A list of reference materials to help you get started on your project. This list is not exhaustive. Please get in touch with Catherine J. Minter if you need help.
General reference materials
Historical reference materials related to the national heritage and political development of the Middle East, Russia and the Balkans, the Caucasus, Southeast Asia, and China and the Far East.
Collections include:
Albania & Kosovo : political and ethnic boundaries, 1867-1946
Armenia : political and ethnic boundaries, 1878-1948
Caucasian boundaries : documents and maps, 1802-1946
Ethnic minorities in the Balkan States, 1860-1971
Greece : ethnicity and sovereignty, 1820-1994 : atlas and documents
Historical boundaries between Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia: documents and maps, 1815-1945
Montenegro : political and ethnic boundaries, 1840-1920
Oil resources in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus : British documents, 1885-1978
Proceedings of the Caucasian Archaeographical Commission, 1886-1904
Soviet Union political reports, 1917-1970
Yugoslavia : political diaries, 1918-1965
The online equivalent of the printed Encyclopedia Britannica and more. A fully searchable and browsable collection of authoritative references, including Britannica's latest article database, hundreds of recent articles not found in the print Britannica. Thousands of illustrations; references to biographies, geography and yearbooks are available.
Economic, political, historical, and geographic profiles of 250+ countries and global regions. Includes contact information for officials and features information on over 1,700 international organizations.
Europa World Plus is the online version of the Europa World Year Book and the nine-volume Regional Surveys of the World series:
Africa South of the Sahara
Central and South-Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Russia and Central Asia
The Far East and Australasia
The Middle East and North Africa
South America
Central America and the Caribbean
South Asia
The USA and Canada
Western Europe.
The Europa World Year Book was first published in 1926 and it covers political and economic information from more than 250 countries and territories. Europa World Plus includes a section that profiles various International Organizations, and there is a section that provides Comparative Statistics on countries along with accompanying data that can be exported as CSV and tab-delimited data.
This database only includes the most recent information.
Database of encyclopedias and specialized reference sources.
Encyclopedias and specialized reference resources in: Arts, Biography, History, Information and Publishing, Law, Literature, Medicine, Multicultural Studies, Nation and World, Religion, Science, Social Science
Authoritative research guides across a variety of subject areas developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians. Combines the features of an annotated bibliography and an encyclopedia.
Access to texts in the Oxford handbooks history series. Includes introductions to topics and a critical survey of the current state of scholarship in history.
Reference resources from the Oxford University Press. Includes English dictionaries and thesauruses, English language reference books, bilingual dictionaries, quotations, maps and illustrations, timelines and subject reference sources.
Access to peer-reviewed research articles across a range of disciplines.
Biographical materials
Biography is built on a foundation of more than 600,000 biographical entries covering international figures from all time periods and areas of study.
Providing coverage of the most searched and studied people, Biography includes over 5,000 portal pages on contemporary and historical figures. Reference content is offered alongside videos, audio selections, images, primary sources, and magazine and journal articles from hundreds of major periodicals and newspapers. This resource is continuously updated.
Biography and Genealogy Master Index (BGMI) provides more than 20 million biographical citations on more than 6 millions persons, living and deceased, from all fields of activity, covering more than 2,000 years of human history.
BGMI indexes entries from reference books such as Who's Who in America or the Dictionary of National Biography. It covers contemporary and historical figures, indicates birth and death dates and gives the title and edition in which relevant entries can be found.
Biographies of those who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century.
Online version of the 60-volume print Oxford DNB, published September, 2004, a major revision of the original Dictionary of National Biography and its supplements. Since 2005 regular updates have extended the Dictionary’s coverage, now including biographies of more than 60,000 people who died in or before the year 2016.
Worldwide index to biographical information on people from the 8th century B.C. to the present.
Provides access to biographical information on over 6 Million people. Includes 8.5 Million digital facsimile articles from biographical reference works. Each entry contains a brief biographical notation, citations to the original reference works in which biographical information about the individual can be found, and the location of those source works in the microform collections. The microform collections (on microfiche) are divided into sets, based on national or geographic designations. Among the microfiche sets held by the IUB libraries are: Archivo biográfico de España, Portugal e Iberoamérica [microform] = Arquivo biográfico de Espanha, Portugal e Ibero-América Archives biographiques françaises [microform] British biographical archive [microform] Scandinavian biographical archive [microform] Chinese biographical archive (CBA) [microform] African biographical archive [microform] Indian biographical archive [microform].
Materials on particular themes/topics
Authoritative reference resource for Jewish knowledge and life.
Since 1972, the Encyclopedia Judaica has been the leading source for information on the Jewish people, the Jewish faith and the state of Israel - how they have shaped and been influenced by our world.
The Encyclopedia Judaica is the authoritative reference resource for Jewish knowledge and life up to the present day. It is designed for both Jewish and non-Jewish readers and covers nine main subject categories: Contemporary Jewry, Education and modern scholarship, History, Jews in world culture, Judaism: practice, Judaism: thought, Language and literature, and Miscellaneous.
The standard reference work in the field of Islamic studies; electronic access to the 2nd ed., enhanced by the inclusion of an Index of proper names and an Index of subjects, and the ongoing 3rd ed.
Comprehensive, online research encyclopedia covering all areas of African history. Includes both primary and secondary materials and is updated regularly.
Digital encyclopedia covering the field of Asian history from prehistory to the present. Along with essays, it includes internet resources for research and teaching, audio, visual, video materials, digitized archives, and other primary sources.