Skip to Main Content

University Library

LibGuides

History 200C: Queer Sexualities

Introduces history majors to basic research library concepts, both for use in this course and in preparation for History 498. Provides both a broad overview of the source types collected by research libraries, as well as lists of specific sources relevant

Libraries

Libraries collect and preserve the graphic records of human experience.1 Not every experience is documented, and not every documented experience is collected and preserved. At the University of Illinois Library you have access to over 14 million printed books, 9 million microforms, 120,000 periodicals, 148,000 sound recordings, 1 million audiovisual resources, 280,000 e-books, 29,000 cubic feet of archival records, 3 terabytes of electronic records, and 650,000 maps—that’s over 24 million records available for your research.

Librarians often refer to these records as documents (see next page!).

Is this a Library?

Main Library Reading Room

University of Illinois Main Library Reading Room

HathiTrust Digital Library

HathiTrust Digital Library

History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library Microfilm Stacks

History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library Newspaper Stacks

History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library Newspaper Stacks

University of Illinois Library's Online Gateway

University of Illinois Library's Online Gateway

Research Libraries

Research libraries differ from other types of libraries in that they attempt to collect documents as comprehensively as possible, within certain parameters. Of course, given the enormous number of documents produced (both published and unpublished), even the largest research libraries, like University of Illinois, can collect only a tiny fraction of those documents...

Notes

1. Jesse H. Shera, The Foundations of Education for Librarianship (New York: Becker and Hayes, 1972), 193.