The Trexler Library: Muhlenberg College

Need help with your research? Contact:

Kelly Cannon
Humanities & Business Librarian
phone: x3602
email: kcannon@muhlenberg.edu
IM (AIM, Yahoo, MSN): refcannon
Reference desk IM: talktotrexler

Reference works

Credo Reference
A subscription reference database including many well-known and respected reference works published ABC-CLIO, Routledge, and others. See especially the reference book Reader's Guide to British History (Routledge).

Wikipedia
A communally-written encyclopedia. Anyone can edit or contribute an entry, at any time. Excellent for locating controversies on a topic and getting ideas for research papers. The bibliographies often point to scholarly resources. Not itself a scholarly source per se, with no authority control. Compare with Scholarpedia.

Europe 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World (Ref Collection 940.203 D515e)
Paints with broad strokes movements and countries in this era. Each signed entry includes a substantial bibliography of recommended books and journal articles.

The Encyclopedia of European social history from 1350 to 2000 (Ref Collection 306.09403 E56o)
Approaches European history through a sociological lens, with an eye for the middle and lower classes: major themes of family, religion, and health.

Books

Cambridge Histories Online
All histories published by Cambridge, now available online by library subscription.

Trexler Library Catalog
Catalog of all books and documents in Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College.

WorldCat ***RECOMMENDED***
Catalog of books and documents in libraries throughout the world. Watch especially for the AREA LIBRARIES designation.

Periodical articles 

general indexes with full text. . .

Academic Search Premier 
A subscription database. Good starting place for journals, and includes the full text of about 3000 journals. Limit to "peer reviewed" to find only scholarly articles. Back issues of journals begin as early as 1990. Recent issues may not be included yet, due to publisher agreement. Journals held in Trexler Library are marked accordingly.

JSTOR
A subscription database. Includes extensive full text, scholarly. Intended as a deep archive. Excludes current five years.

Project Muse
A subscription database. Includes extensive full text, scholarly.

Google Scholar
An open-access web crawler that looks for content it identifies as "scholarly." Emphasis is on books and journal articles. Intended as a "federated search" to search across disciplines (weighted toward sciences and social sciences). Not always full text. Check our Journal Locator (see above) to see if Muhlenberg has access to the full text.

subject-specialty indexes. . .

Historical Abstracts ***RECOMMENDED***
A subscription database. Standard index for art history, with indexing and abstracts from early 1900s-present. Some full text.

getting to the full text. . .

Once you have found the citation of a journal article you're interested in, click on the Get It link found next to the citation, or run a journal title search in Trexler Library's online catalog.

articles via interlibrary loan. . .

Journal articles not found in Trexler Library can be ordered on interlibrary loan.

Can I search all the library databases and catalog together, in one search?

Most of the databases and the library catalog can be searched together in a new library search engine called Search Central found on the Trexler Library website. Most useful when working with narrow topics where you need everything that's available.  Several search features are missing from the original databases, like relevance, and language and peer review limiters.

Web search engines, directories, and selected sites

Google
Non-selective. One of the largest web crawlers.

Intute
The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in the database and write high quality descriptions of the resources.

Style guides

For tips on citing print and electronic sources in the Chicago style, visit Trexler Library's Citation Guides for Print and Electronic Resources. For a more complete guide to the Chicago style, visit Purdue University's Online Writing Lab.

For automated citation, try the shareware Zotero. Here is a user guide.

© Muhlenberg College
Last modified: 2 February 2011