Start Here!
-
Coates Library CatalogYou know it, you love it: the good ol' Coates catalog. Learn how to use subject headings to your advantage by reading the second column of this page.
-
WorldCatWorldCat is a catalog of library holdings worldwide. When Trinity doesn't have a book you need you can send an Interlibrary Loan (ILL) request straight from WorldCat.
-
America: History and LifeAccording to Library Journal, this is "the definitive bibliographic reference covering the history, culture, area studies, and current affairs literature of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present."
-
Historical Abstracts with Full TextIndexes scholarly literature on the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present. Coverage is broad, so the database is also useful for topics in other disciplines (e.g. religion, anthropology, or political science).
-
JSTORThe JSTOR project seeks to develop online access to the full back files of selected journals. The database contains a digitized image of every page and is searchable by every word.
Subject Headings
Subject headings are created by the Library of Congress to make sources discoverable. They're like hashtags but for books and articles, and unlike hashtags they're maintained by a central authority, making them consistent across platforms.
For this seminar, the most useful subject heading is Vietnam War, 1961-1975, though in rare instances you may see Vietnam Conflict or Vietnamese War instead.
Because subject headings are hierarchical, you'll often see subheadings that narrow a topic's scope. For example, here are some of the subject headings for the book Reporting Vietnam (via WorldCat).
Using these constructions in a subject search will yield other books on the topic of journalism about the Vietnam War. You can use the same process to locate materials on whichever topic you choose. The key is to begin with one useful text, then use its subject headings to lead you to related resources.