Announcements

Zotero

  • Do you want to find an easier way to save and organize your research?
  • Do you have a lot of unorganized PDFs saved to your computer? 
  • Do you have a research assistant whom you'd like to have trained in using reference management software?

Register for one of our Zotero classes to find out how to use this free software program to organize your research materials and create easy footnotes and bibliographies!

Digital Scholarship Workshops

The DSSG website lists other workshops and general information about digital scholarship support. 

Belle Lipton (belle_lipton@harvard.edu), GIS Outreach Librarian at the Harvard Map Collection, has added a GIS Mapping Resources page to the Library Research Guide for History.

HOLLIS

Numerous records for books and periodicals in the HOLLIS Library Catalog have no Harvard locations, only CHECK ACCESS OPTIONS.  These are largely items owned by Columbia, Princeton or New York Public Library and located in a shared storage library called ReCAP.  They can be requested via Interlibrary Loan and will generally be available the next business day, like items at the Harvard Depository.  In most cases, volumes of periodicals are available, unlike in BorrowDirect and ordinary Interlibrary Loan.

These ReCAP records are not found via Starts with/Browse. So if you look for books or periodicals using Starts with/Browse: Title, you will miss them.

HOLLIS Catalog & Articles searches the full text of some of the articles included. Articles thus retrieved display a snippet of the full text. This feature can be useful but produces a discordant result set because most articles are not searched full text. You can turn off full text searching by deselecting Search inside text of articles. This does not affect the full text searching of archival finding aids.

You can limit your HOLLIS Library Catalog search to just Harvard finding aids in Advanced Search.

Full Text Searching: HathiTrust vs Internet Archive

HathiTrust and Internet Archive are huge digital libraries of books and periodicals.  Internet Archive also includes, films, images, audio recordings and other material. They both can be searched full text but have different search capabilities. Both can be searched globally, that is, over the whole collection. Both can search the full text of individual items.  Otherwise they differ.

If you go to HathiTrust Advanced Full Text Search, you can search full text of all books and periodicals bearing specified Subject terms (same as HOLLIS Subject terms), title or author. Example:

Full Text and All Fields all of these words: Cholera
AND
(adjust to) Subject any of these words: India Bengal Calcutta
AND 
(adjust to) Subject any of these words: correspondence diaries narratives sources (Add another group of search fields)

You can search Internet Archive for texts bearing a specified Subject term, Title, or Author (Creator). Shift from Search metadata to Search text contents.

  • subject:Calcutta AND cholera [Use lower case for subject, title, creator]
  • title:Lessons in elementary biology AND "oosperm or unicellular embryo" [note no "" after title]
    • For a periodical: title:American Machinist AND "Spring breakage has been eliminated"
  • creator:Parker, T. Jeffery AND "oosperm or unicellular embryo" [note: The correct form of the name must be used. Find this by trying out the name in Advanced Search: Creator. When you find the right name, shift from Search metadata to Search text contents ]

Much of the Internet Archive content is organized into full text searchable Collections. Thus, if you search “Civil rights” you retrieve 104,660 items which are partially organized into 178 collections (see under Media Type in the left hand column). Some of the collections are topical (Kent State Shootings) or they include issues of a particular periodical or podcast. Collections are often nested. For example:

By no means are all periodical issues and other items included in collections. In these cases periodical titles can be full text searched using the title:American Machinist AND "Spring breakage has been eliminated" method.

Oral History

We have added new sources to the Oral History page of the Library Research Guide for History.

To find oral histories in WorldCat Advanced Search:

Subject exact phrase: Indians of North America
AND
Subject contains: Interview* OR "Oral History" OR "Oral histories"

In WorldCat some items will be in transcript form only but may be available via scanning or Interlibrary Loan.  Many are available online.

Online Full Text

In the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) search: physicists AND ("oral history" OR "oral histories" OR Interview)

In Google Advanced search, you can search

this exact word or phrase:: Your person or organization
AND
any of these words: “Oral history” “Oral histories” Interview

Columbia University Oral History Portal is an enormous collection of oral histories at Columbia University.

