Skip to Main Content

English: Honors Students

Getting Started: Finding Background Information on Your Topic

Reference Resources:
Reference books -- either in print or online -- are great for finding background information on a topic. Find out biographical information on an author; key dates, socio/political history of a time period, important events, names of important scholars in the field, and a helpful bibliography for additional reading.

Here are a couple of options for finding reference material online:

Core English Research Tools

Find Books

  • MUSCAT Plus:  Musselman Library's Online Catalog and More!
    **Remember, use a Keyword Search to get started. Once you find books that look like what you generally want, start using appropriate Subject Headings to continue your search.

     
  • WorldCat:  Find books in libraries around the world!
    Use WorldCat to identify books and other materials that our library does not own. Then, request any item via Interlibrary Loan.

What is ILLiad?

  • ILLiad: ILLiad is the name of the library’s Interlibrary Loan system. Use ILLiad to request books and articles we don’t have in the library from other libraries around the world.
https://libguides.gettysburg.edu/c.php?g=1002796&p=7515131
libguides.gettysburg.edu
CC-MAIN-2024-30
37432
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:RDI5CHHJD7LT6IYEWTNWS7QJ4FZHDFOD
<urn:uuid:97dbd3c6-e4ef-4bae-b21c-a36d04626398>
2024-07-19T23:28:13Z
54.85.246.96
text/html
sha1:UUB63ZEFOYBBGVH4YBILTEWKAUDZU6P4
<urn:uuid:93a6c048-1808-4984-8c12-660cddaf79ab>
https://libguides.gettysburg.edu/c.php?g=1002796&p=7515131
response
<urn:uuid:5bec1e34-897b-4417-b0a7-cb936d4d2f74>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-30
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-148
software: Apache Nutch 1.20 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/