HIST 301: Historian's Craft (Benes, Spring 2025)

• Use the Library Catalog to find books, ebooks, and chapters in the WM Libraries system

  This catalog includes books at the WM Libraries & Colonial Williamsburg lending Library

Important notes for this class

• Our catalog and worldcat use "World War, 1914-1918" as the official subject for the war.
  • in the SUBJECT box, search "world war" AND 1918
  • In the other boxes, search keywords or subject of your choosing.
    • example search for Women in Britain during WW1
• ​​​​​​​Our catalog uses "United States" and "Great Britain" and Germany as subject headings.
• Other useful subject headings include
  • ​​​​​​​propaganda
  • women​​​​​​​
  • sexuality
  • religion
  • memory
  • causes
  • historiography
  • Foreign Relations.
  • public opinion
  • social aspects

At this point in your careers, I strongly suggest starting right in WorldCat.

W&M Libraries has a very good history collection, but we don't have everything. Rather than searching twice -- once in our catalog and once in WorldCat -- I strongly suggest going right to WorldCat.  WorldCat also has extremely detailed records, so you're MUCH more likely to find useful essays and chapters using WorldCat. Be Sure to use WorldCat First Search.

Be sure to use Caps for AND, OR, NOT when searching.

AND - searches for books and articles containing both terms. Example: Germany AND France

OR - searches for one of the words. Example: Germany OR france

NOT - exclude a term. Example: (England OR Wales) NOT scotland

Parenthetical notes () - excellent for OR or NOT searches. Like a math equation, the database will do this part first.
Example: ("great war" OR "First world war") AND france
 

Quotation Marks ""- Links words together in the search. Works best for phrases or proper names.
Example: "United kingdom"  
Warning: You might exclude results. A search for "David Lloyd George" will exclude just "Lloyd George"

Asterisk * - Allows you to search several word endings at once, without using OR.
Example: Virginia* will give you results for Virginia, Virginian, Virginians. 
Example: Brit* will give you Brit, Brits, British, Britain, Britains
Warning: You may get unexpected results. Brit* will give you Britony and Britches 

WorldCat contains over 540,000,000 records representing about 3,000,000,000 titles, so keyword searches can be a bit too broad. 

As you start with keyword searches and find books that are of interest, pay attention to the Subject headings in the records.

Our catalog and worldcat use "World War, 1914-1918" as the official subject for the war.

Using the advanced search settings, search "united states" AND history AND "civil war, 1861-1865" to narrow your search to only books directly related to your topic.

Some usages of the advanced options:

• search university in publisher field if you're getting too much pop history
• limit to specific languages. If your language isn't in the dropdown menu, type it manually.
  • example: Books in Basque and Catalan are in Worldcat, even though those aren't default options.
• limit to nonfiction in the "audience" box in "subtypes limits"