Welcome! This guide will serve as a starting point for Shippensburg University students wishing to conduct research on various aspects of civil liberties. You will find sources that introduce you to your topic and keep you up-to-date with links to news articles, research websites, journal articles, research reports and other selected key publications, books & E-books, research organizations and advocacy groups, data sources, and links to general and specialized databases for further research.
Search Terms
Main Term(s): civil liberties, civil rights Related Terms: American Civil Liberties Union, U.S. Bill of Rights, First Amendment, privacy Broader Terms: human rights, liberty Narrower Terms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion
This is the standard encyclopedia of U.S. law, featuring many articles related to civil liberties, including articles on specific civil liberties (freedom of speech, religion, assembly, etc.)
The Internet is great--until someone hacks your accounts or otherwise violates your privacy. This expert book provides a thorough and up-to-date overview of the key issues and risks relative to online privacy and explains how to counter those risks with solutions everyone needs to know.
American Constitutional Law provides a comprehensive account of the nation's defining document. Based on the premise that the study of the Constitution and constitutional law is of fundamental importance to understanding the principles, prospects, and problems of America, this text puts current events in terms of what those who initially drafted and ratified the Constitution sought to accomplish. This edition focuses on individuals' rights and responsibilities.
Social networks, the defining cultural movement of our time, offer many freedoms. But as we work and shop and date over the Web, we are opening ourselves up to intrusive privacy violations by employers, the police, and aggressive data collection companies that sell our information to any and all takers. This book reveals how routinely colleges reject applicants due to personal information searches, robbers use vacation postings to target homes for break-ins, and lawyers scour our social media for information to use against us in court.
The essays in this volume consider issues at the intersection of freedom of expression and racial, cultural, and gender diversity. Negotiating the claims of freedom of expression as they come into open conflict with a wide diversity of viewpoints, both domestically and internationally, has become an increasingly complex task. The present volume seeks both to provide fresh insight into the philosophical grounds for limiting government restriction of expression and to address current tensions between freedom of expression and pluralism.
While it is an advocacy organization, Human Rights Watch is a key data collecting agency on human rights issues worldwide. This link is to its website on human rights in the U.S.
Amnesty International is a global movement of more than 3 million supporters, members and activists in over 150 countries and territories who campaign to end grave abuses of human rights. See also Amnesty International USA.
This library database serves as a search engine to search most library databases at the same time, including magazine and journal databases, e-book collections, and the library catalog. News databases are not included in a comprehensive way. Supplement this with direct searching of ProQuest Newstand and Lexis Nexis Academic. Search results default to items that the library owns, either in online or print format. Remove the "Available in Library Collection" limiter to retrieve items available through interlibrary loan.
Academic Search Complete is our most important general database. covering all subject areas. It is useful for research in all classes, as it includes 26+ million newspaper, magazine, and journal articles, with 50% of these immediately available in full-text.
Access from on campus or off campus with Ship ID.
Contents indexed in Ship Library Discovery Search.
One of the most comprehensive news databases in the world, ProQuest Global Newstream includes access to over 3000 news sources, including 2,200 newspapers, as well as blogs, podcasts, websites and news wire feeds worldwide.
Development note - alt link use stats: (91 total hits, 33 since 7/2012 -- 10 /2012)
This library database is one of the world's largest full-text databases, including very extensive news, legal, and business information. Along with ProQuest Newstand, it is our primary source of news information.
Covers scholarly publications in sociology, social work, criminal justice, and related fields. Contains >2.5 million articles and other materials (70% in full text) with deep coverage from 1960 and some back to 1882.
Political Science Complete is an extensive full-text collection and index to political science literature. It includes online full-text for 500+ academic journals in political science and related fields. It also provides cover to cover indexing for a total of 1,000 political science journals and selective coverage for an additional 1,000 journals in related fields. It also includes a collection of some 340 reference and other political science e-books. In this way, Political Science Complete forms the perfect in-depth complement to the broader coverage found in our current PAIS database.
Library database that covers the most important and controversial issues of the day. Contains the full text of CQ Researcher, a weekly publication. Each issue provides a comprehensive overview and background essay, data tables and graphs, chronology, pro-con starter, and list of major research and advocacy groups. Includes extensive lists of sources and hot-linked footnotes throughout.
