Research Guide for History 115P Winter 2007

Your Assignment: To write a 15-20 page individual research paper on an aspect of medieval European history, turn in an annotated bibliography and a three page book review.

The following is a selection of some of the reference books from the UCSB Libraries that might help you pick a topic. Reference books will help you focus and describe your topic.
Reference Materials

From the Library's home page, select RESEARCH then ARTICLE INDEXES & DATABASES to access the following select databases.
To access these databases from off campus, you must go through the proxy server.

Selected sources related to Medieval History


Finding your Sources in the library

To find articles, use an article index database(i.e. Historical Abstracts or JSTOR)to search the terms related to your topic. In order to get the article you will need to write down some information about the article that you will use to find it in the catalog.

A citation has the following information: journal title, author, article title, publication date, volume and page numbers. The journal title is what you will need to search the catalog to determine if we have it in print or electronic version.

Use Pegasus, to find the periodicals that you need. The Pegasus record will indicate in what formats these titles are available i.e. microfilm, print copy or electronic text. You will need to get the Call Number and location in order to find the particular periodical in the library.
For example:


Primary and Archival Sources
Additional Primary Sources...
Search Strategies,Where and How to Search

When available use the advance search function since this gives you all the search options available for each database. You will need to think about the terms you will use, how to combine them, and more importantly, the time period. You need to find both primary and secondary sources for your research.

SOURCES

You can search Pegasus and Melvyl to find books. Pegasus will tell you what UCSB has and Melvyl will show you what is available from all the other UC campuses. You can access both of these from the library's home page Library's home page here are some possible keyword searches to try in both Pegasus and Melvyl. These will give you both primary and secondary sources so you'll need to examine the results to make sure you have enough of each:


There are also a few series that will be useful for this. Below are some of the series titles; there are others as well. You can search these as a keyword and click the "words as phrase" box:


There are also a couple of websites that have digitized primary source material for this time period. Some of these same web resources also have secondary sources. For the ones that are subscription-based, you will need to use the Proxy Server proxy server.

Ask for Help! Remember to ASK FOR HELP when you need it. You can find a reference librarian at the Main Reference Desk during the week, weekends and even on holidays. For reference help please call (805) 893.3133.
Chimene Tucker: ctucker@library.ucsb.edu.