Finding Sources
- Searching in HOLLIS
- Searching in HathiTrust
- Other Digital Libraries and Collections
- Bibliographies
- Diaries and Other Personal Writings
- Films/Videos
- Government Documents
- Magazines
- News
- Oral Histories and Interview
- Organizations
- Policy Reports
- Political Literature
This page lists a variety of primary source types and offers links to resources for exploring them. We start with two general resources.
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 overpopulation yields
Ecology and the crisis of overpopulation : future prospects for global sustainability, by Anup Shah. Cheltenham, England ; Northampton, MA : Edward Elgar, 1998, 174 p.
Subjects
Population -- Environmental aspects
Demographic transition
Overpopulation
Economic development -- Environmental aspects
Med. subject
Crowding
HOLLIS record http://id.lib.harvard.edu/alma/990079264010203941/catalog
Under Refine my results: Subject on the right of the results list there are more main terms (Population density, Population policy, Food supply)) to try, but not the terms after the dashes ( -- Moral and ethical aspects) which are called subdivisions. NOTE: If you hit one of the terms in this Subject list, HOLLIS will find records with the term, say "Food supply", only on records in the set originally formed by searching overpopulation
Redo your search using the terms that HOLLIS uses. Subdivisions can be applied to other Subject terms. Thus:
- Population -- Environmental aspects
- Economic development -- Environmental aspects
Whenever you have a reference to a useful book, look it up in HOLLIS and see what the Subject terms are.
Any pertinent book published during your era may be a primary source, but certain kinds of primary sources, including originally unpublished sources such as letters and diaries published later, have particular terms attached to their Subject terms in a HOLLIS record. Change Any field to Subject for cleanest results.
- --Archives
- --Correspondence
- --Description and travel
- --Diaries
- --Manuscripts
- --Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
- --Personal narratives (refers to accounts of wars and diseases only)
- --Sources (usually refers to collections of published primary 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.
See the Library Research Guide for History and the HOLLIS Help guide for more information on searching HOLLIS.
Hathitrust and Internet Archive are huge general digital libraries. You can do a full text search over the whole collection of millions of books and journals and then effectively refine the results. Instructions
There may already be a detailed list of sources (a bibliography) for your topic. A bibliography offers a list of books and articles usually arranged by subject. Bibliographies give a systematic overview of the literature on a subject and a breakdown of subtopics. Browsing a bibliography offers a different experience from database searching with keywords.
Look for specialized subject bibliographies in the HOLLIS Catalog: Example. NOTE: The word Bibliography has to be searched as a Subject
You will need to search in HOLLIS to obtain items you find in a bibliography . Ask us if you have trouble finding something.
Diaries and Other Personal Writings
Many diaries, letters and other personal writings are available full text online or in paper.
To find them in HOLLIS search: Overpopulation AND (diaries OR archives OR correspondence).
Autobiographies usually bear the Subject term Biography, and so are not distinguished from biographies. The search Autobiographies OR Autobiography yields many autobiographies, but by no means all.
As well as entertainment films, there are documentary films and newsreels. Tools for finding films listed in this guide. For newsreels. The Library has a guide for streaming video.
Internet Archive Put your search term in Any field. Adjust Mediatype is: to movies
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Search for your topic. Select Type: Moving image on the left.
WorldCat Open Access Advanced Search. Adjust Databases from WorldCat to OpenAccessContent. Open Options (upper right). Change Record list size from 10 to 100.
Search:
Keyword: [your search term(s)
AND
Genre/Form: video OR audiovisual
WorldCat OAIster (Union catalog of digital resources) Advanced Search. Adjust Databases: from WorldCat to OAIster. Open Options (upper right). Change Record list size from 10 to 100.
Search:
Keyword: [your search term(s)
AND
Keyword: ge=video
British Pathé offers numerous British newsreels and documentaries
Academic Video Online has numerous modern documentaries together with newsreels from 1929 to the present.
