EH 102: The 1960s (Halbrooks): Finding Books

“There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site.” -Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google

Quoted in Nunberg, Geoffrey. “Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars. The Chronicle Review. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 31 Aug. 2009. Web. 24 Aug. 2010.

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 ("death penalty")
  • Truncation – use ? after the root of a word to find all its variants (president? finds president, presidents, presidential...)
  • Browse the Subject(s) field in records to find the right words for searches. (Example: Try doing a keyword search for "death penalty," then look at the subject(s) field in several records. You’ll see that the subject term is "Capital punishment." 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.

The Marx Library has large collections of ebooks, many of which can be downloaded to your reader. Some can be found using SOUTHcat but not all of our ebooks are in our catalog at this point. For tips on each collection, see Using Marx Library Ebooks with Ereaders.

The following  collections are the most useful ones for this assigment:

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.