Getting help

• You are encouraged to schedule a 1:1 research consultation with a librarian by using the form on this page.
• To look at items in Vassar's Archives and Special Collections Library, please schedule an appointment by emailing spcoll@vassar.edu.

Books, articles, microfilm, and more beyond Vassar

• If Vassar Library does not have the book or article, use ILLiad to request the item using InterLibrary Loan (ILL).
• WorldCat is a collective catalog for tens of thousands of libraries world wide and a great place to find books beyond Vassar which you can request through ILL.
• Vassar Library is a member of Center for Research Libraries, which includes archival materials, microfilm collections, digital sources, as well as a wide selection (although often with missing years) of British, Indian, Irish, Caribbean and African journals and newspapers.

Strategies and starting points for primary sources

• Check bibliographies and footnotes for other sources on your topic. Reference works have helpful bibliographies as well as reliable contextual information. Consider what available primary sources will support the research questions you are asking and how.
• A good resource to use first in your research: C19 database, an umbrella database including multiple British (and American) archive databases, some full text, some citation only, for books, pamphlets and periodicals.
• Vassar Library is a member of HathiTrust, a digitization project of print book collections from a set of prestigious college and university libraries, where all materials published prior to 1928 are available in full-text open access.  Books published later are not available in full text, but they are searchable there.  

• Use asterisks in your search terms to find variations of words. Ex) A search for "imperialis*" will return results with both "imperialism" and "imperialist."
• Use Boolean operators OR, AND, and NOT. Ex) A search term like "goals OR objectives OR aims" might be more efficient than searching for each of those terms individually.
• Searching within a database or within LibrarySearch is the easiest way to find out if the library already has access to a book or article, but there might be times when you choose to use a broader search engine like Google Scholar. If you do find an article through one of those external sources and you get to a paywall, see if we subscribe to the journal it's published in by going to the Journals page of the library website. (If we don't, you can always request it through interlibrary loan.)
• If you know what your topic is but need help finding search terms, look through the index of a book you were assigned in class or one that you've determined is relevant. This is a good way to find out which words researchers tend to use to describe various subjects. You can also look to see if an article you've found online has subject headings or keywords listed—if it does, you can search using these terms.
• Look at the citations of the resources that you find to get to more resources. This is called citation tracing.
• Using AI tools like ChatGPT to find sources is generally not a good idea, as they often will come up with plausible-sounding titles that do not actually exist.
• Check out the Vassar Libraries' Evaluating Sources guide for more general tips and strategies for working with sources.