Anthropology 33: Transnational Migration in Europe
Fall 2006
GENERAL SOURCES | ENCYCLOPEDIAS, ATLASES, ETC. | BIBLIOGRAPHIES AND INDEXES | A FEW WORDS ABOUT JOURNAL ARTICLES | WORLD WIDE WEB RESOURCES
GENERAL SOURCES
The Five-College
Library Catalog is a good place to start library research. You can search for books, journals, and moving pictures in all Five Colleges, or you can limit the search to Amherst's holdings. All books are listed by their AUTHORS, TITLES, and SUBJECTS, and you can also search by KEYWORD.
KEYWORD searching is not likely to yield a comprehensive list of books on any particular topic, but it's often a good way to start; type in words that seem to you to best characterize your topic, say "South Asians” England (use quotation marks around multi-word phrases to invoke exact-phrase searching), then, if you browse through the resulting list, select titles relevant to your research interests and examine the FULL VIEW catalog record, and note which official subject headings are assigned, you can click on those and do a more thorough SUBJECT search.
SUBJECT searching as such (Subject begins with) requires that you use the exact word or phrase libraries have chosen to describe your topic; for example, libraries list books generally about South Asians in the U.K. under South Asians - Great Britain; related but narrower subject headings, like East Indians - England, may also be worth exploring. Note that subject headings are hierarchically organized so that major headings, like Immigrants, have useful geographical and topical subdivisions; browse those for maximum success.
To see if Amherst owns a journal, highlight the Journal title keywords option in the Basic Search screen of the Catalog, then type in the journal's name in quotation marks.
For quick background information, try Britannica Online from any computer on campus; just click
on the colored link.
ENCYCLOPEDIAS, ATLASES
Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Thousand Oaks CA, Sage, 2006. 5 volumes.
Some short and some longer articles, many of which have brief bibliographies, on themes, prominent theories and theorists, ethnic groups, etc. (Ref GN11 E63 2006)
Europe Since 1945: An Encyclopedia. N.Y. & London, Garland, 2001. 2 volumes.
Concise coverage of events, issues, prominent individuals, etc. in postwar history. (Ref D 1051 E95 2001)
Encyclopedia of European Social History. N.Y., Scribner’s, 2001. 6 volumes.
10- to 20-page bibliographical essays (i.e. with dozens of recommended readings) on methodology, periods, regions, and themes. (Ref HN 373 E63 2001)
Historical Dictionary of European Imperialism. N.Y.,
Greenwood, 1991.
A one-volume collection of brief entries on places
and people; easy access to background info and fact-checking. (Ref D 217
H57 1991)
The Societies of Europe: The European Population Since 1945. Basingstoke UK & N.Y., Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Country-by-country profiles with tabular demographic information. (Ref HB 3581 A3 R684 2005)
An Atlas of International Migration. London, London, Hans Zell, 1993.
Maps and statistical information. A bit dated, but interesting and - with updating from other sources - potentially useful. (Ref G 1046 E27 S4 1993)
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHIES, INDEXES, AND DATABASES
Subject bibliographies and indexes, which list books and/or articles on particular topics, can lead you to substantial reading lists in your area of research; they are useful even when older and not including citations to current publications; online indexes enable you to update. The Reference collection on the main floor of Frost includes dozens of potentially useful book-length, print-format bibliographies in area, gender, and labor studies; to locate them, use official SUBJECT categories in the Library Catalog, guess at KEYWORD(s), and/or ask at the Reference Desk.
One key resource for research in anthropology/sociology is a set entitled Annual Reviews, a collection of bibliographical essays in a wide variety of disciplines, published once a year and available most conveniently in electronic form (click on the link for access to the advanced search page, highlight Anthropology, Sociology - and maybe Psychology too - in the “Publications” box, and enter your keywords in the search boxes).
Online indexes are computerized listings of journal articles and/or books, searchable, usually, by authors, titles, keywords, subjects, dates, etc. Among many possibly-relevant indexes, accessible by clicking on Research Databases in the Quick Links group on the left side of the Library Homepage, are Anthropological Index, Sociological Abstracts, The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), ASSIA: Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts, and EconLit. Area studies indexes like HLAS
Online: Handbook of Latin American Studies, The Bibliography of Asian Studies, and ABSEES: The American Bibliography of Slavic Studies may also work for you if your topic fits. Academic Search Premier is a multi-disciplinary index, more general in its coverage and therefore significantly more selective than those noted above, but it has the convenient advantage of including many electronic, full-text articles.
A FEW WORDS ABOUT JOURNAL ARTICLES
Printed and computerized indexes
and bibliographies provide citations to articles which may or may not
be owned by the Amherst College Library. To find out if and where we have
older issues of journals, you must look up each journal title (not article
titles or authors) in the Library Catalog. Be attentive to volume numbers
and dates which show up onscreen since sometimes we've started or stopped
a subscription in the middle of a run. Some older volumes of journals
may be housed in the Amherst College Depository, an off-campus storage
facility. You can request volumes from the Depository by filling out a
form which pops up when you select Requests from the
left side of the Library homepage, then Depository.
More and more journals are offering full-texts
in electronic form; those we subscribe to are linked to records in the
online Library Catalog and/or you can search for electronic versions using
the Journal
Locator, clickable here and from the box, above right. Also, in some online
indexes (like Sociological Abstracts and IBSS), a button labeled AC
Links permits you to search automatically for electronic versions of articles
you find cited; if the Library does not have access to an electronic version,
AC Links will search for a print-format version
in the Library Catalog.
WORLD WIDE WEB RESOURCES
The Library's 'Research and Using the Library' links provide reasonably direct, organized access to Internet resources like library catalogs in the U.S. and abroad, search engines for finding particular sites, and if you click on Subject and Course Guides and then on Anthropology & Sociology and/or Political Science, you’ll get to pre-selected, academically-oriented metasites, image collections, etc. Remember that the World Wide Web, unlike the Library, is largely un-refereed, that is, some of the information mounted may or may not be well-edited or even legitimate. Be skeptical, and read critically. Who's responsible for the site? What are their sources of information? Where and when was the site produced? Does it seem to be regularly maintained?
Comments regarding this page should be directed to: Michael Kasper