English 2510 Creative Writing: Intermediate Fiction

Instructor: Stephanie Carpenter 
Librarian: Anne Barker

Background Sources via the MERLIN catalog

Browsing the MERLIN catalog can turn up a wide variety of background material: specialized encyclopedias, statistics, diaries, pictures, maps, recordings, government reports.

Keyword searching can be very specific.  Subject headings work more like a file-cabinet: broader categories, but more organization.

Combine your theme words with any of the following sub-headings to look for specific types of publications. 
For example: (solit* or lonel*) and aspects as a keyword search to look for materials on the psychological or social or religious aspects of loneliness or solitude.

If you don't like the results, try broader, narrower, or synonymous theme words.

personal narratives

sources
fiction
handbooks
encyclopedias
pictorial works
diaries

dictionaries

statistics
in literature
in art
aspects
history
maps
correspondence

Statistics or Demographics

The Statistical Abstract of the United States is the first place to look for current U.S. statistics.
Historical Statistics of the United States:Earliest Times to the Present (Ready Ref. HA202.H57 2006) compiles historical statistics.

The Value of a Dollar: Prices and Incomes in the United States (Ref. HB235.U6 V35) and The Value of a Dollar: Colonial Era to the Civil War, 1600-1865 (Ref. HB235.U6 V349 2005) give examples of typical prices and incomes.

Newspapers and Journal Articles, both current and historical

Academic Search Premier is a good general database.
America: History and Life is designed for the study of all aspects of American History.

Lexis-Nexis Academic
Provides the full text of many newspapers, generally from the mid-1980s to the present, although coverage varies depending on the newspaper. 

ProQuest Historical Newspapers contains the full text of the New York Times (1851-1999) and the Wall Street Journal (1889-1985)

You'll find many newspapers on microfilm in Special Collections in the NW corner of the 4th floor. Many are not indexed, so you'll need to browse by date to find things.  Here's a geographical listing of newspapers in Special Collections.
The State Historical Society's Newspaper Library also holds many Missouri newspapers, of which some are available online through The Historic Missouri Newspaper Project.

Readers' Guide Retrospective provides indexing of journals and magazines from 1890-1982.

American Periodical Series  
Full text of American magazines and journals 1740-1900, when complete.

Images and Multimedia

ArtStor is a database of high-resolution images of all sorts.
The Associated Press Mulitmedia Archive provides images, sound clips, graphics, and text covering 160 years.
The Internet Archive provides open source text, images, video, and audio recordings.