HIST 301: Historical Research Methods -- Lombard

Where to Look

Examples of one-stop shopping for quality resources on the web. Check the Primary Sources and Online Primary Documents pages for more.

• American Memory
• Primary Documents at the Library of Congress
• Digital Vault at the National Records and Archives Administration
• Avalon Project at the Yale Law School
• Voice of the Shuttle: US History
• AMDOCS (documents for the study of US History)
• Primary Source Documents Pertaining to American History
• Hathi Trust Digital Library (Gathered from university collections, these are full text or citations of a variety of works from the 19th and early 20th Century)
• Internet History Sourcebooks Project (Fordham University) provides access to the Modern History Sourcebook
• UCLA Library: Online Campaign Literature Archive (Los Angeles area)
• Directory Of Open Access Journals freely-available full text online journals.

Search Strategies

As the internet continues to grow, the amount of useless, broken, and suspect information also grows. Here are some easy tricks to help reduce the clutter and make sure you have the best.

• Limit your searches to domains that are likely to return better quality material.
  
  • EDU domains are university servers. Many universities are digitizing their special collections and offer digital repositories of their scholars' works.
  • GOV limits searches to US federal, state and local governments.
  • MIL limits to US military servers and they are very active historians.
  • ORG can be worthwhile to check out as many of these sites are museums or organizations of specialists in the area of history you are researching.
• Consider alternative terms and spellings, keep in mind that just because you spell it one way doesn't mean it has always been spelled that way, especially in earlier times.
• VERIFY information you find against other reputable sources--the site you are looking at should provide a bibliography to follow up on.
• Investigate the site's author--who are they and what are they trying to accomplish?
• Check the search engine's help pages--they have lots of focused search tips.