogical Publishing Company, revised irregularly). The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy (Ancestry, 2006, 3rd ed.) is also excellent. Doing genealogical research is not a matter of simply typing names into large databases—although that’s part of it. Although the current edition of the Greenwood book is more than a decade old, and therefore does not cover many Internet sites, it is nonetheless required reading if you want to trace your family history because it will alert you to the range of questions that you need to ask in the first place.
Cyndi’s List (www.cyndislist.com) is the best starting place on the Internet; it categorizes and indexes more than 300,000 free websites of genealogical interest. It is particular useful because users can submit new links themselves and report broken ones, so it is effectively updated continually by a very large and active community of researchers.
Another free website is familysearch.org (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints); it provides both full-text information and links to other online sources.
There are three excellent subscription databases to genealogical sources; these are likely to be available through local libraries and will provide access to many important sources not freely available on the open Internet. The first is Ancestry Library Edition (ProQuest); it provides full-text search capabilities in more than 8,600 international sources of genealogical interest (censuses, court records, parish registers, military records, grave registers, birth and death records, land office registrations, newspaper and magazine articles, obituaries, ships’ passenger lists, tax lists, school yearbooks, etc.). Billions of individual names can be searched; coverage is particularly good for the United States and the United Kingdom. A free website, Ancestry.com, is mainly useful for providing just enough information to induce you to subscribe individually if you don’t have access to the Library edition through your local library.
The second database is HeritageQuest Online (ProQuest), which searches not just U.S. Census records but also people and places described in more than 28,000 published family histories and local histories. One important subset of the file is PERSI, or Periodical Source Index, which is an index to more than 6,500 local history and genealogy periodicals in English and French (Canada) going back to 1800. You can search for individual names or subjects (keywords in article titles). This index covers many important historical sources not elsewhere indexed; its coverage of American history at the local level is astonishingly good. It should be used routinely by historians to supplement the America: History and Life database from EBSCO. Other files in HeritageQuest include Freedmen’s Bank Records and Revolutionary War Records, as well as private relief actions and memorial petitions included in the U.S. Serial Set.
The third database is Fold3: History & Genealogy Archives (EBSCO), formerly called Footnote, which provides full-text material from the U.S. National Archives, including many digitized city directories. It is especially good for military records. A version that allows some free searching is at www.fold3.com, but at a certain level of searching you have to subscribe.
Often material on particular families or individuals can be found in local or county histories; two good listings of these are P. William Filby’s A Bibliography of American County Histories (Genealogical Publishing Company, 1985) and Arthur P. Young’s Cities and Towns in American History: A Bibliography of Doctoral Dissertations (Greenwood, 1989). Many county histories are also full-text searchable through the subscription database Accessible Archives (from Accessible Archives, Inc.).
Another good approach to local history is through old fire insurance maps. The subscription database Digital Sanborn Maps 1867–1970 (ProQuest) reproduces more than 660,000 maps of more than 12,000 American cities and towns. The Sanborn company produced unusually detailed maps of urban areas; they can often show you who owned the land on which you now live, where your ancestors lived in a given city at the time of the map (some cities have as many as seven maps published at different times), how many rooms each building had, the number of windows, the kind of roof and the materials the walls were made of. (Such data were important for fire insurance purposes.) You can use these maps to identify which businesses were located in a community (when and exactly where), the location and denomination of churches in particular neighborhoods, and where the grocery stories, banks, hotels, and saloons were. These maps can shed light on the characteristics of the neighborhoods in which your ancestors lived and how the areas the changed over the years. (The database reproduces the original maps held in the Library of Congress; the LC website provides a list of the maps that exist, at www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/sanborn/.)
The Internet provides a number of large, freely searchable archives of photographs and illustrations. Among the first sites to check are these:
Many photographs can be found in relevant books, too, and the Library of Congress Subject Headings system has a number of standard subdivisions that are useful for zeroing in on them:
| [Subject heading] | —Caricatures and cartoons |
| —Illustrations | |
| —Pictorial works | |
| —Portraits |
In searching for older books, also try two additional subdivisions that formerly appeared under names of places:
| [Name of place] | —Description—Views |
| —Description and travels—Views |
Many of the citations discoverable through the many subscription databases will also note whether a journal article is accompanied by illustrations.
Facts on File publishes a wide variety of three-ring loose-leaf binders with copyright-free illustrations, pictures, diagrams, charts, and maps, all intended for easy scanning or copying. Among these titles are:
The thousands of specialized encyclopedias that exist are also frequently useful for pictures or illustrations (see Chapter 1), as is the technique of doing focused browsing in subject-classified books in the library’s stacks (Chapter 3).
