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INQR 2002 - History of Genocide

This guide will walk you through conducting research for your INQR 2002 course.

Tips on Finding Primary Sources

For primary sources, look for:

  • primary sources in the footnotes and bibliographies in the secondary sources that you use. 
    ***This is the easiest way to find primary sources!!***
  • primary source passages that are embedded in secondary source books. These can be extensive quotes or excerpts from primary sources.

 

Discover GALILEO and Primary Sources

Discover GALILEO can be a great tool to discover primary sources on your topic. 

Tips for Searching Discover

 

Start Simple

  • First, you need to search for your topic. It can be helpful to start with simpler or broader terms. So if your topic is a person or an event, try searching for the name of your person or event first.  

 

Use Quotation Marks

  • Quotation marks are helpful when you're searching for phrases like an event or a person's name. It tells the database to keep your search terms together rather than looking at each search term individually. 

For example, searching for "World War II" in Discover GALILEO yields 4,173,517 results. 

 

A search for world war 2. the search term has been put in quotation marks.

 

Using Discover to Find Primary Sources

But with the search of "World War II", Discover GALILEO gives us some interesting primary sources to work with.

 

Browsing Videos in Search Results

 

As you scroll down to the very bottom of the page, you should see videos from the Associated Press. If these videos were produced during the same time period of World War II, these would count as primary sources.  The benefit of searching Discover GALILEO for these video sources is that it also provides citations in APA, MLA, CMS, and Harvard. 

 

Examples of Associated Press Videos from the search World War II. Some of these results are from the time period in question and thus would be primary sources

 

Using Publication Date Limiter to Find Primary Sources

 

This same concept works for articles as well. If you got to advanced search (the link is found under the search bar at the top of the page) you should see the option to limit to a date range. If you enter the date of your time period, any articles published during the period of your event would also count as primary sources. 

 

Publication Date Limiter is highlighted to reflect that results have been narrowed down between 1939 and 1945, if interested in this time period these could be primary sources.

Date Range options shown with the custom range selected for 1939 to 1945.

 

Examples of Searching for Primary Sources in Library Catalog

If your topic is Rosa Parks, you can search in the catalog for "Rosa Parks."

  •  Helpful hint: Quotations are helpful to keep phrases together in your search, just like in Discover GALILEO. 

 

Search for Rosa Parks in the library catalog. Search results limited to physical books and books on the third floor


It is worth browsing Subjects to see if there are ones that align with your topic and/or assignment. 
 

 

Subjects found on the left hand side from a search for Rosa Parks

 

From there, you can connect the "Rosa Parks" keyword with one of the suggestions in Keywords to use in GIL Catalog.  

*Helpful hint: When connecting keywords in a GIL-Find catalog search it is important to capitalize the words - AND, OR, NOT - that link the two keywords together.

So if you were looking for interviews and Rosa Parks, you could search: 

"Rosa Parks" AND Interview

 

Can't Find a Book on Your Topic?

 

If you cannot find a book on your specific topic, think about the bigger picture. Is there a search term that you can use to help uncover primary sources? 

For example, if there were no books about Rosa Parks, we might trying searching for: 

"Civil Rights" AND Interview