LIBRARY RESEARCH BASICS

Finding Books in the Library Catalog
On the Tisch Library homepage select Library Catalog.

• If you want to find information about someone (i.e. literary criticism of an author, biographical information), try a Subject search.
• If you are searching for information on topics, try a Keyword search.
• Use the connectors AND, OR, or NOT to join more than one topic/keyword.

Note: In the Library Catalog, two asterisks ** are needed for truncation, whereas in many databases only one asterisk * is needed--but ALWAYS CHECK THE HELP SCREEN IN EVERY DATABASE to learn how to do the best (and fastest) searches!

Finding Articles in the Library Databases
To search for articles using the library databases, go to the Tisch Library Website and select Databases and Articles under Searching. Type in the name of the database in the search box or use the A-Z list to locate it.

Finding Materials at Other Libraries

Books

• If you want to search for books on your topic beyond what's available at the Tufts University Libraries use WorldCat. You can access this database on the Databases & Articles page.
• If you want to borrow a book that is not available at Tufts University Libraries, follow these steps:

1. Search the Boston Library Consortium Virtual Catalog by clicking on its link along the top menu of the Library Catalog. This catalog contains the book holdings at most of the BLC libraries. Users can directly request books through the catalog and pick up the books at Tisch Library. You can also search the holdings of each individual BLC library.
2. If the book is not available through the BLC Virtual Catalog, Submit an online request through the document delivery service - ILLIAD. Users are notified when the material arrives at Tisch. You can sign up for an ILLiad account by clicking on First Time Users at the ILLiad home page.

Articles

• Articles not available in full-text through our libraries' databases and print collections can be requested through ILLiad. You can sign up for an ILLiad account by clicking on First Time Users at the ILLiad home page.
• You can also use ILLiad directly within the databases by clicking on the button.

Primary Source Databases

• The Gerritsen Collection
  Begun in the late 19th century, the Gerritsen Collection represents books and periodicals tracing the development of feminist consciousness through 4 centuries and 15 languages. The Collection is one of the most important single sources in the study of women's history.
• GenderWatch
  GenderWatch is a full-text collection of international sources, including journals, special reports and conference proceedings on a wide range of women's issues. It includes archival materials dating back to the 1970s.
• Women and Social Movements
  Primary sources in the study of women's social movements from colonial times to the present. This database contains books, pamphlets and proceedings from national conventions on women's rights, abolition, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union.
• Women Working (Harvard online collection)
  Digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard's library and museum collections. This collection explores women's roles in the U.S. economy between the Civil War and the Great Depression.
• Women Writers Online(Brown University)
  A full-text collection of works written by women, in English or in English translation, before 1850.
• Archive of Americana
  This family of historical collections contains books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, government documents and ephemera printed in America over three centuries.
• American Periodicals Series
  The American Periodical Series contains the full text of a wide variety of early American periodicals such as The American Apollo (1792-1792), The Boston Weekly - Magazine (1743-1743), and The Philadelphia Minerva (1795-1798). The date range of the entire series is 1740 to 1900.
• ArchivesUSA
  Information about primary source materials from U.S. manuscript repositories, with detailed indexes of manuscript and other special collections.