African American History

Use WorldCat to search for other books worldwide. Just find what you want and click on "Borrow from Another Library." After you have logged into your ILLiad account it's easy to transfer the bibliographic information, enter the maximum amount you are willing to pay (usually $0 for an in-state library), and submit. In most cases you will have the book in hand within a week.

Most books published before 1922 are out of copyright. Google has digitized entire copies of many titles and they are available to everyone. Just enter your search, click on Full view only, set your publication date range, and you will be amazed at what comes up. Even books published after 1922 will usually offer some pages or snippets, enough to determine if you want to ask for them on Interlibrary Loan.

One of our UT-Tyler history faculty members swears by Amazon to track down current books on detailed topics because they do such a good job of mining publishers' descriptions, table of contents, and sometimes the entire text for keywords. If you can't justify buying the book, just use the information to ask for it on Interlibrary Loan.

Think of theses and dissertations as "books before they were books." Some will appear in this database full image (about 1997 to present) and some citation only (back to the 1860s); some will have subject headings and some will be keyword only. Go on to Advanced Search and be creative with search terms. If you get too many hits limit your searching to the abstract. Dissertations have no indexes, but they have superb bibliographies that can lead you to additional sources.