History Courses & Research

Your search strategy: Traditional with a dash of curiosity

1. Browse encyclopedias, Credo Reference, or Wikipedia for narrowing ideas and further reading recommendations.
2. Search in OneSearch and WorldCat for books.
3. Search in the databases America: History & Life, Historical Abstracts, JSTOR, and more for scholarly articles.
4. Search books (many books reprint primary documents) and online for digitized archives and primary source material, such as oral histories.

Research Session 9/14/21

In class, we are going to compare information we get from a Wikipedia article and 2 encyclopedia articles on the topic of Gertrude Scholtz-Klink. We will read each source in turn and assess its content on the questions in the spreadsheet. Fill in the spreadsheet for your table/group.

Follow-up questions:

• What is the most critical way to learn about this topic?
• How does knowing how Wikipedia articles are edited change how you might interact with them in the future?

Look at how these subject terms on these books match up with what you would naturally use for keywords for these topics.

• When they are the same, you are on the right track.
• When they are different, add them to your keywords or use them as searches themselves.

A few examples of the types of resources you can find online.

Avoid other types of online resources that look more like personal blogs or unedited, unprofessional websites.