LibGuides at USA: HY 135: U.S. History to 1877: Finding Books

More SOUTHcat Resources

Basic Guide to SOUTHcat
An introductory guide to SOUTHcat

Subscription E-Books

The USA Libraries subscribe to several subscription e-book collections. These collections tend to focus on a specific discipline or field of study in their coverage.

ACLS Humanities E-Book Project
Full text to books of major importance in historical studies. Formerly the History E-Book Project.
EBSCO eBook Collection
Formerly called NetLibrary 3. A collection of about 11,173 current electronic books. The checkout period for books from EBSCO is currently 7 days. In order to check out a book, you must create an account with EBSCO. Click on Sign In at the top right on the blue bar, then choose Create a New Account. A maximum of 60 pages may be printed at one time.
Ebrary Academic Complete
A collection of over 70,000 electronic books covering all acadmic disciplines. Pages from ebrary titles can be printed by using the InfoTools button and choosing Print. You can choose to print the current page, a range of pages (with the maximum number of pages being 60) or an entire chapter.
Springer Ebooks
A collection of over 29,000 electronic books from Springer Publishing for the years 2005 to 2011. Sort your results by date so that the books we have access to will appear first. You can also tell if a book is part of our collection if the square to the left of the title is green.

SOUTHcat

To find books and government documents in USA Libraries' collections, use SOUTHcat: USA Libraries' Catalog.

Catalog tips and tricks:
- Keyword searches – use quotation marks to hold phrases together ("colonial period")
- Truncation – use ? after the root of a word to find all its variants (biograph? finds biography, biographies)
- Browse the Subject(s) field in records to find the right words for searches. (Example: Try doing a keyword search for "thomas jefferson," then look at the subject(s) field in several records. You’ll see that the subject term is "Jefferson, Thomas, 1743-1826." Click the subject heading to find more records with this subject.)
Revise and refine your searches.
Watch for repeating call numbers and browse stacks in that area.
Pay attention to the Location and Status fields. You will need this information to locate the item in the library.

Suggested Search Terms

Below are some suggested search terms to use when searching the SOUTHcat catalog or library databases. Search techniques may vary with each databases, so look at help screens or ask a librarian for suggestions about using quotation marks and truncation symbols.

Leave out the word "and" when doing a single keyword searches on SOUTHcat, since "and" is automatically added between words if the phrase is not in quotes. Put phrases in quotation marks to search as a phrase. Use ? as a truncation or wildcard symbol in the catalog. SOUTHcat will ignore internal punctuation in a word, for example: ching will find ch'ing.

Subject
united states-history-colonial period
women - united states-history-18th century
slavery-united states-history-17th century

Keywords
"united states" "colonial period" sources
women "colonial period" diar?
american newspapers colonial
"indians of north america" sources
colonial “united states” letter?
newspaper? "united states" bibliograph?
"thomas jefferson" correspondence

Search Google Books

Part of Google's library-scanning project. Only books in the public domain are shown in full text. Others may have just a citation or show selected pages from the book. Remember, you can check SOUTHcat to see if we have a book you find in Google Books if the full text is not available.