HIS 441: Colonial Histories and Literary Representations

Our collection includes over 2 million volumes; another 2 million volumes in microforms; nearly 400 databases.

The Central Reading Room and Music Library are on the on 1st floor of Melville Library. The entrance to the Main Stacks (Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences collections) is on the 3rd Floor. There are several Branch Libraries on campus as well.

The Health Sciences Library is separate library system located on the East Campus. You have access to their collection, both in print and online.

Circulation Policy: 99 books, semester loan (except branches) for grads and instructor.

Renewals: 3 times if no one is waiting for the material. Can be done online via STAR.

Fines: $0.25/day, $85/book – Card is blocked at $5.

Recalls/Holds can be done online via STARS.

Photocopies: $.10 a page. You can put money on your student ID for copy machines. Copy machines also accept change and bills. The Photocopy Center is on the 3rd Floor of Melville, near Circulation.

Here are some easy tricks that can help with your searching:

Putting an AND between words will search for BOTH words on a webpage or in an article.  When you do a normal Google search, you are doing an AND search.

EXAMPLE: immigration and employment will only give you web pages or articles that have both of those words.  This means you will get fewer results, but they should be better results.

Putting QUOTATION MARKS around a phrase will search for web pages or articles that have that exact phrase.  This is a very useful trick.  It will cut down on the number of bad results.  Be careful not to include too many words inside the quotation marks, because that's EXACTLY what will be searched.

EXAMPLE: “genetic engineering” will only give you web pages or articles with that exact phrase.  Other examples are "climate change," "no child left behind," "body image."

An ASTERISK (*) search is very useful when similar words are being used to talk about a topic.  It searches for all the various words using the same root.

EXAMPLE: comput* will give you articles that have the words compute, computer, computing, etc.  Or: educat* will search for educate, education, educator, educators, etc.

Putting an OR between words will give you articles with at least one of the words.  This will give you more results.  It can be useful when you're not sure which word is being used more.

EXAMPLE: fat OR obesity will give web pages and articles that have the word fat.  And it will give you web pages and articles that have the word obesity.

Use (Parentheses) to group multiple search terms together.  You're basically doing TWO searches at the same time.

EXAMPLE: debt and (teenagers or adolescents) will give you web pages or articles that have the words debt and teenagers and web pages and articles that have the words debt and adolescents.