The Trexler Library: Muhlenberg College

The Age of Franklin Roosevelt

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

Online library catalogs of primary and secondary resources (i.e. monographs/books and government documents)

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.

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.

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. . .

America History and Life ***RECOMMENDED***
A subscription database. Standard index for U.S. history. Some full text links.

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.

print indexes of (primary-source) magazine articles

Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature
1900-present
Located in the Reference Room on level A of Trexler Library

New York Times Index
1859-present
Located in the Reference Room on level A of Trexler Library

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 and directories

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

Intute ***RECOMMENDED***
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.

Selected websites containing primary documents

Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Museum and Library

New Deal Network

American Memory: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Library of Congress Digital Collections

Fireside Chats

American Presidency Project

Historical statistics

Historical Statistics of the United States
A library-subscription database.

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.

Annotated bibliography

For help in writing annotated bibliographies, visit Purdue's Online Writing Lab (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/) for a definition of and examples.

© Muhlenberg College
Last modified: 31 August 2011