Welcome
This guide is selective and intended as a point of departure for your research in History 1068 United Nations: A Global History.
Please feel free to email me with questions. We can make an appointment for you to come in, and we can talk at length about your project. Fred Burchsted, (burchst@fas.harvard.edu) Research Librarian and Liaison to the Department of History, Widener Library.
Getting What You Need
There is a guide to Finding Materials in Widener.
Finding a pertinent book on the shelf and then looking at its neighbors is an excellent way of finding more material, because the call number system is also a subject system: QH 30 means biographies of biologists and naturalists.
If a book is checked out, you can probably get it within 1-4 days via Borrow Direct. This is quicker than recalling it from the person who has it. Borrow Direct is a service allowing expedited interlibrary loan (within four days) for books held by Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale. Books (not journals, dvds, etc.) are located and ordered through the Borrow Direct catalog. Books which Harvard owns but which are checked out or marked non-circulating (providing they are circulating at another library) are available via Borrow Direct.
Material not available at Harvard or Borrow Direct can be obtained via HCL Interlibrary Loan. Loans for books and media usually take a week/10 days; copies of periodical articles take just a few days.
The new Harvard Direct system allows you to request a book from one Harvard library to be delivered to another. Hit Request item on the HOLLIS record for a book that is not checked out. More on Harvard Direct.
If you have the citation to an article which is not available online or the pages or chapter (up to 30 pp.) from a book, Scan & Deliver will email you the pdf within 1-4 days. Hit Scan & Deliver on the HOLLIS record