Two good overviews of sources available to students of literature are James L. Harner’s Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies (Modern Language Association, 2008, 5th ed.) and James K. Bracken’s Reference Works in British and American Literature (Libraries Unlimited, 1998, 2nd ed.).
The first source that students often go to for literary criticism is the subscription database MLA International Bibliography (EBSCO, Modern Language Association), which is the largest online index to literary criticism journals. Sometimes this is combined with a search of JSTOR for full-text articles. Either way will provide “something quickly”—which may be adequate for undergraduate purposes, but not for more in-depth study. One major problem with MLA is that its results will be spotty due to very inconsistent indexing in the database (e.g., not all of the articles on Captain Ahab are findable by searching “Moby Dick”). JSTOR is fine as far as it goes, but it does not cover nearly the full range of journals containing literary criticism. Better overviews of the critical literature can usually be found by finding a published bibliography devoted to the particular author, then checking its index for the particular story, play, or poem you have in mind. (The Bracken volume mentioned above is particularly good in identifying such bibliographies.)
For example, a student who wishes to find analyses or John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” (Holy Sonnet 10) will find seven articles on it by searching “Death Be Not Proud” in the MLA. (The same researcher would probably miss an additional article findable via “Holy Sonnet 10”—another example of inconsistent indexing.) If the student checks her library catalog under Donne, John, 1572–1631—Bibliography, however, she may find three compilations by John R. Roberts, John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1912–1967; John Donne . . . 1968–1978; and John Donne . . . 1979 –1995 (University of Missouri Press, 1973 and 1982; Duquesne University Press, 2004). The first lists 5 articles about the sonnet; the second, 16; the third, 35.
Similarly, a student interested in Edgar Allan Poe and cryptography would get different results looking in the MLA International Bibliography, on the one hand, and in either J. Lesley Dameron and Irby B. Cauthen’s Edgar Allan Poe: A Bibliography of Criticism 1827–1967 or Esther F. Hyneman’s Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles in English 1827–1973, on the other. In this case, the online resource serves to update the latter published bibliographies—but it does not include everything listed in them.
A neglected but occasionally very useful index to 146 printed bibliographies of literary criticism is Alan R. Weiner and Spencer Means’s Literary Criticism Index, 2nd ed. (Scarecrow Press, 1994). This source enables you to search for articles on particular plays, poems, novels, and short stories and frequently leads to citations not indexed anywhere online. (It is probably not necessary for undergraduates to use this index; but grad students who wish to do comprehensive literature reviews should consult it.)
If you wish to avoid the morass of postmodern and deconstructionist criticisms of a particular work and are looking for insights on what it might actually tell you about life, a good shortcut is provided through the old Prentice-Hall Twentieth Century Interpretations series. Look in your library’s catalog under the title phrase Twentieth Century Interpretations of [Title of Work]. Within the brackets you can enter such titles as A Farewell to Arms, The Crucible, Doctor Faustus, Gray’s Elegy, Julius Caesar, Moby Dick, Oedipus Rex, Pride and Prejudice, etc. There are about a hundred volumes like this, each about 120 pages long, and each presents an excellent collection of scholarly analyses.
Another comparable series is Prentice-Hall’s Twentieth Century Views. These volumes tend to have titles of the format [Name of Author]: A Collection of Critical Essays. A good entry into the contents of this series is an obscure but useful volume entitled Reader’s Index to the Twentieth Century Views Literary Criticism Series, Volumes 1–100 (Prentice-Hall, 1973). This reproduces the index pages from the end of each volume in the series. It thus offers a way to find predeconstructionist articles on particular topics connected with authors (as opposed to particular works), such as “Negative capability in Keats,” “Inscape and instress in Hopkins,” “Irony in Mann,” and “Puritan influences on Hawthorne.” (As with published bibliographies, you can in effect do Boolean combinations of “specific topic AND particular author” in this printed source.)
You can easily find either of these series in your library’s computer catalog by combining the phrase “Twentieth Century” with either the name of a literary work or the name of the literary author.
Three newer series published by Chelsea House are Modern Critical Views (each volume of which is entitled with the name of a literary author, e.g., Alice Walker or Homer); Major Literary Characters (each with a title such as Hester Prynne or Huck Finn); and Modern Critical Interpretations (each with the title of a particular works such as Jane Eyre or The Scarlet Letter). All three of the Chelsea House series have Harold Bloom as their general editor. This makes online searching easy: just combine “Bloom” and “author” (or “title” or “character”) to find if there is a volume relevant to your interest.
