HIST 103: Topics in American Legal History

Library Prize for Undergraduate Research

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 16:21:54 -0700

The Library Prize for Undergraduate Research recognizes excellence in undergraduate research projects that show evidence of significant inquiry using the library, its resources, and collections and learning about the research and information-gathering process itself.

Doe, Main Stacks, Moffitt Library Floorplans

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 11:10:12 -0700

Looking for a location or call number in Doe, Main Stacks or Moffitt? Try the floorplans, or ask for assistance!

Off-campus Access to Library Resources

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 11:51:25 -0700

Before you can access Library resources from off campus make sure you have configured your computer with proxy server settings.

After you make a one-time change in your web browser settings, the proxy server will ask you to log in with a CalNet ID or Library PIN when you click on the link to a licensed resource.

Printing and Scanning in the Libraries

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 12:33:47 -0700

All libraries on campus are equipped with "bookscan stations," which allow you to scan documents and save them to a USB drive, or to scan documents and then send them to a printer.

In order to scan documents, you must have the following:

A Cal 1 Card, with money loaded onto it (go here to make a deposit to your Cal 1 Card account). This is not the same as meal plan points! Your Cal 1 Card debit account is a separate fund on your card.
A USB drive (you cannot email a scanned document from a bookscan station; you must save your document to a USB drive)
Scanning and saving to a USB drive is 5 cents a page for students.
Scanning documents and sending them to the printer is 10 cents a page for students. Color printing is 60 cents a page.

In order to send documents to the printer from any of the public computers in the libraries, you must have the following:

A Cal 1 Card, with money loaded onto it (see above)
A document that's on the Web or attached to your email (the public computers in the libraries will not open files from a USB or other drive)
Printing is 10 cents a page for students (black and white). Color printing is 60 cents a page.

Have more questions? There's more info here.

Staying Informed

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 11:51:57 -0700

The UC Berkeley History Collection News blog will keep you informed of new digital collections, trials of resources, workshops, events related to History collections, and other news of interest to researchers in History. Options for accessing the blog include:

Visiting the blog (I post a few times a week)
Subscribing to the RSS feed for the blog
Following me on Twitter at @ucbhistorylib where I tweet links to the blog posts

Campus Library Map

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 10:42:45 -0800

Click on the image below to see a larger interactive version of the campus library map.

You can also view/download a PDF map of library locations. For library contact information and building addresses, visit our directory.

Locating Primary Sources

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 13:21:02 -0700

There are many access points to the vast collections of primary sources available to you.

Certain words and phrases (part of the Library of Congress Subject Headings classification system) will find primary sources in library catalogs. You can use these in OskiCat or Melvyl:

-correspondence
-sources
-diaries
-personal narratives
-interviews
-speeches
-documents
-archives
-early works to 1800
-newspapers

For specific search strategies, see the Library's Guide to Finding Historical Primary Source s.

Your searches will be more successful if, in your preliminary research, you identify specific:

names of relevant individuals and organizations
dates of events
places
what terminology was used at the time by participants and observers? (ex: negro or colored instead of african american)

Organizations with manuscript collections make their collections accessible with finding aids. The tools below allow you to search the finding aids by topic, helping you identify collections available around the world that may inform your research. The Online Archive of California includes finding aids from historical societies, government agencies, libraries in California, including Bancroft Library, and is your best choice for locating archival collections in California.

HathiTrust

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 12:57:49 -0700

HathiTrust (Hathi is pronounced hah-tee) is a partnership of libraries that works towards the goal of developing a shared digital access, preservation, and storage solution for the materials held in the member libraries. The contents of HathiTrust are similar to that of GoogleBooks, but the collecting focus is on scholarly materials and the resource includes content and features (such as indexing and manipulation of results) not available in Google Books.

