How do I compile a primary and secondary source bibliography?
Compile a bibliography of approximately 15 books and 10 scholarly articles and, if possible, 2 published primary sources on your topic. Your bibliography must conform to the proper style. It should include full bibliographic details for books (author, title, name and location of publisher, year of publication) and journal articles (author, article title, journal title, volume, year, pages of article).
Compiling a comprehensive bibliography is the crucial first step for any historical reading or research project. It involves much more than merely grabbing the first ten or twenty items listed under your topic heading in the University Library catalogue. You should have two opposing concerns: to include all the most reliable and important sources of information and to exclude all outdated, unreliable or redundant items so that you can concentrate your research efforts on the best sources.
A variety of bibliographic and reference tools will help you compile your preliminary list of sources. Start with MNCAT, the University Library's computerized catalogue. This will give you good access to many books and some published primary sources, but not to scholarly articles. Follow the techniques suggested by Wilson librarians for defining a set of relevant and delimited subject headings for searching. You may need to use keyword searching first to identify some subject headings used on relevant items.
For many topics you will initially discover far more books than you have time to read. How do you select the best ones? Eventually you should draw upon book reviews and historiographical essays for more background evaluation by other scholars. But even at this preliminary stage you can use the information contained on the long-form catalogue entry: familiar expert author, date of publication, publisher (a scholarly press?), length, list of subject headings, chapter outlines, etc.
For any general topic area there are published specialized bibliographies, both selective and comprehensive that can save you lots of time and assure that you gather the best items for your topic. You can find them by subject search in MNCAT, attaching the suffix "--Bibliography" to your previously identified subject headings or other slightly broader headings. Use your imagination. Browse the stacks of the Wilson Reference Room where these tools are shelved. To find primary sources you can attach suffixes such as "--Sources" or "--Personal Narratives". Be sure to list these specialized bibliographies in the second part of your assignment, where you indicate your sources of information.
There are special bibliographic tools meant for searching for scholarly journal articles. In History, two of the basics are “America: History and Life” (for U.S. and Canadian history) and “Historical Abstracts” (for history of the rest of the world). You will need to sign in using your x500 at the Library.
They are available in hard cover format and, for recent years, on CD-ROM which is much more convenient to search. Ask a reference librarian for help in using the CD-ROM version. There are also other tools such as Social Science Index, Expanded Academic Index, and several other indexes for earlier journal articles. Some are computerized too, handy for powerful keyword searching techniques.
You can of course also augment your evolving bibliography by "chain-searching" the bibliography and footnotes of some of your early discoveries to get leads to other books, articles or primary sources. You will soon notice that certain items keep reappearing: they are presumably the "classic" (but perhaps outdated?) or "standard" works on their subject.
