Dr. Rebecca Bates History 200 Fall 2023: Getting Started

GENERAL NOTES ABOUT REFERENCE AND RESEARCH

Students indicate topic selection and simply getting started as the two major sources of research anxiety. Reference materials offer broad overviews with significant background information. One of the fastest ways to build a knowledge pool is consulting reference works. The goal is to inform the reader rather than persuading them. Professors strongly discourage or even disallow citing reference works. This is the major reason students give for neglecting reference books. Why consult if you cannot cite? Here's why. Citation issues aside, reference books remain the best starting place. Berea students jump too quickly into journal literature that is often required without the background information available from reference works. Recent studies concerning undergraduate research indicate a strong preference for books of over journal material. It is about working smart. Students can browse a reference book on a broader subject to identify a research topic and use the bibliographies as potential resources. Our reference section includes books that are not true reference works but are held in reference to insure a copy is always available, and to protect items from defacing or theft. So if you have questions ask your instructor or a librarian.

COMMONLY ENCOUNTERED REFERENCE RESOURCES

While these formats exist in both print and electronic formats, they are most obvious in their print incarnations.

Encyclopedia / Dictionary – Terms are almost interchangeable and share a common A to Z format. The term encyclopedia suggests an effort to incorporate knowledge into a larger package that utilizes graphics, images, timelines, maps and bibliographies. Newer encyclopedias may include primary documents. Some encyclopedias are organized chronologically. Dictionaries provide concise entries with fewer features.

Chronologies – Some are simple timelines of historic events or personages. Others link contemporary events, individuals, politics, literature, the arts and sciences together offering a comprehensive picture of the intellectual and social landscape of a given period. Historians often find these helpful as the discipline is structured chronologically rather than A to Z.

Atlases - Collections of maps, thematic, political maps and statistical data presented in map form. Atlases can be historic or devoted to contemporary circumstances.

Bibliographies – These are often called “Book about Books.” In recent years these have become underused assets, but before the digital age bibliographies played a major role in academic research. These are valuable for identifying older material.

Handbook - Handbooks are generally essay collections representing the current thinking and scholarship in a given field. In Hutchins most handbooks reside in the circulating collection, but some are housed in reference as gap fillers in the collection.

Gazetteer - This is a geographical dictionary or directory providing locations and statistics. They are often used in conjunctions with atlases. 

Companions - This format varies dramatically from publisher to publisher, ranging from a dictionary like resource to scholarly essay collections.

DATES AND ERAS

Not every historian or publisher define eras with uniform dates or attaches the same name to a period. While there is general agreement, these are not cast in stone. For example, the 19th century can be defined as the standard 100 year period or event based such as 1789 to 1914 known as the "long nineteenth century" or a shorter period starting with the end of the Napoleonic Age and the start of WWI, 1815 to 1914.

In recent years many reference works have incorporated abreviated chronologies along with documents. These are good examples of stand alone chronologies.

R 502.02 C557 Chronology of Science

R 902 .02 M525 Chronology of World History, 4 vols. (1999)

R 907.02 W723c 2005 Cassell’s Chronology of World History (2005)

R 960.02 D573b Black Chronology (1983)

The London Times, National Geographic and Oxford all produce high quality atlases with dedicated followings. Regular sized atlases are shelved according to Dewey number. Over sized atlases are housed at the end of the reference collection.  Our collections includes world, regional, national and state atlases. If you have questions please ask at the reference desk.

R 910.3 C726 1998n Columbia Gazetteer

R 911 T583 1993 Times Atlas of World History

R 912 M229 Macmillan Centennial Atlas of the World

R 912 T583 1999 Times Atlas of the World, Tenth Comprehensive Ed, (1999)

R 912.7A881 2005 Atlas of North America,

R 912.42 C712a 2010 Atlas of Britain

917.56 P886n 2010 North Carolina Gazetteer, 2 Ed