Research Center.
This page will provide you with instructions on research methods as well as links to resources.

Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) Indices and abstracts of art-related books, conference proceedings and dissertations, exhibition and dealer's catalogs, and articles from more than 2,500 periodicals. Covers European and American art from late antiquity to the present. Updated quarterly and covers 1973 to the present.

Philosopher's Index
A bibliographic database with informative author-written abstracts covering scholarly research in the fifteen fields of philosophy, published in journals and books since 1940. Over 480 journals are covered, from 38 countries. 1940-present.

Ovid databases
The Ovid databases are: AGRICOLA (plants and animals), ATLA Religion Database, Books in Print, ERIC (education), Medline (medicine), MLA Bibliography (language, literature, and film criticism), and PsychINFO (psychology).

Historical Abstracts
Historical coverage of the world from 1450 to the present. Indices to over 2,000 journals published throughout the world. Includes books, chapters from books, and dissertations. You will find no primary material in this index.

ISI Basic Social Sciences Index
The ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) Basic Social Sciences Index covers nearly 185,000 articles from 500 leading worldwide social science journals. Coverage: current year plus the most recent nine years.

Expanded Academic Like Social Science and Humanities Abstracts, expanded academic covers a wide range of sources but does not cover any field with great depth. There are some full-text articles in this database. Also, a good place to go fishing if you're not sure of your direction yet.

FirstSearch databases
A multidatabase search service that includes:
Social Sciences Abstracts: Covers the high-circulation, highly regarded journals in the social sciences. A good place to browse for an overall view but not very "deep" in coverage.
Humanities Abstracts: Covers the high-circulation, highly regarded journals in the humanities and arts. A good place to browse for an overall view but not very "deep" in coverage.
Arts & Humanities Citation Index: Unlike the Basic Social Sciences Index (see above), this index has complete coverage of the humanities and arts.
Art Abstracts: More concentrated on English-language journals than BHA. Includes only journals.
Once you click on FirstSearch, use the pull-down menu to select a database.

JSTOR (Journal Storage)
This is a unique digital archive of over 100 core scholarly journals. The collection covers material from the 1800s up to a "moving wall" of between 1 and 8 years before the current publication date. It covers 15 subjects at present, mainly in the Humanities and Social Sciences, including over 100 journals. You will find journals such as Renaissance Quarterly here as well as general history journals.

Project Muse
Full-text of over 110 scholarly journals in a variety of disciplines. Most coverage begins in 1996 and continues through the present. You will find the Journal of Medieval and Modern Studies here as well as other general history journals.

Library catalogs (books, videos, CDs)
Four College libraries ... UMass library ...
Remember: When using the catalog, you are not searching articles from journals.

Further and General Research Tips (Jim Wald)

I will be adding various tips, both here and in class discussion. Here are some starting points:

Finding Information

As a rule, it's easiest to begin your research with a package of information that is small or general (or both).
Thus, for example, a passage in Wilcox's In Search of God and Self might provide you with an overview of the topic—its nature, its relation to the larger contours of the era, and so forth.
Then you might turn to the bibliography at the end of the relevant chapter(s) in Wilcox. You will find there not just titles, but commentary on the approach and value of the works in question.
At the same time, you would begin to pursue your investigations in our Five-College library system. Here, you can look to both primary and secondary sources. The latter fall into the two main categories of books and scholarly journals. (See Dan's advice, above.)

There are in addition, of course, Internet resources. I urge you to exercise a healthy caution when using them. The Internet contains both a wealth of wonderful information (both primary and secondary sources) and a lot of dross. It can therefore be difficult to use if one does not already possess both general critical skills and some particular knowledge of a given field and its traditions. (For general help with this problem, consult Dan's advice [above] and the advice contained under the rubric, "Internet Research," on the Hampshire Library homepage. See further the Pocket Style Manual.) This is one reason that we are working to perfect our "one-stop website": We have devoted a great deal of time to exploring the web and selecting information that we have found to be both reliable and useful.

When preparing your research papers (or just seeking further information), see, in addition to the sites included on the syllabus page, the following.

Among things to bear in mind:

• Some sites called "medieval" in fact treat Classical and early modern topics
• Most of these sites contain detailed subheadings. Thus, for example, you could find material on women's history and experience by starting at the top page and navigating through the directory.

• Classical Antiquity

--Project Perseus (art, archaeology, literature)
--Internet Classics Archive (literature; note: includes some Persian and Chinese sources)
• James J. O'Donnell homepage (an authority on both classics and the Internet; notable for his work on St. Augustine)

• Middle Ages/Early Modern Europe

--NetSERF: The Internet Connection for Medieval Resources
--Argos: Limited Area Search of the Ancient and Medieval Internet
--The Online Medieval and Classical Library
The aforementioned three locations also contain links to several other major sites such as:
--Internet Medieval Sourcebook
--The Labyrinth: Resources for Medieval Studies
--ORB: Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies

• Medieval and Renaissance Texts (in addition to those available at the other sites listed here)

--The Avalon Project (section on Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Documents on law and politics; from Yale)
--Digital Dante
--Decameron Web
--Italian Renaissance (major texts in the humanities and arts; selection of secondary literature; arts, as well; from Hanover Historical Texts Project)
--Erasmus Text Project
--Literature Two, from the University of Bristol
--Renascence Editions (An Online Repository of Worked Printed in English Between the Years 1477 and 1799)

• The Fine Arts

--Art on the Web (links to numerous sites)
--Art History resources on the web (one of the largest and most widely used collections of links)
--The Web Gallery of Art (works from 1150-1750)
--The Artchive (numerous scanned images)
--Medieval Art and Architecture
--VRND: Virtual Notre Dame Cathedral
--The Louvre (Paris)
--The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Cloisters (medieval collection)
--The Uffizi Gallery (Florence)
--Investigating the Renaissance (Dutch art)

further resources

• Religion

--Bible editions [texts] in various languages (from artfl at U. Chicago)
--representative bible editions [images] (from U. Minnesota-Duluth)
--The Ecole Initiative: Early Church Documents
--Christian Classics Ethereal Library (primary sources)
--The Holy See (Vatican website)
--The Roman Catholic Lectionary for Mass
--The Franciscan Archive
--Catholic Online Saints Index
--Reformation (texts by Luther and other reformers NB temporarily unavailable)
--The Protestant Reformation (more texts, as well as some secondary literature from Hanover; NB temporarily unavailable)
--Project Wittenberg (Lutheranism)
--Internet Resources for the Study of Judaism and Christianity (note: includes some Islamic material, listed below)
--Islamic Studies, Islam, Arabic, and Religion
--Al Khazina: The Treasury (Islam and Near East; general)
--Internet Islamic History Sourcebook
--Internet Jewish History Sourcebook
--Welcome to Judaism 101 (Orthodox)
--Judaism and Jewish Resources (general)
--A Page of Talmud

more religion resources (from my site; resources continually being added)

further resources

examples of images for your book-arts projects: medieval and Renaissance woodcuts and the like (godecookery.com)
Note: These images are in the public domain, and the creators of the site urge you to make use of them for non-commercial purposes.

• History of the Book

further resources

•