Encyclopedias attempt to summarize, as concisely as possible, the state of knowledge in a field of inquiry. Encyclopedias summarize the secondary literature, and are therefore often referred to as tertiary sources. Use encyclopedias to find background information on your topic, and to familiarize yourself with what is already known on the topic. A good encyclopedia can be a valuable starting point for your research, and often contains recommendations for additional reading.
Four online reference collections that students often find useful are:
Additional encyclopedias that would be specifically relevant for research in this course:
The purpose of bibliography is to list documents, usually published documents like books and articles. This type of bibliography is more accurately called "enumerative bibliography". An enumerative bibliography will attempt to be as comprehensive as possible, within whatever parameters established by the bibliographer.
Bibliographies will list both secondary and primary sources. They are perhaps most valuable to historians for identifying primary sources. (They are still useful for finding secondary sources, but increasingly historians rely on electronic resources, like article databases, to locate secondary sources.)
Think of a bibliography as a guide to the source base for a specific field of inquiry. A high quality bibliography will help you understand what kinds of sources are available, but also what kinds of sources are not available (either because they were never preserved, or because they were never created in the first place).
For more information on the role of bibliography in historical research, see our guide to Bibliography and Historical Research.
Catalogs are similar to bibliographies (see above), and the two are often grouped together, and can be used in similar ways and for similar purposes (discover of sources). The essential difference between bibliographies and catalogs is that former will list any documents known to have existed, while the latter will be lists of sources that are held by a particular library. Like bibliographies, many catalogs are now available online.
These databases identify biographical information published in periodicals, books, and encyclopedias.
Like the encyclopedias described above, these encyclopedias summarize what is known about a person, in shorter, article-length entries.
For help finding statistics and other kinds of data, contact Carissa Phillips in the Scholarly Commons. Below are some standard reference sources for locating statistics.
1. Jesse H. Shera, The Foundations of Education for Librarianship (New York: Becker and Hayes, 1972): 193.