Other sources for film and video are listed in the Library Research Guide for History, which also has pages for television and radio.
ProQuest Congressional provides indexing for Congressional publications dating from 1790 to the present. Full-text access is often available. Publications included are Committee Hearings, House and Senate Documents, House and Senate Reports, Senate Executive Reports, Senate Executive Treaty Documents, Legislative Histories, Serial Set Maps, Serial Set. More complete than HathiTrust for congressional hearings, but clumsier to use.
Hathitrust includes numerous government documents.
Offers:
- Separate full text search for HathiTrust government documents. Narrow the results in the left hand column by Author: agency name, date, etc.
- United States Federal Government Documents Registry, a catalog type search. Not all included documents are full text in HathiTrust, try Internet Archive as well.
In Advanced Search, you can use a government department or agency name as author and search within full text
There are also many government documents in the Internet Archive. There are two Internet Archive collections GovDocs Government Documents and FEDLINK - United States Federal Collection which are full text searchable and which contain foreign, US, state and local documents. These may not include all government documents in the Internet Archive.
Sources for magazines (popular periodicals) are listed on the in the General and Popular Indexes pages of the Introductory Library Research guide for History.
Alternative/Radical Literature
Alt-Press Watch (1995- ) is a full text database of the newspapers, magazines, and journals of the alternative and independent press.
Independent Voices provides over 1,000 titles of the independent alternative press of the 60s-80s. Many papers are still only available at Harvard via microfilm collections, below.
Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975: Rock and roll, counterculture, peace and protest. Choose Document Type: Underground Press to see titles.
The Sixties :primary documents and personal narratives 1960-1974
See Guide to Newspapers and Newspaper Indexes
Oral History in HOLLIS and WorldCat
To find oral histories in HOLLIS or 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.
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
Oral History Online indexes oral history collections, with links to interview-level bibliographic records and to full-text materials, audio files and visual files where these are available.
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).
Voices of the Manhattan Project
CalTech Archives includes manuscripts, notebooks, photographs, oral histories from the CalTech Archives collection.
Society of Women Engineers Oral Histories
Engineering and Technology History Wiki offers thousands of articles, first hand accounts, oral histories, milestones, archival documents and lesson plans. Grouped by major subjects. List of all oral histories
American Institute of Physics Digital Archive includes digitized archival material and many oral histories.
You can put the url of an organization into the Internet Archive Wayback and find old web pages sometimes going back 20m years. Some will not be fully functional.
Science for the People
Periodical Science for the People 1975-1989
The Grad Activist: Resources for Science Advocacy
Union of Concerned Scientists.
Periodicals
Internet Archive resources
Bulletin of the atomic scientists
HOLLIS Records
Bulletin of the atomic scientists,. Internet Archive Full Text 1945-2015
Lists and Directories
Scientist Action and Advocacy Network
Science advocacy organizations
The activist's almanac : the concerned citizen's guide to the leading advocacy organizations in America, by David Walls.New York, N.Y. : Simon & Schuster, 1993, 431 p.
HOLLIS Record
Policy Literature, Working Papers, Think Tank Reports
PolicyFile (1990-) offers public policy reports and studies published by think tanks, university research programs, research organizations including the OECD, IMF, World Bank, the Rand Corporation, and a number of federal agencies.
Policy Archive is a digital library of public policy research containing over 30,000 documents.
Think Tank Search - from the Kennedy School of Government, a customized Google search of documents produced by think tanks.
Google advanced search. You can limit by domain: .org
PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) (1915- ) indexes international public and social policy literature. Includes journal articles, books, book chapters in edited volumes, conference proceedings, government documents, etc.
JSTOR offers full-text of complete runs (up to about 5 years ago) of numerous journals. Allows simultaneous or individual journal searching, full-text searching optional, of many educational journals. List of included journals.
International bibliography of political science (1953- ), included in International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, is a bibliography of periodical articles, books, essays in books, and government publications.