Trexler Library | Muhlenberg College

Research Seminar: FDR & the New Deal

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

American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature (Trexler Library Reference 016.9 C946 1995).
A well-known bibliography covering a wide range of historical topics.

American National Biography (Trexler Library Reference 920.073 A512n)
Signed articles. Invited authors. Excellent bibliographies.

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

Trexler Library Catalog
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website (http://www.muhlenberg.edu/library) > catalog.
Catalog of all books and documents in Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College.

WorldCat
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Library Catalogs
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
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
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
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
A subscription database. Includes extensive full text, scholarly. Intended as a deep archive. Excludes current five years.

Project Muse
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
A subscription database. Includes extensive full text, scholarly.

Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com)
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***
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
(http://www.muhlenberg.edu/library/articles/databases/alphabetical.html)
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. NOTE: Access from Trexler Library website > catalog.

articles via interlibrary loan. . .

Journal articles not found in Trexler Library can be ordered on interlibrary loan.
NOTE: Access from Trexler Library website > 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

International Index
early to mid-1900s
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 (http://www.google.com)
Non-selective. One of the largest web crawlers.

Intute (http://www.intute.ac.uk/) ***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 (http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/)

New Deal Network (http://newdeal.feri.org/)

American Memory: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/presidents/fdroosevelt/memory.html)

Library of Congress Digital Collections
(http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html)

Fireside Chats
(http://www.mhric.org/fdr/fdr.html)

American Presidency Project
(http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/)

Citing sources

For tips on citing print and electronic sources, visit Trexler Library's Citation Guides for Print and Electronic Resources. NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Citation Guides. A guide offering an overview of the Chicago style for both a) footnotes and b) a bibliography is included here.

With special attention to history sources, see this Chicago style guide.

For additional assistance, try Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/), a reference management software that allows you to capture and manage bibliographic citations and then input them into MS Word. Here are directions for this software.

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.