Access from on campus or off campus with Ship ID.
Quality Web Sources
High Quality Web Source Finder
Use this search tool to find high quality web sources for your research. You can limit by In-Depth Journalism, Newpaper Topic Guides, Science News, CRS (Congressional Research Service) Reports, and Web Directories. Please Note: Several ads will appear first in the results list.
ProPublica is a freely available website produced by a major online non-profit news organization dedicated to in-depth investigative reporting about current issues in the public interest. ProPublica features two kinds of reporting: Investigations, which include a series of in-depth articles about a topic (often between 15 and 30 articles - major topics range from dozens to 100+ articles). MuckReads are shorter reports featuring investigative journalism from other news agencies. Major areas of interest include, among others: healthcare and the health industry, fracking, censorship, money and politics, and financial and economic issues.
Reveal is a freely available website and the online media platform for the Center for Investigative Journalism, a major online non-profit news organization, founded in 1977, and dedicated to in-depth investigative reporting about current issues in the public interest. They publish series of investigative reports on a topic (typically between 10 and 20). Major areas of coverage include: criminal justice, the environment, guns, health care, labor and employment, national security, religion, surveillance and privacy, and veterans.
The Center for Public Integrity is a freely available website produced by a major online non-profit news organization dedicated to in-depth investigative reporting about current issues in the public interest, with a special focus on accountability and fairness, especially in terms of the role and influence of money. Topics featured include politics and elections, national security business, the environment, juvenile justice and health.
NPR is one of the most important freely-available sources of investigative journalism. It includes excellent topical pages but these are not easily browseable on the website. Use the High Quality Web Source Finder search box to locate the topical pages for your issue.
This very high quality web site, located at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and sponsored by leading academic journalism programs, guides journalists and other researchers to find scholarly sources related to many of the most important topics in the news. Whenever the source is not available in full-text, use the discovery layer or library A-Z journal list to get library access to the article or to order it on interlibrary loan.
Newspaper Topic Guides
A number of important national newspapers have topic or issue sections of their website that bring together all the paper's articles on particular topics. The leading example of this is "Times Topics" from the New York Times. Each topic guide/section has a search tool that lets you refine your search.
Unfortunately, these sections are often not easy to browse or locate on the newspaper websites. Use the "High Quality Web Source Finder" search box above to search for your topic. Then choose the Newspaper Topic Guides tab to look for these in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune. If you should hit a pay wall when browsing these newspapers, simply search for articles from any of these three papers using the ProQuest Newstand library database.
Congressional Research Service Reports (CRS Reports)
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is the public policy research division of Congress. It issues detailed research reports on a very wide range of issues. CRS doesn't maintain its own website, but its reports are available through several organizations and libraries.
Website that attempts to make all CRS reports easily available to the public. The result of a bi-partisan movement to get Congress to pass a bill requiring open access.
The University of North Texas maintains a freely available digital library collection of Congressional Research Service reports, with the goal "to provide integrated, searchable access to many of the full-text CRS reports that have been available at a variety of different web sites since 1990" -- website. Best search tool for finding CRS reports. Update holdings of specific reports through the Federation of American Scientists or through a web search on the name of a report.
This freely available website produced by the Vanderbilt University Libraries provides an alphabetical topical directory to important websites on some 50 current issues. These guide pages typically include sections for these kinds of web resources: Basic Sites, Government, International, News, Statistics, Interest Groups and Research Centers and Other Educational Sites.
Welcome! This guide will serve as a starting point for Shippensburg University students wishing to conduct research on various aspects of civil liberties. You will find sources that introduce you to your topic and keep you up-to-date with links to news articles, research websites, journal articles, research reports and other selected key publications, books & E-books, research organizations and advocacy groups, data sources, and links to general and specialized databases for further research.
Gale Encyclopedia of American Law
Online Privacy: A Reference Handbook by 
Profiling and Criminal Justice in America: A Reference Handbook (2nd ed.) by 
American Constitutional Law: The Bill of Rights and Subsequent Amendments (9th ed.) by 
I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy by 
Freedom of Expression in a Diverse World by 
