The main search tools for finding books, articles, databases, archival collections, and more at Yale (and beyond) can all be found on the "Find, Request, and Use" page of the library's website. Here are a few quick refreshers, but be sure to visit the page for a full overview:

James Kessenides, Kaplanoff Librarian for American History, james.kessenides@yale.edu

Background or "reference" sources are a great place to start your research and can be extremely useful, especially if you're venturing into a new research area for your project. They include bibliographies, scholarly encyclopedias, historical dictionaries, handbooks, and other works that provide overviews of topics and suggestions for finding both primary and secondary sources.

Don't hesitate to reach out to a subject specialist to schedule a research consultation or for assistance finding resources for your research!

In addition to a multidisciplinary database such as Academic Search Premier, subject-specific databases are a key resource for finding secondary literature, including the latest scholarly journal articles in the field, and the main subject databases for finding historical literature are:

• America: History and Life: Provides historical coverage of the United States and Canada and indexes over 2000 historical journals. A key resource if you are searching for historical scholarship related to your research project.
• Historical Abstracts: Provides historical coverage of the world, not including the United States and Canada, from the 15th century to the present. Indexes thousands of journals in multiple languages.

Searching these databases will allow you to check for the latest scholarly articles, reviews of books, citations to book chapters, and more in a wide array of historical journals.

And, don’t forget, the library catalog -- i.e., Orbis and Books+ -- is always a useful tool for locating secondary sources!

Get It @ Yale brings together three services of the Yale Library that greatly facilitate research work: Borrow Direct, Interlibrary Loan, and Scan & Deliver. Borrow Direct will furnish rapid delivery of titles from a small group of partner libraries if the book isn't available at Yale. Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is a larger library partnership that can provide scans of journal articles that aren't available at Yale as well as loans of physical items such as books and microforms. Scan & Deliver will fulfill requests to have journal articles, book chapters, and limited pages from microforms held in the Yale Library scanned by members of the library staff and provided to you electronically. All of the Get It @ Yale services help to make your research more efficient, so please don't hesitate to use them or to reach out with any questions about them as you work on your essay!