Library Subject Guides
As a History student, you are expected to find and use high quality literature. You'll need to use a range of different sources and demonstrate your ability to find good results in order to impress your tutors and to develop your research skills.
Books can be a great place to start your reading around a topic.
History books are located in the Q section on the second floor of the JB Morrell Library. Many books will also be available online as e-books. Look for the links in YorSearch, under the View It section of each book.
| Shelf location | Subject |
|---|---|
| Q | History |
| Q 30 | Ancient History |
| Q 40 | Europe |
| Q 50 | Asia |
| Q 60 | Africa |
| Q 70 | North America |
| Q 80 | South America |
| Q 90 | Australasia and islands of the Pacific |
The Library subscribes to a large number of e-books. You can access individual e-books via YorSearch, but you may also wish to search across e-book collections for relevant material:
All journal titles are listed on YorSearch, and can be found by searching the journal title.
If you don't have a specific title in mind, you can browse journals in your subject area on Browzine. Journals are organised by field of research, such as:
The following titles are available online as individual newspaper archives. For a more comprehensive list of newspaper titles see the Newspapers section on the Library's E-resources Guide.
The Library holds print and microform collections of UK government publications. Guides are available to help you use these publications:
Much of the current government information is available via the Web. The Politics Subject Guide is also a useful place to start.
See the Law Subject Guide for full details of searching for legal sources.
Printed copies of law reports are available in the Morrell Library at J REPORTS. These include:
We have a large microform collection in the library. These are in a number of different formats: microfilms, microfiche and microcards. To search for this material in YorSearch, enter a term (for example British Library) and filter the resource type in the right hand menu to ‘Microform’. You can ask for help with using microforms at the Library Help Desk.
If we don’t have the microform material you need you can request it through our Interlending service and we will try and source it for you. You can also make use of our free minibus service to the British Library at Boston Spa to consult the material held there in person.
All University PhD and MPhil theses are available via the library catalogue. Masters theses for some subjects are held in the Library for 6 years.
All York research students registered in or after October 2009 are required to upload their thesis into the White Rose Research Online, a shared online repository for academic publications from the Universities of York, Sheffield and Leeds.
You can also access theses from outside the University:
To start a more detailed search for articles and other research evidence, you'll need to use online databases. These are collections of resources that allow you to search for articles from hundreds of different journals at the same time.
This link opens in a new windowWatch this video to learn more about Gale Digital Scholar Lab and the wide variety of text data mining applications available within it. As well as integrating with the Gale Primary Sources collections that the Library owns, the Lab can be used to analyse your own text based datasets, so is of value to all research disciplines.
You can access all of the resources listed within the video via our E-Resources Guide.
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