Downloading PDFs

To limit to “full view” (public domain materials) in your search, check the “full view only” box.
From the “full view” of any item, click on Download whole book (PDF).
Click login.
Choose the University of California, Berkeley from the drop down list and click login.
Enter your CalNet ID and passphrase.
Click Download whole book (PDF).
PDF will load and you will choose to either open it or save it.

Tips for searching HathiTrust:

Phrase Searching: Use quotes to search an exact phrase: e.g., "occult fiction"
Wildcards: Use * or ? to search for alternate forms of a word. Use * to stand for several characters, and ? for a single character: e.g., optim* will find optimal, optimize or optimum; wom?n will find woman and women.
Boolean Searching: Use AND and OR between words to combine them with Boolean logic: e.g., (heart OR cardiac) AND surgery will find items about heart surgery or cardiac surgery.

Tips for doing a full-text search:

Phrase Searching: Use quotes to search an exact phrase: e.g., "occult fiction."
Multiple Term Searching: When your search terms are not quoted phrases, avoid common words (such as: 'a', 'and', 'of', 'the', etc.) to speed up your search.
Boolean Searching: Use AND and OR between words to combine them with Boolean logic: e.g., heart OR cardiac will find items containing the word heart or the word cardiac; heart AND cardiac will find items containing both words. Use a minus (-) to remove words from the result e.g., heart -cardiac will find items containing the word heart that do not include the word cardiac.

Creating Collections

On the Collections page, click on login.
Choose the University of California, Berkeley from the drop down list and click on login.
Enter your CalNet ID and passphrase.
Click on Create a New Collection and name your collection (the description is optional).
Indicate whether it is a "Private" or "Public" collection.
Click on Add.

In the future if you want to edit, change the private/public setting, or delete the collection, your collections will always be listed in the "My Collections" tab whenever you are logged in to HathiTrust.

Google Books

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 11:15:19 -0700

Google Books contains millions of scanned books, from libraries and publishers worldwide. You can search the entire text of the books, view previews or "snippets" from books that are still in copyright, and read the full text of out-of-copyright (pre-1923) books. Want to read the entire text of an in-copyright book? Use Google Books' Find in a Library link to locate the book in a UC Berkeley library, or search OskiCat to see if UC Berkeley owns the book.

Why use Google Books?

Library catalogs (like OskiCat) don't search inside books; using a library catalog, you can search only information about the book (title, author, Library of Congress subject headings, etc.). Google Books will let you search inside books, which can be very useful for hard-to-find information. Try it now:

Searching Library Catalogs

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 11:46:44 -0700

Use OskiCat to locate materials related to your topic, including books, government publications, and audio and video recordings, in the libraries of UC Berkeley. OskiCat will show you the location and availability of the items that we own.

Using OskiCat (but not Melvyl) you can also renew your books online, look up course reserve materials by course number or instructor name, and place holds on items that other library users have already checked out.

Use Melvyl to locate materials related to your topic located at other campuses in the UC system, or worldwide. You can use the Request button to request an item from another library, if we don't own it.

Using Melvyl (but not OskiCat) you can find articles as well as books, easily format a citation for copying into a bibliography, and see images of book covers, when available. Melvyl will also show you the location and availablity of items that we own.

Melvyl has changed as of January 2012, and now includes many more articles. Detailed Melvyl help.

Find Dissertations

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 13:01:07 -0700

Find Dissertations by searching Dissertations and Theses (Dissertation Abstracts) Full Text, which indexes graduate dissertations from over 1,000 North American, and selected European, graduate schools and universities from 1861 to the present. Dissertations published since 1980 include brief abstracts written by the authors and some feature 24-page excerpts. The database offers full text for most of the dissertations added since 1997 and some full text coverage for older graduate works.

Also see Find Dissertations and Theses for other specialized sources. Dissertations completed at UC Berkeley can be found in OskiCat, using the feature allowing you to limit to dissertations/theses:

Older dissertations not available full text may be obtained through Interlibrary Loan or using the "Request" option in Melvyl.