G. K. Hall has published more than 250 volumes in two comparable “Critical Essays” series; these can be found by searching for titles of the form Critical Essays on [Name of Author] or [Title of Literary Work].
The largest online source for full-text literary criticism is the subscription database Literature Criticism Online (Gale). It contains the full texts of several sets that are separately available and that collectively have more than 1,800 volumes:
My own experience with the database, however, is that its page-viewing software is extremely clunky, and since many of its articles are more than a hundred pages long, they are very difficult to read online. The database version is most useful as an index to the various paper-copy sets, which are much preferable for reading.
Another good subscription database is Literature Resource Center (Gale). It includes biographical and critical articles and a variety of other sources, among them:
If you are looking more for full texts of literary works themselves, rather than critical articles about them, the best database is LitFinder (Gale), which includes:
Literary Reference Center and Literature Reference Center Plus (EBSCO) are somewhat comparable to the Gale databases in that they provide full texts of both literary works themselves and critical/biographical studies. Overviews of their contents may be found at the EBSCO website www.ebscohost.com/academic/literary-reference-center-plus.
Yet another good database covering literature is MagillOnLiteraturePlus (Salem Press), which includes 35,000 analyses of individual works (novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, philosophical works) plus biographies and bibliographies, but not texts of the literary or philosophical works themselves.
Perhaps the most important thing for an undergraduate to keep in mind when doing an analysis of a literary work, however, is that quite possibly no research at all is required, or even desired, by the professor. Often the purpose of such assignments is to stretch your own analytical and critical powers rather than your research abilities. One problem with critical articles is that much of what you find simply won’t be worth reading. (This was already the case nearly 40 years ago when I was getting my own Ph.D. in English; it is questionable that the situation has improved much since then.) Few things are more frustrating to a student than expending a great deal of effort tracking down and reading critical articles, and then finding they don’t give you any particular “keeper” insights; the time involved would often be more profitably spent devising your own analyses.
For most everyday purposes of getting from point A to point B, the “Maps” search options within Google or Bing and GPS location devices are eminently suitable. For academic or other research purposes, however, a number of other resources are preferable, both for their coverage that is nondigitized to begin with and for the convenience factor of not having to view large maps formatted to be viewable on small computer screens. Scholars who are writing for publication may also prefer to cite printed copies of the map sheets they have used, if only because their online equivalents have a way of changing their URLs—or vanishing entirely.
Good starting points on the Web for finding maps of any area, as well as historical and thematic maps, are the following:
The printed set Inventory of World Topographic Mapping, compiled by Rolph Böhme (English language editor, Roger Anson), 3 vols. (London and New York: International Cartographic Association and Elsevier Applied Science Publishers, 1989–1993), continues to be the best overview source for the history of mapping in each country; it also provides lists of map scales and map series for each. Historical listings may be found in Thomas Chubb’s The Printed Maps in the Atlases of Great Britain and Ireland: A Bibliography, 1579–1870 (Homeland Association, 1927; reprinted, Martino Publishing, 2004) and A List of Geographical Atlases in the Library of Congress, with Bibliographic Notes, 9 vols. (Martino, 1997). The World Directory of Map Collections edited by Olivier Loiseaux (541 pages; Saur, 2000) and Guide to U.S. Map Collections edited by Christopher J. J. Thiry (511 pages; Scarecrow Press, 2006, 3rd ed.) are useful directories.
The Maps on File, Historical Maps on File, and Charts on File compilations of copyright-free illustrations from Facts on File are also useful (see the above section on Illustrations), and probably can be found in local libraries.
The most important databases providing full texts of newspapers include the following (many of which are described in Chapters 4 and 5):
One of the biggest mistakes made rather routinely by researchers is to assume that they’ve “covered” all newspapers relevant to their topic by simply having done a search in only one or two of these databases (usually mentioning ProQuest—without paying attention to the scope of their local library’s ProQuest subscription—or LexisNexis). Each of the above databases, however, contains full texts not available elsewhere; a combination of searches is almost always required if comprehensive coverage is desired.
Further, there are thousands of newspapers on microfilm that have not been digitized at all, especially for the years 1923 and after. If you don’t find what you need through the databases, be sure to ask your librarians if other newspapers exist on microfilm, covering the cities and time periods you want. The best listing of existing U.S. newspapers, with library locations, is provided by the free website U.S. Newspaper Directory, 1690–present, at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles/.
Many indexes to small-town newspapers exist in unpublished form throughout the United States in libraries, newspaper offices, and historical and genealogical societies. The best guide to these is Anita Cheek Milner’s Newspaper Indexes: A Location and Subject Guide for Researchers, 3 vols. (Scarecrow Press, 1977–1982).
