Getting Started with Historical Research - History - Historical Research

Background Information - Credo Reference

Credo Reference
Credo Reference is a full-text online reference service. This collection includes over three million entries from hundreds of well-regarded titles from some of world's the best reference publishers. Credo’s collection is intelligently integrated with millions of cross-references and contains dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias, quotations and atlases, plus a wide range of subject-specific titles covering everything from art to accountancy, science to Shakespeare and law to literature.

You can also use Credo's Mind Map tool to help you find more keywords.

Harvard Writing Center - Tips for Writing History Papers

A Brief Guide to Writing the History Paper
A guide from the Harvard Writing Center offering tips on how to write an effective history research paper.

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Getting Started - Primary and Secondary Sources.......Tertiary Sources

Primary Sources are immediate, first-hand accounts of a topic, from people who had a direct connection with it. Primary sources can include:

Texts of laws and other original documents.
Newspaper reports, by reporters who witnessed an event or who quote people who did.
Speeches, diaries, letters and interviews - what the people involved said or wrote.
Original research.
Datasets, survey data, such as census or economic statistics.
Photographs, video, or audio that capture an event.

Secondary Sources are one step removed from primary sources, though they often quote or otherwise use primary sources. They can cover the same topic, but add a layer of interpretation and analysis. Secondary sources can include:

Most books about a topic.
Analysis or interpretation of data.
Scholarly or other articles about a topic, especially by people not directly involved.
Documentaries (though they often include photos or video portions that can be considered primary sources).

Tertiary Sources are reference materials that summarize information from other sources, but don't provide original analysis or interpretation. They are useful for getting a broad overview of a topic and for identifying primary and secondary sources. Tertiary sources can include:

Bibliographies (a great tool for identifying multiple resources / experts for your topic)
Book Reviews
Dictionaries
Encyclopedias
Indexes
Textbooks

Primo Search - Best for Secondary Sources

Search
What is Primo Search?

Find books and streaming video with Primo, the main search box on the library's home page.

How to Search with Primo

How to perform basic searches in Primo

How to perform advanced searches in Primo

Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) are used to narrow or expand your search results and exclude unwanted terms. Remember:

AND is used to join your search concepts to make your searches more precise. I want information only about "global warming" AND "polar bears".
OR is used to include synonyms to expand your search to include results where a synonymous term is used: "global warming" OR "climate change" AND "polar bears".
Quotation marks " " are used to force the search engine to look only for the exact phrase with no space between words.
Asterisk * is used for truncation. It forces the search engine to look for all extensions of the root word. Bear* will find bear, bears, bearing, etc.
NOT is used to exclude unwanted words and terms. Bear* NOT Bearing
Ellipses ( ) are used to group terms to control the order of operations. ("global warming" OR "climate change") AND ("polar bear* OR "ursus maritimus")
The default search order is that OR processes before AND, which processes before NOT. But parentheses tell the search engines to search within the parentheses before taking other steps.

If you want to control the order of the search, use parentheses. Remember that 1) parentheses process first and 2) inside parentheses process before outside parentheses. Just like in algebra.

Hint: Always enter your operators in all capital letters.