Gale eBooks Provides full text online access to Gale electronic books, including encyclopedias and other reference resources.
What's in Gale eBooks?
Gale eBooks is a huge collection of subject encyclopedias covering many academic fields. Entries in subject encyclopedias are a type of tertiary source, and are best used for obtaining background knowledge and identifying sources for further research.
What's good to know about Gale ebooks for STHS 375 research?
- When you look up a topic in Gale eBooks, you'll get a list of entries that appear in multiple different subject encyclopedias. This can be a great way to find out how different disciplines approach the same topic! For example, if you look up "tuberculosis," the entry from the Gale Encyclopedia of Science provides information about the medical facts of the disease, prevalence, and current global efforts to combat the disease. The Dictionary of American History offers information specifically about the experiences of tuberculosis in the 19th century, and thus provides more of a social history.
- Most entries in subject encyclopedias include recommendations for further reading. These recommendations are not hyperlinked, so you will need to copy and paste the citations into Primo. If you can't find a source in Primo, please email your STHS liaison librarian for assistance.
History of Science, Technology and Medicine (HSTM) An international bibliography for the history of science, technology, and medicine and their influence on culture, from pre-history to the present. Includes records of journal articles, conference proceedings, books, dissertations, serials, maps and other materials.
What's in HSTM?
HSTM is an index of scholarly secondary sources that have been published in books and discipline-specific journals.
What's good to know about HSTM for STHS 375?
HSTM is a type of subject database, meaning that it aims for depth in a given academic field, in this case, the history of science, and it concentrates on scholarly work. Because it is an index, it provides the full bibliographic information for a source, but you'll often have to search Primo to actually obtain the source.
- If the source is an article, click "Search Primo for full text" to see if Collins provides access to it in any of its full text databases. If Collins does not have it full text, request it via interlibrary loan. Most requests for articles will be delivered electronically in 1-3 days.
- If the source is a book, copy the title and search for it in Primo. (Don't rely on "search Primo for full text" because that only searches for electronically available material, and it's possible that Collins or SUMMIT has the book in print format.)
JSTOR An multidisciplinary journal archive. It includes archives of over one thousand leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. Includes the Artstor image collections.
What's in JSTOR?
JSTOR consists primarily of full-text articles published in scholarly journals, so in most cases, it will help you find peer-reviewed secondary sources. More recently, JSTOR has begun to include scholarly books, image collections, and primary source sets.
What's good to know about JSTOR for STHS 375 research?
- Because JSTOR is a massive online archive and uses keyword searching, most searches yield dozens if not hundreds of results, which can be rather a lot to sift through! Use the options to limit your results. For example, in the advanced search, you can select just journals in a particular discipline, such as "History of Science and Technology," which will limit your results to just 36 journals.
- Pay attention to the dates of publication for any articles you are thinking of using. JSTOR includes archives of journals dating back to the nineteenth century. Depending on your topic and approach, you could use an article published in 1901 as a primary source, rather than a secondary source.
What's in Primo?
Primo is the combined catalog of 37 academic libraries in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, and provides bibliographic information about millions of items, including books (both print and ebooks), videos, and selected journal articles (including the contents of JSTOR!). Books not available in Collins can be requested via SUMMIT and will be delivered in 3-5 business days.
What's good to know about Primo for STHS 375 research?
- Primo will help you find materials about or related to a topic, but those materials can be all sorts of different types of sources, depending on how you choose to use them. For example, books on a topic can be aimed at different audiences (children, general audience, scholars), and they can be in different genres (fiction, non-fiction, popular science), and they can have been published over hundreds of years. After you get your results, use the filters on the right hand side of your results, as necessary, to create a manageable set to sift through.
- Use Library of Congress subject headings (found on complete records for books) to help identify other books that share that same subject heading. For example, compare the results with these subject headings:
