History Research Guide

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.

• BUBL Catalog of Internet Resources: Ancient History
• BUBL Catalog of Internet Resources: History
• BUBL Catalog of Internet Resources: Humanities 
• Directory Of Open Access Journals freely-available full text online journals.
• Diotima: Women and Gender in the Ancient World
• EAWC: Exploring Ancient World Cultures: Index of Internet Sources
• 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 Internet Ancient History Sourcebook, Medieval Studies Sourcebook and Modern History Sourcebook
• Labryrinth (Medieval Studies) there are two versions: OLD and NEW, check them both.
• Luminaria: Medieval, Renaissance and 17th Century materials
• NetSerf a mixed collection of material, does offer some useful links to medieval texts and a glossary of medieval terms
• New York Public Library Digital Gallery (a large and growing number of drawings, paintings, photographs and other primary source images in collections divided by subject, time period or geography)
• Online Medieval and Classical Library provides searchable, digitized collection of early texts
• ORB: The Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies is a peer-reviewed collection of articles for scholarly use, translations of medieval works and more.
• Perseus Digital Library
• UCLA Library: Online Campaign Literature Archive (Los Angeles area) 
• UNESCO Archives Portal: Primary Sources Online Archivists and other digital collection builders are encouraged to publish links to their sites through this wide-ranging portal. Note that some sites have a "popular" icon which appears to mean they get high numbers of visits, rather than the content is not scholarly.
• Voice of the Shuttle: Anglo Saxon and Medieval emphasizes literature and the study of literature.
• WWW-VL History Central Catalogue

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.