HIST A477: Politics and Political Movements in 20th Century U.S. History

RefWorks  

RefWorks -- an online research management, writing and collaboration tool -- is designed to help researchers easily gather, manage, store and share all types of information, as well as generate citations and bibliographies.

Set up an account using your UAA/APU user ID and Password, and start organizing and sharing your research.

1.  Use Control-F (PC) or Command-F (Mac) to search for a word or phrase in a page of text.

2.  When on a page of links, you can very often press the Control Key (PC) or Command Key (Mac) at the same time as you click on a link to open that link in a separate tab; using this technique, you don't have to use your back button all of the time to get back to your page of results.

3.  In a Google search, site:domain will get results ONLY from that domain. (i.e., site:alaska.gov PFD)

4.  But -site:domain will get results from everywhere EXCEPT that domain! (i.e., -site:alaska.gov PFD)

5.  When using ebooks - as with books - the index can be of great help.  One ebook I've included on many of the tabs is:

Which Side Are You On? : 20th Century American History in 100 Protest Songs 

The Table of Contents (often abbreviated TOC) is nice for general categories, but you have to read through them.  And where, for example, is 'Anti-War'? It's not in the TOC.  Can you imagine the 20th century without anti-war protest songs?  Choose the Index from the Table of Contents.  Anti-war is the obvious term, but there's nothing there.  The most prominent war protesting was done during the Vietnam War, so check Vietnam - and there are a number of entries, starting on p.1.  You could scr-o-o-o-l-l-l all the way back to the top - or you could see which page number looks interesting (sorry, no live links in this index!) and look for the page number box that's usually at the top right of the screen.  The Woodstock festival is on pp.1-2; type 1 in the page number box, press Enter, and there's Woodstock!   Try it with the Iraq War.  Or for the environment, try Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.

6.  You can certainly use 'Search Inside The Book,' too, but major index entries are often subdivided by topic and can be more efficient than working your way through a hundred results of the same word or name one by one.  'Search Inside The Book' uses keywords; it's just matching what you type in, while the index was created by a person making decisions about what's most important in the book.  Both are useful.

Ask A Librarian
Call, chat, email, or visit the reference desk.