Table of Contents:

ASA, the Lehigh Library online catalog
Electronic Full Text Primary Source Collections, Databases and Journal Indices
Online Reference Book Sources
Newspaper resources
Specialized History Web Gateways
U.S. Government Publications
U.S. Decennial Census materials
Bibliographical Resources
Biographical Resources
Archives, Museums and Manuscript  Collections
Contact information

Searching the Lehigh University Online Catalog

The Lehigh Catalog, ASA, contains records of  the library's collection of books, journals, documents, microfilm collections, government publications, electronic materials and selected web resources. Both primary and secondary sources can be located using the search features of ASA.

Remember that Linderman Library is closed until January 2007 and materials are in storage centers. If ASA indicates that the book is from Linderman, fill out the retrieval request form and the books or journals you need will be delivered to Fairchild Library.

When you find that materials you need don't appear in Lehigh's collection you will want to utilize ILLiad our interlibrary loan system and PALCI, which is a direct borrowing service for books.

Regarding ILLiad and PALCI:

• ILLIAD can be used to borrow both books and copies of journal articles from libraries around the United States. You will need to register the first time you use ILLIAD, see the FAQ, but after that it will recognize you and keep a profile of your preferences. It will even allow you to get your articles delivered electronically if that is how the other libraries deliver them to us.
• PALCI allows you to borrow books only, but can often get them to you in less than a week. The participating libraries in PALCI include colleges and universities in Pennsylvania as well as Rutgers University.

Databases, Indices and Full Text Electronic Resources  for Historical Research

This following section includes databases that are generally useful for finding articles in scholarly journals and other secondary sources, increasingly however electronic  primary source material products are being acquired by the library and are also included. The entire list of Lehigh's databases appears on our DATABASE FINDER page.  Some indexes are still in print and are noted as such below. They will be found in the library reference area, index/abstract section.

Full text primary source collections for historical research:

American Periodical Series Online
Full text images from over 1,100 periodicals that first began publishing between 1740 and 1900, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines, and many other historically-significant periodicals."

Early  English Books Online  1475- 1700
Contains over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640), Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700), and the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661). "Searchable fields include Author, Title, Printer, Publication date, Type of illustration, and Library of Congress subject heading." Records are linked to the corresponding page images downloadable in PDF.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online  1701- 1800
Provides full-text searching and access to digital images of nearly 150,000 items including books, broadsides, Bibles, tract books and sermons and printed ephemera and includes works by many well-known and lesser-known authors published between 1701 and 1800.The collection is an ongoing project based on The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a machine-readable union list of the holdings of the British Library, as well as those from more than 1,500 university, private, and public libraries worldwide.

Evans Digital Editions - Early American Imprints 1639 -1800
Evans Digital Edition (1639-1800) is based on Charles Evans' American Bibliography and the Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography by Roger Bristol. These bibliographies attempted to gather all American imprints (published works) from the 17th and 18th Centuries. These works identify historic publications that were microfiched in a collection known as Early American Imprints, 1639-1800. The Evans Digital Edition is an ongoing project of digitizing and making full text searching available for all of the 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images. This resource provides access to primary sources covering nearly every aspect of early American history, literature, philosophy, religion, politics and every day life.

Early American Imprints: Series II: Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819 -Subscription to begin in late January 2006 - link will be added to the guide or check the Library Database list.
Provides full-text access to the 36,000 American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the first nineteen years of the nineteenth century. The continuation of Early American Imprints: Series I, this primary source database, based on the authoritative bibliography by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker and now supplemented by thousands of new items, allows students and scholars to explore the development of the American nation.

New York Times,  Historical Newspapers.  Full Text image database  1851-2000
Includes the entire historical run of The New York Times. The database delivers every page of every issue from cover to cover, with full-page and article images in downloadable PDF. Each record is associated with a "page map" so that the item's context on the page can be seen. Using the "MORE SEARCH OPTIONS" one can limit retrieval to birth notices, letters, display or classifed ads, editorial cartoons, etc.

Databases and Indexes for Journal, Periodicals and Newspapers.

America: History and Life.
a complete bibliographic reference to the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the  present. Published since 1964, the database comprises almost  400,000 bibliographic entries, providing an incomparable research tool for students and researchers of US and Canadian history.  Covering over 2000 journals, this database is also a valuable source of scholarly book reviews.

Biography and Genealogy Master Index covers 1980-

Biography Index/Abstracts 1984-
     print edition in L-1-Index, 1946-

Book Review Digest 1984-
     print edition in L-1-Index, 1916-1993

Dissertation Abstracts International 1861- (Indexing) 1980- (Abstracts)
The Lehigh Guide to Finding Dissertations and Theses describes the coverage of Dissertation Abstracts, how to locate Lehigh Dissertations and the various methods you can use to obtain Dissertations through Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery or online delivery.  How to Use Digital Dissertations describes the process for downloading digital dissertations or ordering copies for a fee.

