Check for bibliography notes in secondary sources. This will often lead you to listings of primary source materials, other secondary sources and authors prominent in the area which you are researching. The on-line library catalog is the primary source for accessing the collections of the Bowdoin College Libraries. The catalog contains electronic bibliographic records for books, periodicals, videorecordings, CD ROMs, and sound recordings. For the government documents collection and special collections materials, specialized indexes may need to be consulted since the records for those collections are only partially entered into the library catalog.
Most research begins with a subject search.
This function is very powerful and flexible in an on-line catalog, but the best search results are still obtained by use of the standardized subject headings found in the Library of Congress Subject Headings books. Library Gateway Academic Universe is a fulltext database of news and legal information. Time coverage for the various newspapers, journals, and newswire services varies from publication to publication, generally no earlier than 1980. This source indexes articles, books and dissertations about the history of the United States and Canada published throughout the world. It is a subject index which provides citations and abstracts for the works indexed.