History 316: World War II / Professor St. Cordery (Spring 2007)

Below are listed library resources and research strategies pertaining to the research of the history of World War II. This guide is intended to get you started in your research; once you have mastered these tools, please see a librarian for further direction.

Overall tips

Plan ahead: Effective time management is a critical part of any research project, especially so when your research is likely to require resources from other libraries. Make sure that you build in a two-to-three-week delay for each step of the way, to allow ILL materials time to arrive...and be careful with your optimism.
What's it called over here? Different online databases vary in their naming conventions, especially with their subject vocabularies. In order to locate the most appropriate resources, you need to be sensitive to these variations. For example, what WorldCat calls "World War, 1939-1945," America: History and Life calls "World War II." These differences may seem trivial, but using the wrong term in the wrong place will likely cost you hours of wasted time.

Call numbers

Browsing the shelves is a simple, powerful method for finding materials on your topic. You can quickly evaluate the scope of a book by checking its table of contents, index and bibliography. In fact, even if a book's contents aren't what you are looking for, its bibliography may list tens or hundreds of more useful sources.

Depending upon your exact topic, you may wish to browse different sections of the collection. Below are examples of several call number ranges related in some way to World War II:

D	History (general) and the history of Europe
D 731 - 838	World War, 1939-1945
D 750 - 754 D 755 - 769 D 803 - 804 D 824 - 829	Diplomatic history Military (land) operations Atrocities / War crimes Reconstruction
E	History: America
E 745	Military biographies
HQ	The family. Marriage. Women
HQ 1420	Women. Feminism -- United States -- 1920-1960
U	Military science
U 263 - 264.5	Atomic warfare. Atomic weapons

To see a brief outline of the entire Library of Congress classification system, click here.

Reference resources in Hewes Library

If I may quote professor Cordery: "Encyclopedias, textbooks, and dictionaries are not appropriate sources for college papers. Do not use them."

While her point is well taken regarding your final paper, reference materials can provide an excellent starting point and factual repository. Encyclopedias and dictionaries are perfect for campaign maps, casualty figures, chronologies, or beginning bibliographies. The resources below, among others, may be found in the Reference Collection on the Main Level.

World in conflict: 1914-1945 REF D 521. S45 2000
World War II: the encyclopedia of the war years 1941-1945 REF D 743.5 P57 1996
World War II: a statistical survey REF D 744. E45 1995
The Oxford companion to World War II REF D 740. O94 1995
War maps: World War II, from September 1939 to August 1945, air, sea & land, battle by battle REF D 743. G65 1982
Combat chronology: 1941-1945 REF D 790. C29 1991
American decades: 1940-1949 (5 vol) REF E 169.12 A419 1994
American military leaders: from Colonial times to the present (2 vol)REF E 181. F84 1999
Japanese American history REF E 184. J3 J3355 1993

Books in Hewes Library

The Hewes Library Catalog, allows you to locate any item in Hewes Library: our books, videos, CDs, and more. Please note that HIP represents only a portion of our Government Documents Collection, and generally only the newest items at that (more about Gov Docs may be found below).

For your History 316 purposes, we recommend a mixture of searching and browsing features. Use the catalog to identify some promising titles. When you locate these books on the shelves, explore the surrounding titles too. Spend some time. Look around. You may find something much better than what you went up there for in the first place.

Last but certainly not least: found a good book? Use its bibliography!

Online resources

Books not in Hewes Library

WorldCat
Provides bibliographic information and holdings for over 40 million library items held in 40,000+ libraries worldwide.

Journal articles

America: History and Life
Indexes and abstracts 450,000+ articles from 2,000+ international journals, focusing on the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Coverage: since 1964, with 16,000 entries added annually. Title list available in-product.
JSTOR
Indexes and provides access to full-image (.PDF) articles from over 600 journals in all disciplines. Some holdings extend back into the nineteenth century.

Newspaper articles

Chicago Tribune 1849-1984
Provides article images (.PDFs) of nearly every page and article of the Chicago Tribune, from its first issue as the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1849, through 1984.
New York Times 1851-2003
Provides article images (.PDFs) of nearly every page and article of the New York Times, from its first issue as the New York Daily Times in 1851, through 2003: 3.4 million pages in all.

Government documents

Monmouth College is a member of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), which means that we receive copies of certain documents published by various government agencies. We have been a part of this program since 1860, which makes us the oldest depository in the state of Illinois.

Searching the Hewes Library Catalog for government documents

Searching the Hewes Library Catalog for government documents is of limited usefulness, since it contains only those government documents received since 1994, plus a few especially valuable titles that we have added to the catalog for various class projects.

Browsing government documents

An effective way to locate government publications is by browsing the shelves. Of course, you will need to to know which government agency is likely to produce the resources helpful to you. To see an alphabetical listing of agencies as they appear in the classification system (which is called Superintendent of Documents, or SuDoc), click here.

CIS U.S. Serial Set index: (1789-1969) REF Z 1223. Z9 C65 1975

The CIS U.S. Serial Set index, produced by the Congressional Information Service, is a 36-piece set that indexes Congressional publications from 1789 to 1969. It is found in the Reference Collection on the Main Level, and is organized primarily by date. Notice the word index in its title: that means this set does not actually contain the publications themselves; instead, it is an index that tells you where to find them.

If we do not have the publication that you are looking for, then you can request it through our Interlibrary Loan service. Ask a librarian for assistance.

Monthly catalog of United States government publications: (1881 - 1976) GP 3.8

We call this one MoCat for short. It lives with the rest of the government documents on the Lower Level. It lists all government publications, arranged alphabetically by department. Notice the word catalog in its title: again, no publications here, just the pointers to the publications.

GPO catalog online (click here to access)

GPO is the online version of MoCat (see above). Its purpose and content is the same, but its range is far more restricted: it only covers those documents published since 1976.

Style

For this paper, Professor Cordery is requiring that you write and cite your paper according to the Chicago manual of style. Chicago is much more than an authority on citation formats; it covers everything from grammar and punctuation to quotations and abbreviations. Hewes Library carries the two most recent editions:

The Chicago manual of style (15th ed) RDY REF Z 253. C49 2003
The Chicago manual of style (14th ed) REF Z 253. U69 1993

Human resources: your local librarians

Hopefully, the ideas and resources above will help you to get started in your research. If you have any questions, comments or difficulties, please contact a librarian at the Reference Desk: (309) 457-2301. Ask early and ask often: the more time that you give us to help, the more we can do for you.

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