Essay and General Literature Index 1900-1993   print edition only. L-1-Index. (Request from Storage)

Historical Abstracts. 1971-
This database provides indexing to the journal literature on the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada, which are covered in America: History and Life)

Humanities and Social Sciences Index Retrospective  1907-1984
includes indexing of nearly 1,200 periodicals back to 1907. It covers important scholarly journals published throughout the 20th century in North America and Europe. It includes coverage of the entire range of the humanities and social sciences topics for nearly a century as well as coverage of many important scientific journals through the 1950's. The Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective allows searching of the equivalent of 46 printed volumes including: International Index (18 volumes, 1907 - March 1965), the Social Sciences & Humanities Index (9 volumes April 1965 – March 1974), the Humanities Index (10 volumes, April 1974 – March 1984) and the Social Sciences Index (9 volumes April 1974 – March 1983). The many subject areas covered include addiction studies, criminal justice, archaeology, art, environmental studies, ethics, film, gender studies, history, international relations, journalism, law, literature, minority studies, music, political science, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and urban studies. 

Humanities Index     print edition in L-1-Index, 1974- 1993 (Restricted storage, use Humanities and Social Sciences Index Retrospective)

International Index to Periodicals. 1907-1964 print edition only. L-1-Index (LMC Annex - Temporarily Unavailable)

Official Index to the Times (London)  1906 -1980

Palmers Index to the Times (London)  1790-1905

Pooles Index to Periodical Literature. 1802-1906 print edition only. L-1-Index (Mini-Linderman Reference Collection - Fairchild Library)

Readers Guide to Periodical Literature   print edition in L-1-Index, 1900- 1992 (Request from Storage if years 1983-1992 are needed, otherwise
    see Readers Guide Retrospective Database below)

Readers Guide Retrospective.  1890-1982
Comprehensive indexing of the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States reflecting the history of 20th century America.

Social Sciences Index     print edition in FM-3-South, 1973-1994

Victorian Database
The Victorian Database lists books, articles, and dissertation abstracts on every field of nineteenth-century British studies

WorldCat
This specialized tool is essentially a catalog of the books, manuscripts, documents , journal holdings  and other materials in libraries in  the U.S. and internationally.It is not an index to articles in journals. Materials in these collections can date back to 1200 .

Online Reference Book Services

Oxford Reference Online - multi-part database of the online versions of seminal Oxford University Press texts. Each topical division contains the searchable version of the latest edition of published dictionaries and encyclopedias. Includes such works as the full text of the Oxford Companion to British History, Oxford Companion to United States History and the Oxford Companion to World War II.

XRefer Plus - a collection of reference books including encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri and books of quotations as well as subject-specific reference titles.

Newspaper Resources at Lehigh Libraries: Historical Collections and Runs

Colonial & early U.S. Newspapers on Microfilm at the Lehigh Libraries

For more recent newspaper coverage -

Current  Newspaper Subscriptions at the Lehigh Libraries

Lexis/Nexis Academic
 
Morning Call, online 1996- present, Microfilm: 1987-2003

See New York Times Historical listed under Databases/indexes.

Useful Gateways and digital archives for Historical Materials on the WWW:

Gateways:

WWW - Virtual Library: History
http://www.ku.edu/history/VL/index.html

Voice of the Shuttle - History Page
http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2713

Selected Major Digital Archive Collections:

American Memory - The Library of Congress continues to develop this digital collection of its historical materials

Avalon Project - A collection of historical, diplomatic and legal texts from Yale Law School

Digital Scriptorium - Medieval and Renaissance texts from the special collections departments of a consortium of major universities.

Documenting the American South - 19th century American South materials from the University of North Carolina

Making of America - full text primary materials on Ameican Social History covering 1850- 1900

U.S. Government Documents

Congressional Publications

American State Papers   Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States. Covers the early national period from approx. 1789- 1836.
38 Volumes.  FM -3- North, 327.73 A51214.  The Library of Congress also provides electronic access to the ASP at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwsp.html
 

U.S. Serial Set. Pre 1932 volumes housed in the Library's Remote Storage collection. Others in FM-2-DOC Government Documents Collection . A selected number of the Serial Set documents are available on the Library of Congress website: A Century of Law Making for a New Nation.
 

Indexing:

CIS U.S. Serial Set Index - covering 1789-1969                          015.73 C749c FM-2-DOC-R

CIS Index to publications of the United States Congress -1970-    015.73 C749i FM-2-DOC-R

Checklist of United States Public Documents 1789- 1909,            015.73 U5ch3 FM-2-DOC-R

      ( use this tool to determine which Serial Set volumes are held in the Lehigh Collection.)
 