OskiCat Searching Tips

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:08:24 -0700

Search for author's name using the author search: Auster, Paul
Search for topics using a keyword search: labyrinth and borges
Use an asterisk as a wildcard: author* finds authority, authorship, etc.
Limit results by language (Modify search)
You can browse topics using the Subject links. To find secondary literature on a particular author, look for "criticism and interpretation" subject links such as these:
- Auster, Paul, 1947- -- Criticism and interpretation.
- Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-1986 -- Criticism and interpretation.

Legal Research

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 12:14:28 -0700

Where's the PDF?

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 11:49:03 -0700

Many article databases contain information about articles (citations or abstracts), not the entire text of the article. Once you've used an article database to find articles on your topic, you may need to use this button: in order to locate and read the full text of the article. The UC-eLinks button appears in nearly all the databases available from the UCB Library website.

UC-eLinks will link you to the online full text of an article if UCB has paid for online access; otherwise, UC-eLinks will help you locate a print copy on the shelf in the library. If UCB doesn't own the article in print or online format, UC-eLinks can also help you order a copy from another library.

For more information, watch this video tutorial (about 4 min.)

You can also set up UC-eLinks to work with Google Scholar. For more information, watch this video tutorial (about 2 min.)

18th & 19th Century Journals

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 11:05:10 -0700

Databases for Legal History

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 19:32:56 -0700

Citation Help

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 15:47:51 -0700

"Ethics, copyright laws, and courtesy to readers require authors to identify the sources of direct quotations and of any facts or opinions not generally known or easily checked."--

Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press), p. 594

Why cite sources?
Whenever you quote or base your ideas on another person's work, you must document the source you used. Even when you do not quote directly from another work, if reading that source contributed to the ideas presented in your paper, you must give the authors proper credit.

Citations allow readers to locate and further explore the sources you consulted, show the depth and scope of your research, and give credit to authors for their ideas. Citations provide evidence for your arguments and add credibility to your work by demonstrating that you have sought out and considered a variety of resources. In written academic work, citing sources is standard practice and shows that you are responding to this person, agreeing with that person, and adding something of your own. Think of documenting your sources as providing a trail for your reader to follow to see the research you performed and discover what led you to your original contribution.

Citation Management Tools

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 11:06:11 -0700

Citation management tools help you manage your research, collect and cite sources, and create bibliographies in a variety of citation styles. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses, but any are easier than doing it by hand!

Zotero: A free plug-in that works exclusively with the Firefox browser: keeps copies of what you find on the web, permits tagging, notation, full text searching of your library of resources, works with Word, and has a free web backup service.
RefWorks - free for UC Berkeley users. It allows you to create your own database by importing references and using them for footnotes and bibliographies. Use the RefWorks New User Form to sign up.
EndNote: may be purchased from UC Berkeley's Software Central.

It's always good to double check the formatting -- sometimes the software doesn't get it quite right.

Chicago Manual of Style

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 11:08:21 -0700

The Chicago Manual of Style includes two slightly different documentation systems: (1) notes and bibliography (NB) and (2) author-date. The notes and bibliography style is preferred by many in literature, history, and the arts.

In the NB system, you mark within your paper where you have cited something by adding a number, which refers to a detailed reference either at the bottom of the page (footnote) or at the end of the paper (endnote). These notes indicate the specific place in your source you are referencing.

The bibliography includes complete information for each item, with the items arranged in alphabetical order by author's last name.

Purdue's Writing Lab provides an example of a paper formatted using Chicago NB style.

Research Advisory Service

jdorner@library.berkeley.edu (Jennifer Dorner) — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 11:21:53 -0700

Research Advisory Service for Cal Undergraduates

Book a 30-minute appointment with a librarian who will help refine and focus research inquiries, identify useful online and print sources, and develop search strategies for humanities and social sciences topics (examples of research topics).

This service is for Cal undergraduates only. Graduate students and faculty should contact the library liaison to their department or program for specialized reference consultations.