Tertiary sources including encyclopeidas, historical dictionaries, handbooks and companions guides provide helpful overviews, including key facts, dates, people, place and issues associated with historical topics.They are often known as background or reference sources.
They gather and synthesize existing information to make it easy to find and understand, and are an excellent starting point in most research projects.
Search tips: Keep searches simple withinn tertiary sources, one or two words usually works best, e.g. malaria history
In the discipline of History, secondary sources interpret and analyze primary sources, and are removed in time from the events they discuss. They can be scholarly or non-scholarly/popular.
Try limiting searches by:
Still looking for information or overwhelmed by LibrarySearch results? Try a history specific database:
Primary sources take many forms, and the most appropriate or helpful type of primary source will depend on your topic. Some types of primary sources related to the history of health, medicine and disease include:
Official reports, government records, health policies:
Research studies, medical and scientific commentary:
Images:
Materia medica / pharmacological texts:
Specialized collections:
Basic tools
Use terminology from the time period you are studying - e.g., melancholy vs. lunacy vs. madness vs. mental illness
If the search tool offers the option to limit by date, use it. Be very specific to the time period you are studying.
Be methodical - if you know the time frame of an event, browse multiple editions or publications from that time range for potential mentions of the topic/event.
MRU has access to several image collections that may be helpful for your StoryMap. They include:
ArtStor - High quality images from JStor
Bridgeman Art Library Archive - Be sure to limit keyword searches to images.
Oxford Art Online - Art images; note that you can browse or limit searches by time period
Smithsonian Open Access - millions of images from their museum and archives collections.
Wellcome Collection - From your search results, limit by FORMAT to digital images.
Google Images - To find copyright friendly images, use the TOOLS option and limit by USAGE RIGHTS to Creative Commons.
Other - Primary source databases, including newspaper and magazine collections and many others, often include image searches in their advanced search function.
MRU Chicago Style Citation Resources: Includes a guide for using Chicago style, examples, and instructions for inserting footnotes.
Try simple searches within a relevant scholarly journal, such as:
Call number: The address for a physical library item, so you can find it on the shelf. In MRU's LibrarySearch, it is displayed below the title of the book. You can follow the locate icon for a map to the book on its shelf.