The databases and websites listed above in the Genealogy and Local History section will also provide indexing, and often full texts, of many other newspapers, or sometimes sections (e.g., obituaries) within them.
An excellent guide to the literature on American newspapers in general is Richard A. Schwarzlose’s Newspapers: A Reference Guide (Greenwood Press, 1987).
Many term paper assignments nowadays are given with the specification that students should “use primary sources” in their research. To judge from the questions that come to a library reference desk, this admonition seems in many cases to mean “don’t confine your search to sources on the open Internet sources [read: Google and Wikipedia]—use the library, too.” The problem is that many teachers themselves do not realize what can (or cannot) be found in libraries that lies beyond the reach of Google. Their assignments are thus often more than a little confusing, because millions of primary sources are indeed directly available, full text, on the open Internet; and saying “use primary sources” does not guarantee any use of real libraries. So, right off the bat, it would be helpful for teachers and professors to specify more clearly what they have in mind by specifying “primary sources”—and for students to ask for such clarification.
In a sense, every chapter of this book so far has discussed sources that would identify, if not provide direct access to, primary sources. Several shortcuts, however, are worth repeating.
First, specialized subject encyclopedias frequently include Appendices (sometimes an entire volume) specifically reprinting the most important primary sources relevant to their subject coverage (see Chapter 1).
Second, the Library of Congress Subject Headings system (see Chapter 2) provides several subject subdivisions that can be used to zero in immediately on primary sources that have been published in book form. If you first find the right heading for your topic (e.g., Civil rights movements; World War, 1939–1945; etc.), you can then look for these subdivisions in a browse display, or enter them directly into a Boolean combination (see Chapter 10) with the heading:
When I am doing such searches myself I usually add the following keywords into the combination:
Theoretically, documentary histories and eyewitness accounts should already be included under the format subject subdivisions listed above, but oversights in cataloging are not unknown. Oral history is actually an LCSH heading in its own right (not a subdivision of other topics), but “Oral” as a keyword within a Boolean combination would pick up both that heading and any use of the term in a title or subtitle.
You may find that you cannot combine all of these elements in one Boolean command without overloading your library catalog’s search software—e.g., “ ‘World War, 1939–1945’ AND (Sources OR Diaries OR Narratives OR Correspondence OR Interviews OR Quotations OR Collections OR ‘Pictorial works’ OR document? OR eyewitness? OR oral).” If you break the search into smaller units of combination, however, you’ll still get the results you want. Remember, too, that using browse displays of subdivisions under LC subject headings is a very effective way to spot most of these terms if you cannot remember them, as well as to notice other standard subdivisions that may be of use (e.g.,—Songs and music, which can alert you to resources that could readily be considered primary literature in some contexts). Look also for the subdivision Bibliography (see below).
A third tip is that many large collections of primary sources have already been assembled in a variety of subscription databases (e.g., American Civil War Letters and Diaries, or Oral History Online) or microform sets (e.g., Anti-Slavery Collection or Early American Medical Imprints 1668–1820) (see Chapters 4 and 13). The individual items in these collections will usually not be cataloged by library OPACs, nor will they be adequately identifiable by federated searches of multiple databases simultaneously.
A fourth tip is that many published bibliographies (see Chapter 9) exist, such as the following, that readily identify primary sources:
These all have useful subject indexes that connect the diaries to various historical events or periods. When you are searching an OPAC, then, be sure to include Bibliography as one of the terms in your Boolean combinations.
Unverified, garbled, and misattributed quotations are floating around the Internet by the thousands. There is no simple way to deal with all of these cases, but among the many available compilations of quotations, the two best starting points are these:
A useful group of sources that are likely to be available in libraries are the various Architectural Graphic Standards from John Wiley & Sons; they are all revised irregularly:
The first one is a basic source providing diagrams and standard measurements of such things as tennis courts, horseshoe pits, swimming pools, door frames, fireplaces, etc. It even diagrams the profiles of major species of trees, listing their average heights and spreads.
If you need to obtain a technical, engineering, industrial, military, or governmental standard, a good overview website is provided by the Science, Technology & Business Division of the Library of Congress at www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/trs/trsresources.html. This site provides further links (under “IHS Global”) to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), and Underwriters Laboratory (UL), as well as to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and a score of other national and international websites for standards.
Another good starting point is the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at www.nist.gov with links to national standards bodies all over the world, as well as to international standards organizations.
