Trexler Library | Muhlenberg College

The Renaissance

Need help with your research? Contact:

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

Reference works

generally. . .

Credo Reference
Access: Trexler Library Home Page > Online Reference Shelf
A subscription reference database including many well-known and respected reference works published ABC-CLIO, Routledge, and others.

Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (Ref. Collection 940.2103 E56of) ***RECOMMENDED***

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org)
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.

Books

Trexler Library Catalog
Access: Trexler Library Home Page > Catalog
Catalog of all books and documents in Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College.

WorldCat
Access: Trexler Library Home Page > Books, Videos, Music
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
Access: Trexler Library Home Page > Articles 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.

Omnifile (WilsonWeb)
Access: Trexler Library Home Page > Articles A to Z
A subscription database. Includes extensive full text, from both popular and scholarly periodicals.

subject-specialty indexes. . .

Historical Abstracts
Access: Trexler Library Home Page > Articles A to Z
A subscription database. Standard index for European history 1450-present. However, some topics will be covered that are a bit earlier.

Iter Bibliography
Access: Trexler Library Home Page > Articles A to Z
A subscription database. Focuses on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

PubMed
Access: Trexler Library Home Page > Articles A to Z
A free database. Index to with medical history section, 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 (http://library.muhlenberg.edu/search).

articles via interlibrary loan. . .

Journal articles not found in Trexler Library can be ordered on interlibrary loan (http://www.muhlenberg.edu/library/more/ill/index.html).

Web search engines, directories, and selected sites

Google (http://www.google.com)
Non-selective. One of the largest web crawlers.

Intute (http://www.intute.ac.uk/)
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.

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.

Evaluating resources

Visit Trexler Library's Evaluating Resources (http://www.muhlenberg.edu/library/guides/evaluating.pdf) page.

Citing sources

For tips on citing print and electronic sources, visit Trexler Library's Citation Guides for Print and Electronic Resources (http://www.muhlenberg.edu/library/reshelp/citations.html).