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The University of Massachusetts Amherst
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Afro American Studies

A general guide to library research in Afro American Studies.

Library Guide to Educ 218:

Hip Hop Nation Language and Literacy Practices

Hip Hop Scholarship

Citation Management

Use a citation manager, such as Zotero to keep track of your research.

Put all your references in one place, create quick and easy bibliographies, build your knowledgebase for the rest of your career. For help, check out the online guides and webinars or Ask a Librarian. 

Some tips on using Chicago notation style with Zotero. 

If it's not at UMass, we'll get it for you - for free!

Use your Interlibrary Loan account to:

  • Borrow books, videos, and other materials not available in the Five College system.
  • Request electronic copies of articles and book chapters not available at UMass.

 

Databases

Why databases?

Databases help you efficiently find good scholarly journal articles on your chosen topic.

Tips for Databases:

  1. At a minimum, search Black Studies Center, Academic Search Premier, America: History and Life, and Web of Science.
  2. From off-campus locations, an OIT Computer Account is required to access licensed databases.
  3. Use RefWorks to manage your citations and create your bibliography.
  4. After you've run a search, use the button (if the database has it) to retrieve articles.

The following databases, are recommended for Afro Am topics:

 

Academic Search Premier - (includes full-text journal articles) Good for scholarly journal articles. Tip: For scholarly articles, limit the search to Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals in the front search screen

African American Biographical Database - A source for information on 19th and early 20th century African American lives and culture, from a digitized collection of books published 1790-1950.

African American Newspapers - Seven nineteenth-century African American newspapers in full text, including advertising, 1827-1902.

African American Song - 16,000 tracks of historical recordings of jazz, blues, gospel and other genres, 1890's-1970's.

America: History and Life - Scholarly article citations in American history with some full text links.

Biography in Context - Biographies of thousands of important people.

Black Studies Center combines several resources for research in Black Studies: Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, International Index to Black Periodicals (IIBP), The Chicago Defender, and the Black Literature Index. IIBP provided indexing and abstracting of 150 African, American and Caribbean periodicals, with full text of forty core journals. The Chicago Defender was at one point the most widely-read black newspaper in the country, with more than two thirds of its readership based outside Chicago.

Black Thought and Culture - Collection of books and other monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders and writers within the African American community from 1700s to 1975.

Black Women Writers - A growing collection of literary works by about 77 African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean women.

Book Review Digest - Great for book reviews.

ERIC - Articles and reports dealing with issues in education.

Ethnic Newswatch - Full-text articles from the newspapers, magazines and some scholarly journals of ethnic communities in the United States.

Google Scholar - Use this version of Google Scholar within UMass IP range to access many UMass online journal subscriptions.

Historical Pittsburgh Courier - The leading newspaper of the African American community in twentieth-century U.S. Covers 1911-2002.

JSTOR - Full text scholarly articles in many fields.

MEF Films Online - Educational films on current issues, by the Media Education Foundation. 

New Grove Music - Definitive encyclopedia for anything pertaining to music, instruments, composers, and musicians.

Sociological Abstracts - Scholarly article citations in sociology with some full text links.

Web of Science - Covers almost all English-language scholarly journals. Provides a means of tracing where an article is cited, as well as topic and author searching. Social sciences journals are covered since 1956.

Finding Books

To find books at UMass, you have two options.

1. Start with the Discover Search general search box on the library home page, www.library.umass.edu.  

Advantages:

This search gives you access to books and articles and more.

Citations can be exported directly to RefWorks or other citation managers.

2. Or, use the Five Colleges Library Catalog.

Advantages:

This catalog lets you search in some very specifc ways, for example, by Library of Congress Subject Heading. Be as specific as possible in your searching. Start with a subject search (use keyword if subject yields no results). Search by author, title, subject, keyword, call number, journal title, etc. For materials on a specific subject, enter your term(s) into the Subject or Keyword search boxes.

Citations can be exported directly to RefWorks or other citation managers.

To find books not at UMass