Congressional Committee Hearings

Lehigh's hearing collection is spotty prior to 1960. After that the collection is very extensive. Located in in Superintendent of Documents classification scheme under "Y4.." in Government Documents Department.

Indexing:

CIS Congressional Committee Hearings Index - 1833-1969       348.731 C579 FM-2-DOC-R

CIS Index to publications of the United States Congress -1970- 015.73 C749i FM-2-DOC-R

Congressional Record 1873- Microform and Paper copies         328.732 C74r FM-3-South
 

U.S. Decennial Census Reports

Located in the Government Documents, Reference Area under call number: 317.3 U584

1790, First Census of the United States
1800, Second Census
1810, Third Census
1820, Fourth Census
1830, Fifth Census
1840, Sixth Census
1850, Seventh Census
1860, Eighth Census
1870, Ninth Census
1880, Tenth Census
1890, Eleventh Census
1900, Twelfth Census
 

Located in the Government Documents, Reference Area under call number: 317.3 U58

1910, Thirteenth Census
1920, Fourteenth Census
1930, Fifteenth Census
1940, Sixteenth Census
1950, Census of Population and Housing
1960, Census of Population and Housing
 

Located in the Government Documents Stacks under the Superintendent of Documents Number:

1970 - C 3.223/9: 970
1980 - C 3.223/6: 980
1990 - C 3.223/5: 990 ( also available on CD rom products and http://www.census.gov )
2000 - most data is on the American Factfinder Website. Some print and CD ROM materials in Gov Docs Collection.

SELECTED PRINT RESOURCES FOR HISTORICAL RESEARCH

Bibliographical Resources

American Historical Association's guide to historical literature / general editor, Mary Beth Norton ; associate editor, Pamela Gerardi. Oxford University Press, 1995.     016.9 A512 1995 (Mini-Linderman Ref - FM Library )

British Museum Catalogue. 263 vols.

Bibliothèque Nationale. Catalogue générale des livres imprimés. 231 vols. 017 P93

Charles Evans . American Bibliography (through 1800) 14 vols. 015.73 E92a

Roger Bristol. Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography. 015.73 E92ab

Clifford Shipton/James Mooney. Short-title Evans. 2 vols. Alphabetic index 015.73 E92aa

Ralph Shaw & Richard Shoemaker. American Bibliography, a Preliminary Checklist for 1801-1819
           22 vols. 015.73 S535a

Richard Shoemaker/Gayle Cooper. American Imprints. 1821-1846 20 vols. 015.73 S535aa

National Union Catalogue of Manuscript Collections. ca. 26 vols. 016.091 N277

Union List of Serials. 5 vols. 016.05 U52

Clarence Brigham. A History and Bibliography of American Newspapers (to 1820) 2 vols.
016.07 B855h 1962

Winifred Gregory. American Newspapers, 1821-1936. 016.07 A512 1967
 
 

Biographical Sources

National Cyclopedia of American Biography. many vols. 920.073 N277

Dictionary of National Biography. 22 vols. 920.042 D55 - see below for electronic version

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography- ONLINE version - coming SOON. Check the Database Finder for listing.

Who Was Who. 14 vols. 920.073 W628

New York Times Obituary Index [in Fairchild/Martindale Library]
 

Guides to Archives, Museums and Collections

Corporate Museums, Galleries, and Visitor Centers: a Directory. Vicot J. Danilov. Greenwood Press, 1991. L-REF 069.025 D186c

National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States: Federal Records, Index 1985.
Compiled by Victoria Agee, et.al. Chadwyck-Healy Inc, 1985. L-REF 081 N277f

National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States: Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Index 1983. Compiled by Victoria Agee. Chadwyck-Healy Inc, 1983. L-REF 081 N277m

Official Museum Directory 2000. American Association of Museums. National Register Publishing, 1999.
L-REF 069.0578 O32

Locating Manuscript Collections

search ASA for the subject - Manuscripts United States Catalogs

National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections  Linderman Reference  016.091 N277
The 26 printed volumes of this work provide descriptions of approximately 72,300 collections located in 1406 different
repositories with approximately 1,085,000 index references to topical subjects and personal, family, corporate, and geographic
names. These volumes were printed from 1959 to 1993. Since that time the catalog has been continued as an online product
which can be accessed from the Library of Congress NUCMC website:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/coll/nucmc

Guides to archives and manuscript collections in the United States: an annotated bibliography. Compiled by Donald L. DeWitt.
Greenwood Press, 1994 L-REF 973.016 D522g

Other web portals to manuscript and archive sites:

Ready, Net, Go: Archival Internet Resources

Repositories of Primary Sources
 
 

or use our Live Reference Chat Line

Revised January 2006 by Roseann Bowerman