Some of the Columbia University oral histories have been digitized.  For those available only at Columbia here are instructions for obtaining copies. Then you can go to Harvard Library Interlibrary Loan.

Columbia University Oral History Portal  Some of the oral histories found here have been digitized but have no links to the digitized version.  Go to Digital Collections for these to search for these.  Some of the oral histories found in the digital collections have only citations (Padlock icon).

Some Columbia oral histories we have in: 
Oral history collection. Columbia University, [Oral History Research Office].
[Glen Rock, N.J. : New York Times, 1973-1988?] 6 pts. on 2690 microfiches + guide (32 p.)
HOLLIS Record

Some Columbia oral histories, even among those in the microfiche, are not in Oral History Online.

For a known oral history:
Check Columbia digital library
Check HOLLIS for microfiche
Obtain copy from Columbia  Instructions

Non-Harvard Resources

Many Colonial Office reports, blue books and other publications are available in the Internet Archive collection: Colonial Office (Great Britain) publications

Family History Library has digitized all their microfilms (formerly available only at their branch libraries).  More information  --  FamilySearch Wiki

The Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI) is an online searchable compilation of records that identify individual enslaved persons and enslavers in the states of New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Jersey.

Women Writers: Intertextual Networks focuses on intertextuality in early women’s writing, examining the citation and quotation practices of the authors represented in Women Writers Online (WWO). More information.

World War II Records, ca. 1941 - ca. 1947 offers records from the Adjutant General’s Office of the War Department (Record Group 407) Includes maps and charts, overlays, city plans, aerial photographs, photomaps, pencil sketches, and architectural drawings relating to the European, Mediterranean, and Pacific theaters of war. More information: World War II Records Digitized.

New News Resources

Louisville Defender (1951-2010)  (ProQuest Historical Newspapers) African-American weekly newspaper.

Michigan Chronicle‎ (Detroit; 1939 - 2010) (ProQuest Historical Newspapers) African-American weekly newspaper.

Cleveland Call and Post (1934-2010) ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Documenting white supremacy and its opponents in the 1920s offers newspapers promoting and opposing white nationalism, largely 1920s. Local, regional, and national newspapers of Klan and pro-Klan organizations. Also offers anti-Klan voices from newspapers of Black, Catholic, and Jewish communities.

Arctic Today offers news from media organizations from around the circumpolar North.

East View Global Press Archive

New E-Resources

General  --  Africa  --  Europe  --  Latin America/Caribbean  --  Middle East  --  North America

General

Age of exploration (c. 1420-1920) offers manuscripts, early printed materials, maps, documents, diaries, ships' logs as well as speeches and films related to European maritime exploration.

Africa

African Diaspora, 1860-Present offers personal papers, organizational papers, journals, newsletters, court documents, letters, and ephemera, etc. from African diasporic communities largely in the Caribbean, Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and France.

Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, Africa and Middle East, 1960-1969  (ProQuest History Vault) For an overview of contents, select Browse and scroll down to International Relations and Military Conflicts

Europe

British Periodicals (1681-2005) offers full text for several hundred British periodicals and now extends up through 2005.

Latin America/Caribbean

Colonial Caribbean: Settlement, Slavery and Empire, 1624-1832 offers British Colonial Office files

Middle East

Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, Africa and Middle East, 1960-1969  (ProQuest History Vault) For an overview of contents, select Browse and scroll down to International Relations and Military Conflicts

North America

Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, Africa and Middle East, 1960-1969  (ProQuest History Vault) For an overview of contents, select Browse and scroll down to International Relations and Military Conflicts

FBI Confidential Files and Radical Politics in the U.S., 1945-1972 (ProQuest History Vault) For an overview of contents, select Browse and scroll down to American Politics and Society

Slavery and the Law (ProQuest History Vault) For an overview of contents, select Browse and scroll down to Southern Life, Slavery, and the Civil War.

Water rights & resources (HeinOnline) offers congressional documents, books, legislative histories, and Supreme Court briefs concerning irrigation, hydropower, water conservation, drinking water quality, tribal water rights and other issues,