Ship Discovery Search is our most comprehensive search tool, covering newspapers, journal articles, books and videos. It is the one comprehensive way to identify and access all our print and e-books holdings.
Our largest individual academic e-book collection, including over 200,000 books. It is a good first starting place for research on topics in ancient and medieval history worldwide.
Available on campus or off-campus with your Ship ID
This is our largest single publisher e-book database It features a large collection of recent scholarly books relevant ancient and medieval history. Although accessible through Ship Discovery Search, it is also helpful to browse and search it directly.
A large interdisciplinary database covering literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, etc. Contains current full text scholarly journals which cover these fields and a large collection of recent scholarly books. Useful to browse and search in the entire book collection, even though Shippensburg only subscribes to a portion of the ebooks.
Access from on campus or off campus with Ship ID.
Search Tip for Primary Sources
Particularly in Ship Discovery Search, find search terms for your topic, then add the following search to another row on the search screen:
sources OR primary OR document* OR sourcebook OR autobiog* OR memoir* OR diar* OR correspondence OR letters
One of the largest commercial book databases in the world. It has powerful search software and many features to lead you to related titles. A very useful starting point to get some beginning, current titles on your topic.
The world's largest book database, WorldCat serves as a shared library catalog for 25,000+ libraries worldwide. Contains links to books, periodical titles, videos, internet resources, and other cataloged resources in libraries. It also contains selected collections of periodical articles. Access from on campus or off campus, with no ID required.
This database contains the full-text of several million, mostly older books that are out of copyright, and provides partial view and search capabilities for millions of more recent titles that are still under copyright protection.
This database, which we have trial access to until March 13, includes the full-text of virtually all books published in English from 1450-1700. This is an extraordinary source for primary source materials for those students with topics from the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly in England.
Using Book Databases for Primary Sources
For students beginning research on a topic, published books are best place to go for primary sources. As you do more detailed research at a later date, unpublished materials such as letters and diaries in archival collections become more important.
Published books are good for finding a variety of primary sources, including:
Separate edition of a specific work, i.e. Xenophon's Cyropaedia
Collected edition of an author's work that might contain the specific text you want, i.e. Xenophon, with an English Translation (7 vols)
Specialized collections of sources by an author on a specific topic, i.e. Plutarch on Sparta
Topical collections or anthologies of primary texts, i.e., The Greek City-States, a Sourcebook
This collection features over 20 million freely available books and texts and "a collection of 2.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account"--website.
This site provides access to electronic books from many of the most important web e-book collections. The great value in this smaller selective site is that it includes texts from a wide range of digitization projects. Access is free but very brief registration is required.
HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository that provides long-term access for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.
