As students in a primarily online course, you are being asked to use primarily online resources. This guide will focus primarily on resources available to you freely online or available to you through your SCSU account rather than print resources. Many of the print resources we have access to will be searchable through the same primary portals. If you need further help with print resources or any of the content of this guide, please feel free to contact me at crowleyp5@southernct.edu.
Print resources include physical journals and books, paper newspapers, manuscripts and archives, physical primary sources, letters, etc..
Electronic resources include e-books, digital journals, scholarly blogs, online newspapers and newsletters, e-mails, recorded speeches etc.
A scholarly resource is a book, article, or other text that is written by a knowledgeable researcher in a given subject and that gives citations for where it is deriving the information, arguments, and interpretations of data that it presents. This citation will take the form of some combination of bibliography, footnotes, or endnotes. These explicit pointers to other sources are a crucial part of what defines scholarly publication because it locates the resource in the wider context of academic discussions that may stretch back hundreds of years and include scholars from anywhere in the globe.
Another hallmark of scholarly resources is that they are often peer reviewed. This is especially true of journal articles (and it is something you can specifically search for in our databases). Peer review is a process by which, before a new piece of scholarship is published, other experts in a field will read and comment on the text in order to improve the final publication and to ensure that the scholarship is generally within the parameters of the state of the field. Many publishers employ peer revier procedures, but this is especially the case with university presses. So if you see a book published by a university press, this is more likely to be peer reviewed and therefore reliable.
Primary sources are sources which act as first hand documentation or evidence of an event, idea, or personal history. Examples can include physical or digital sources such as diaries, letters, photographs, first hand accounts, speeches, manuscripts or typescripts, archaeological or art objects, official governmental or legal documents, autobiographies, social media posts, etc. Seriously, as long as they survive, your Instagram posts of today could be considered primary sources for historians of the future studying America in the 2020s!
Secondary sources are more generally deep studies of a specific topic drawing on primary sources and other secondary sources to arrive at an argument or reasoned opinion on that topic. Examples might include scholarly books, journal articles, investigative journalism, and other resources that analyze and synthesize multiple other sources into one body of work. Since scholarly secondary sources are based upon other materials, they include bibliographies and foot- or endnotes in order to allow the reader to trace ideas back. Any research paper you are writing is, in essence a new secondary source in the making!
Tertiary sources are basic, summarized facts about a given topic or person mainly for quick reference and to get a general overview of a topic. They are often written based on reading multiple secondary sources. Some, but not all, such reference sources will include sources. Examples include encyclopedias, dictionaries, standalone bibliographies, etc.
As you are looking for resources, it is important to understand what you can expect to get out of any given database.
Many of the resources you will be looking at are available to you in full text. For example, almost everything in Southernsearch is eaither in print or available as a full text document online. JSTOR, for example is a database which only shows result that you can access in their entirety.
Some of the databases, like EBSCO products, show both results that we have full access to and resources that exixst, but which we would need to acquire for you digitally.
And a few of these databases are abstracts databases. What this means is that they search the brief summaries of an even larger selection of scholarship that databases with full text. This helps to locate scholarly resources that you can find separately or ask for library help to get access to.
We may not have immediate access to everything in every database, especially if it is an abstracts database. But often we can get you access to a journal article you need in very quick succession. We can often get access to a journal articles within a day, sometimes within hours using ILL. Sometimes you can automatically ILL through the individual database. EBSCO, for example gives easy links labeled "Find at SCSU" to direct you to our Journal finder and ILL.
But the surefire way to make an ILL request is using the publication of the article you are looking for and entering it into our ILL portal.
When in doubt, ask me or any other librarian for help!