ELECTRONIC ARCHIVES AND BIBLIOGRAPHIES:
There are thousands of bibliographical databases, but some are particularly helpful for historians. Unfortunately many are proprietary databases, for which you need to pay annual subscriptions. Fortunately the Texas Tech University Library has purchased some institutional subscriptions which you can access IF YOU ENTER THROUGH THE TEXAS TECH LIBRARY NETWORK and identity yourself through eraider. From a Texas Tech computer or from your eraider account, go to the Library Web site. On the left of your screen, under “Electronic Resources" you should click on “Find Databases.” This takes you to a screen with an alphabet index and below it a box into which you can type titles. If, for example, you wanted to access the JSTOR database, you either click the "J" in the alphabet and find JSTOR in the alphabetized list of databases that appears; or alternatively you can type JSTOR into the box and hit "enter."
JSTOR is an electronic archive of
almost 2000 journals, including many historical journals. It has a
relatively intuitive interface, but there are
tutorials. If you know the bibliographical information concerning a particular article that
you would like to consult (or even just a few accurate words of it), you can type
that information into the search box that opens up on the front page and, if the
article is in JSTOR, it will appear. If your subject has some rather
distinctive search term--as for example an investigation of some aspect of the
career of Richard Lionheart--a "Lionheart" search can give you a quick and dirty
review of the available literature. But more advanced search options are
avialable. Many book reviews are stored in JSTOR, allowing you to quickly access
information on books that you may or may not want to consult. The "Browse"
option on the site produces an alphabetically organized index of the journals
stored, a list that sporadically increases. However, the content is
presented in photographed pages, not in text files, so that not all systems can
search or copy sections of articles.
Project Muse is a much smaller but similar archive, more focused on the humanities and social sciences, offering 200 joournals from non-profit publishers. Because it lacks JSTOR's five year rolling wall, it can actually offer more recent content than JSTOR Its search engine offers author, title, and subject field options, and it it works smoothly once you have figured out where to click.
ITER: Gateway to the MIddle Ages and Renaissance is Texas Tech's best database for medieval studies. It includes "more than 1.2 million citations of secondary source material about the European Middle Ages and Renaissance" (defined as years 400-1700). But this is a serial bibliography, not an archive. Thus when you locate a bibliographical reference in ITER you still need to find the actual item in the library, by interlibrary loan, or someplace else online. When you access the ITER interface, through the TTU Library system, you need to click on the box for "ITER Bibliography." That will give you a search box into which you can type information. If you are working on a medieval research project, this is a great way to look up all the relevant works of particular authors or those with particular search terms in the title. Books and book reviews are indexed. While archives such as JSTOR and Project Muse can get you to useful materials more quickly, they index only the limited samples of the literature found in the journals that they cover whereas ITER attempts to be universal. However, the actual ITER project is only about a quarter century old, and, while its references are fairly inclusive from the 1980s forward, it has not always caught up with earlier bibliography.
Other historical fields also have their own electronic serial bibliographies and databases--reference librarians and the historians who teach specialized fields can help you discover what Texas Tech has available.