The History Research Process

Consider WHAT is being searched--this affects HOW you search!

Library Databases usually search full text (that is, every word in the article)  --> search for very specific words and ideas

Library Catalog searches only metadata (that is, a brief description of the item and what it's about)  --> search for broader, more general ideas, then flip through the books to look for the more specific topic.

• Example: You want information about African Americans who served in a specific military role. Step back; search the catalog for more general books about the history of African Americans in the military. Flip through those books to see if they address the specific military role.

Remember: When you are searching primary documents, keyword searching (what you are used to doing in Google) will NOT always be the best approach.

Some research topics simply don't relate to what people explicitly wrote in literal words.

Some topics may require that you locate a body of cultural works--for example, numerous issues of a certain children's magazine, or large quantities of letters from certain kinds of people--and just READ to see what you find.

Read between the lines. Read for what is implied, not just what is baldly stated. Make inferences. Use critical thinking.

With digital versions of historical documents, keyword searching sometimes works very poorly because a computer is reading and "translating" the words in the document (not a human).

True Story: A student was searching eighteenth century documents online for information about how people dealt with lice in their wigs. But the database often matched the word rice in a document instead of lice--with the low-quality, faded type on an old newspaper or magazine, the computer just couldn't tell the difference!

In a case like this, you need to "think around" what you hope to find. If searching for the word lice isn't working, what else could you search for? Think about combinations of wigs, hair, vermin, pests, insects, louse (the singular of lice).

You may also want to explore proximity searching, a technique that will only match the second word, lice, if it occurs very close to the first word, wig (say, within 5 or 10 words of each other). The trick is to read the Help or FAQ page for each database to learn exactly how to type a proximity search in that database; each one is a little different. Ask the History Librarian if you would like more help using proximity searching.

Click the icon in the bottom right corner of the video player to view it in full screen!

Click the icon in the bottom right corner of the video player to view it in full screen!

Click the icon in the bottom right corner of the video player to view it in full screen!