HOLLIS/WorldCat/CRL
HOLLIS -- WorldCat --- Center for Research Libraries (CRL)
To search for a topic in HOLLIS, enter a keyword search for any reasonable words.
To find books, periodicals, manuscripts, videos, etc., on a topic in HOLLIS, put in likely keywords and choose Library Catalog. Look at pertinent records and find the terms under Subject. For example, searching Malaya colonial economic* yields
The political economy of imperial relations : Britain, the sterling area, and Malaya, 1945-1960, by Alex Sutton. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire : Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 222 pages
Subjects Sterling area -- History -- 20th century
Imperialism -- Economic aspects -- Malaysia -- Malaya -- History -- 20th century
Imperialism -- Economic aspects -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century
Economic history -- 1945-1971
Great Britain -- Foreign economic relations -- Malaysia -- Malaya
Malaya -- Foreign economic relations -- Great Britain
Malaya -- Economic conditions -- 20th century
Malaya -- Colonial influence
Great Britain -- Economic policy -- 1945-1964
HOLLIS Record
Redo the search using to proper Subject terms together with any useful keywords. Sometimes there are no, or several, subject terms for a topic. Anti-colonialism yields
Under Refine my results: Subject on the right of the results list there are more main terms (Decolonization, Economic policy, Labor policy) to try, but not the terms after the dashes ( -- ) which are called subdivisions. NOTE: If you hit one of the terms in this Subject list, HOLLIS will find records with the term, say Decolonization, only on records in the set originally formed by searching Malaya colonial economic* . Redo your search using any additional pertinent Subject terms. Also, go to Starts with.../Browse (top black band) and put in Malaysia adjusting to Browse by Subject. This is very useful in breaking down a large subject and in giving you more subdivisions, which can be applied to other Subject terms, to search. Thus:
- Imperialism -- Economic aspects
- Nationalism -- Economic aspects
Whenever you have a reference to a useful book, look it up in HOLLIS and see what the Subject terms are.
Browsing the actual shelves allows you to dip into books and immediately gauge their value. You will, however, miss any books that are checked out or in Offsite Storage. You can browse these too, although you cannot dip, in HOLLIS. When you find a pertinent book, go to Starts With/Browse and put in the call number, adjusting the menu to Library of Congress (Wid-LC) or Other. This shows you other books on the same subject.
This is a small sample of possible Subject terms:
- America -- Discovery and exploration -- Spanish
- America -- Early works to 1800
- Anglo-Indian literature
- Colonial administrators -- Great Britain
- Colonization -- Moral and ethical aspects
- Great Britain -- Colonies -- Africa, British Central
- Great Britain -- Colonies -- History
- Great Britain -- Colonies -- Officials and employees
- Imperialism -- Social aspects -- Russia -- History
- India -- History -- British occupation, 1765-1947
- India -- Relations -- Great Britain -- History – Sources
- Islamic Empire History 1258-1517
- Russia -- Territorial expansion
- Spain -- Colonies -- America -- History
- Travelers' writings, English -- India
- Turkey -- History -- Ottoman Empire, 1288-1918
- and many others.
You can also use these official subdivisions to better find primary sources:
- Archives
- Correspondence
- Description and travel
- Diaries
- Interviews
- Manuscripts
- Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
- Personal narratives (refers to accounts of wars and diseases only)
- Sources (usually refers to collections of published primary sources)
These terms are attached to Subject terms, for example:
Urban health -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century -- Sources
When you find a pertinent book, go to Starts With.../Browse and put in the call number, adjusting the menu to Library of Congress (Wid-LC) or Other. This shows you other books on the same subject, even though they may be in storage or checked out.
In HOLLIS Advanced Search do searches of the form:
- Limit to English
- Translat* yields both translated and translation
- This search is not exhaustive. Where you have a particular Arabic work, do a Title exact phrase search, limiting to English
Searching within All English-language Works Published in a Country
In HOLLIS Library Catalog Advanced Search do searches of the form:
Code: MARC place of publication: nr [Code: MARC place of publication is toward the bottom of the search menu: Nigeria]
- Limit to English
- List of country codes
See the Library Research Guide for History and the HOLLIS Help guide for more information on searching HOLLIS.
For material not available at Harvard, search in: WorldCat (the OCLC Union Catalog) which includes catalog records from over 70,000 libraries worldwide but largely U.S. Includes books, periodicals, archives and manuscripts, maps, videotapes, computer readable files, etc.
Using WorldCat
- Use Advanced Search
- Use the same Subject terms used in HOLLIS
- Options (top right) lets you adjust records displayed from 10 to 100
- Remove punctuation from titles (;,:, -, etc)
- There are frequently several records for the same item. Search HOLLIS directly before you decide that Harvard doesn't have it.
Public Version: WorldCat.org
It is often easier to isolate open access material and websites in the public version of WorldCat.
On the results page, left-hand column: choose Open Content; also, separately, under Format, choose Website. This gets a mixture of free websites and subscription databases that must be accessed via the Harvard Library system.
The two vertical lines after the simple search box yield Advanced Search.
Center for Research Libraries (CRL)
The Center for Research Libraries in Chicago is an important repository of South Asian and other material. A considerable amount is available online. Search the CRL catalog using the Advanced search which has a Language field. Much is only in print or microfilm for which you fill out an Interlibrary Loan form as usual. You can limit to online material by adjusting Reproduction Type to Online.
For digital items, when you hit the link in the Available Online box (for example), you may find that the digital material is open access and you can look at it. For LLMC material go through HOLLIS Databases. Sometimes you get a “Member Restricted Resource” page. Harvard is a member, but for technical reasons we cannot use the Shibboleth Login that is offered. So what you do is to take the url, say https://dds.crl.edu/crldelivery/13287 and change it to https://dds-crl-edu.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/crldelivery/13287
That is you put .ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/ after the https://dds-crl-edu
If you don’t want to do this manually, there is an app (called the Bookmark) you can insert on your browser bookmarks bar. It’s labelled Check Harvard Library, and it automatically inserts that url fragment when you hit the bookmark. General instructions. Installation is slightly different in different browsers. We can help if you have any trouble.
Sometimes when you hit the link in the Available Online box you are taken to the login page of a different database, for example LLMC (example). Here you go to LLMC in HOLLIS Databases and log in with Harvard Key in the ordinary way
Center for Research Libraries (CRL) Topic Guides: China --- South Asia