Finding Primary Material from the Famine
Google Book Search:
Locating primary sources from the 1840's is an immediate problem for the serious researcher; obviously, magazines and newspapers reported on the famine. Books were written, travelers and other observers noted what they saw, other people spread the information or commented upon it as the news spread into the world. As news, opinion, and illustrations reached the press, material proliferated...but indexing did not.
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Search, change vocabulary, experiment, and search again. This is an extraordinarily rich database and persistence will be richly rewarded. You will be reading material that would have been nearly impossible to locate only a few years ago!
WorldCat:
Go to WorldCat from the Drew Library Research Resources page. Go immediately to Advancedsearching...you need more tools! Look over the dropdown menus next to the search boxes, the line for date limits, the possibility of restricting results (this is not a good database for searching periodical articles), and the other available tools. The dropdowns, for instance, can be set to Place of Publication or Author, among other choices. Choose words and phrases as above...phrases need to be bracketed by quotation marks, as "potato famine". OR terms can be put within a search box, as "famine or hunger or starvation." Again, the year brackets can be added to locate early books or left out to trace the recent. When you locate a good book, open the citations and look at the subject terms to improve your search. Here, you are searching the holdings of thousands of libraries worldwide with modern cataloging. Books owned by Drew will be noted, books only available from other libraries may be ordered from Interlibrary Loan.
Other Googles:
Try Google Advanced or Google Advanced Image Search.
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