Subject Guide
Researching for Your Class
Research - Where to start?
A good way to explore a topic idea is by first getting a handle on the overall picture. Get an overview of your topic by looking at reference books or online resources that provide general summaries. These should include bibliographies listing further sources that most likely will cover your topic in greater detail. The overviews will give you an introduction to a subject and to the relevant terminology and issues as you explore various ideas. If you have already settled on a topic, the bibliographies will provide additional titles to investigate.
- Trinity College Catalog
(One way to begin finding books in your subject area is by doing a general keyword search on a topic using natural language. If you find a useful-looking book in your list of results, clicking on a Subject term in the record will lead you to other books on that topic.)
Library of Congress Call Numbers
Once you find a book in the catalog you want to use, note its Call Number in the record. Use the Floor Plans link to the right of the record, or at the top of each library page, to see what floor contains the first letter of your Call Number. Go to that area and look at the signs on the end of each row of books. Follow the Call Numbers down the row until you reach your book.
NOTE that books with Call Numbers that say Quarto (oversized books) will be in a slightly different location on each floor map due to their larger size.
CTW Consortium
The acronym CTW stands for the Connecticut College, Trinity College, and Wesleyan University consortium of libraries. As a student at Trinity College, you have the same borrowing privileges at Conn and Wesleyan as you have here at Trinity. For example, you can borrow books for 28 days and renew them 3 times.
Scholarly articles usually address one narrow aspect of a larger topic, so it is generally wise to search for articles after you have a picture of your topic as a whole and what the surrounding issues are. Then you can begin to dig deeper into your topic.
The following journal databases are useful for students researching architectural history.
- JSTOR
Archive of past issues of scholarly journals from all areas of study. Includes full runs of covered journals, excluding content from the past 2-5 years. Includes full runs of covered journals. Free access to the Security Studies and Sustainability collections is available through June 30, 2021. - Project Muse
Full text of all journals of the John Hopkins University Press as well as some other selected university publishers. An important academic resource for the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Coverage generally from 1990s forward. See 'More Info' about e-books
By popular request, the library has re-activated our e-book subscription. Books are available to download without DRM (digital rights management) restrictions.
You can find scholarly articles in this search engine, too--it searches the content of our databases, as well as other scholarly web sites, and links to full text when it's available.
Note: you must be on the Trinity network to get the full text!
Reminder: Always cite your sources.
And don't forget to cite the source of any images you use in papers or presentations, just as you would cite other resources.
- Cite Source
Everything you need to know about creating citations, with information on style guides, copyright, citation management tool Zotero, and more.