Gathering

• How are you storing the information you find? Notecards? An online tool?
• Are you organizing them according to the question they answer? or are you using a different method?
• What types of material are you looking for? Even now you should be focusing on answering specific research questions, and certain materials are better suited to answering those questions than others.

Databases

National, electronic databases are available in the Sparta High School MRC. By using these sophisticated tools, you can find citations to documents, magazines, and newspapers; locate abstracts of articles; and even read full texts of wire service news stories and some magazine and encyclopedia articles.

In this district, you have been prepared for database searching since the elementary grades. You can gain an understanding of electronically stored information by creating a small database. After performing simple research in print sources, you can record your facts on a database program and even make the results available to others in the class. (HOW can they do this?)

• ABC-Clio American History or ABC-Clio World History Modern Era- Provides full coverage of past and present issues in American History. Primary-source materials, include speeches, laws, executive orders, treaties, book excerpts, committee transcripts, debate transcripts, lyrics, and poems.
• ColumbiaGranger's World of Poetry
• CQ Researcher- The CQ Researcher is your complete source for in-depth analysis reporting on the most current and controversial issues of the day
• EBSCO- Provides access to over 1800 magazines and journal articles, 194 full-text newspapers, as well as American Heritage Dictionary, Dunn & Bradstreet Company Directory, ERIC, the educational resource information center , Newspaper Source, Health Source and Masterfile Premier, a multidisciplinary database with full text for more than 2,000 general reference publications dating as far back as 1975.
• Facts on File- Provides information from the following databases: Science On-line, Science Experiments On-line, American Women's History, American Historical Images, Landmark Documents, African American History and Culture, American Indian History and Culture, World Atlas On-line, Career Guidance On-line and Forms on File On-line.

• GALENET- Provides access to reference materials, full-text magazine, journal, and newspaper articles, primary documents and multimedia resources.

• Proquest Direct- Full-text magazine, newspaper and scholarly journals.

Topic-Specific Search Engines

Art

• American Master's Database: " Consisting of more than 250 hours of programming to date, AMERICAN MASTERS is a growing film library documenting the role important individuals, groups, and movements have played in the formation of our cultural identity.
• Artcyclopedia: We have compiled a comprehensive index of every artist represented at hundreds of museum sites, image archives, and other online resources. We have started out by covering the biggest and best sites around, and have links for most well-known artists to keep you surfing for hours

Additionally, you can create your own search engine similar to this one:

Custom Search

using Google Custom Search Engines. Essentially, you can add websites to this search engine so that it only searches those sites for you rather than wasting your time in other places. Here is a quick tutorial about how to create these search engines through Google.

Music, Television and Film

• Internet Archive: The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, they provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.
• Mutopia: Search for printed music.
• Internet Movie Database (imdb): a comprehensive site for all things on the bigscreen

Here is our Custom Search Engine for the above sites for Music, Television and Film

Custom Search

General

• Librarian's Internet Index: From their website "Librarians' Internet Index (LII) is a publicly-funded website and weekly newsletter serving California, the nation, and the world."
• David Rumsey Map Collection: "The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection has over 18,460 maps online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North American and South American maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia, and Africa are also represented. Collection categories include antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall, childrens, and manuscript maps. Some examples are United States map, maps New York, California map, Arizona map, America map, New York City map, Chicago map, and Colorado map. The collection can be used to study history, genealogy and family history"
• Google News Archive: Google is actively archiving news stories as they occur and trolling old newspapers and media for various topics. They have partnered with major newspaper and media services to digitize old news. Use the timeline feature to see how the media has treated your topic over time.
• National Archives If you need governmental records, this site houses all federal government records: court transcripts, military service records, and presidential records.
• The European Library: "The European Library is a free service that offers access to the resources of the 48 national libraries of Europe in **20 languages**. Resources can be both digital or bibliographical (books, posters, maps, sound recordings, videos, etc.)."

Here is our Custom Search Engine for General Resources.

Custom Search

Subject Heading Search

Use what you know

While we don't condone Wikipedia as a credible source to be used in the final version of your paper or project, when conducting subject heading searches or looking for a starting point for references, Wikipedia houses a great number of referenced works in each entry. Here's my search for "Mark Twain" in Wikipedia:
If I were to use this for general information, I would need to quote another source. Luckily for us, there are very specific rules governing the content that is displayed on Wikipedia. For example, every piece of information posted must be objective and must have a credible source cited. We can look for those citations at the bottom of every Wikipedia entry.

For the Twain resources, here is what is available to us:

This is only a snapshot of the resources available on this topic. Use this to guide you towards both primary and secondary sources.

Searching for Texts (Print books and Reference)

1. Open Spectrum 5.
2. Click on Catalog Tab
3. At the Easy Search Screen, there are four options for searching
4. Select either "Key Word," Title," Author," or Subject" and enter a search term.
5. Author's names should be entered as Author's last name, first name.
6. Press enter and a list of "hits" will appear along with the Dewey call number on the left and the number of copies on the right.
7. Clicking on the title of an item in the returns list will bring up an image of the full card catalog record.