The most useful general compendium of statistics on all sorts of things is the annual Statistical Abstract of the United States, published by the U.S. Census Bureau up through 2012 and by ProQuest thereafter. Another large collection of federal statistics online is search at the FedStats website, www.fedstats.gov. The UK National Statistics website is www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/index.html; the Canadian site is www.statcan.gc.ca/; the site for Australian statistics is www.abs.gov.au/.
Several compendia are good for historical data:
Polling the Nations (ORS Publishing) is a subscription database of public opinion polls with full texts of a half-million questions and responses from more than 14,000 surveys conducted since 1986 in the United States and more than a hundred other countries.
Statistical Warehouse (RegionalOneSource) is another pay-per-view database somewhat like ProQuest DataSets, which enables you to create charts or graphs on the fly from a wide variety of cross-searchable sources; it is described at http://statisticalwarehouse.com.
Rankings of various sorts can be found in sources such as these; you have to check individual titles for their most recent editions:
Other good compendiums include the United Nations Statistical Yearbook and its Demographic Yearbook. The UNESCO Statistical Yearbook ceased publication after its 1999 issue.
A particularly good reference book is Statistical Sources: A Subject Guide to Data on Industrial, Business, Social, Educational, Financial, and Other Topics for the United States and Internationally (Gale Cengage, revised irregularly). It is an extensive listing of more than 1,500 organizations, printed sources, databases, and websites from more than 210 countries, with specific contact information (phone and FAX numbers, e-mail addresses, mailing addresses, and URLs) categorized under more than 30,000 very specific topics (e.g., Aggravated Assault, Dairy Products-Consumption, Farm Mortgage Loans, Silk Production, Vanuatu—Postal Service). It’s often a very useful starting point.
The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan is a nonprofit organization that maintains the world’s largest archive of machine-readable data files in the social sciences; both current and historical data sets are available (via fees or subscriptions) in manipulable formats. Its home page is at www.icpsr.umich.edu.
Many of the statistics sources listed above either present data or enable data to be presented in tables and charts. A particularly useful subset of data in such formats is provided by the Chemical Rubber Company (CRS) of Cleveland, Ohio; it publishes more than 50 handbooks that present tabular reference data in such fields as chemistry and physics, mathematics, optics, probability and statistics, microbiology, nutrition and food. The best avenue into this bewildering maze of data is the printed Composite Index for CRC Handbooks, 3rd ed. (Taylor & Francis, 1992), which is a cumulative index to more than 300 of the CRC handbooks. The full-text subscription database CRCnetBASE (Taylor & Francis Online) includes all of the handbooks plus several thousand other CRC publications.
Two excellent sources that outline your options for finding published or unpublished tests are websites from the American Psychological Association and the Educational Testing Service:
A good overview in book form is Tests: A Comprehensive Reference for Assessments in Psychology, Education, and Business, by Taddy Maddox, 6th ed. (PRO-ED, Inc., 2007).
It is sometimes also possible to find full-texts of tests included as appendices to doctoral dissertations that have made use of them. (Note, however, that discovering a test appended to a dissertation does not automatically mean that you are entitled to use it; you will probably still have to seek out its author[s] or publisher for the necessary permission.)
The easiest way to find out if a foreign-language book has been translated into English is to look under the original author’s name in WorldCat, the old National Union Catalog: Pre-1956 Imprints, or the subscription database Books in Print Global (Bowker).
Another good source for identifying translations of books since 1979 is UNESCO’s Index Translationum website; its URL is lengthy, but a Google or Bing search for “Index Translationum” will bring it up quickly. Printed volumes of this title cover from 1932 to 1940, with a gap from April 1940 to 1947, then resuming for 1948–1986. There is a 2-volume Cumulative Index to English Translations 1948–1968 (G.K. Hall, 1973), covering that portion of the Index Translationum.
In the humanities, a series from Boulevard/Bable, Ltd. in London is sometimes useful; it includes:
Good subject headings to look for in library catalogs are of this form:
[Name or Subject]—Translations into English [or French, German, etc.]
Dialog Professional (ProQuest) is a subscription database that now incorporates World News Connection as a component; the latter offers ongoing English translations of foreign media sources (broadcast and print) from 1997 forward. Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports (a subscription database from Readex) provides coverage from 1974 to 1996. World News Connection includes what used to be called the Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) series of indexes to, and translations of, foreign newspaper articles. Retrospective paper-copy indexes covering a microfiche set of documents are the Bibliography-Index to Current U.S. JPRS Translations, vols. 1–8 (1962–1972); Bell & Howell Transdex (1975–1983); and Transdex (1984–1996).