A research tip from a friendly neighborhood librarian!
I want to introduce you to the wonderful world of subject librarians and Libguides.
I’m sure it’s common knowledge that scholars and writers have academic specialties. The same is true for subject librarians! Most libraries use a tool called Libguides to amass and describe resources on a given topic, course, work, person, etc. (I use them for everything. All hail Libguides.) These resources can include: print and ebooks, databases, journals, full-text collections, films/video, leading scholars, data visualizations, recommended search terms, archival collections, digital collections, reliable web resources, oral histories, and professional organizations.
So, consider that somewhere out there in the world, there may be a librarian with a subject specialty on the topic you’re writing on, and this librarian may have made a libguide for it.
Are you writing about vampires?
Duquesne University has a guide on Dracula
University of Northern Iowa: Monsters and Religion
Fontbonne University has a particularly good one on Monsters, Ghosts, and Mysteries
Washington University in St. Louis: a course guide on Monsters and Strangeness
How about poverty?
Michigan State: Poverty and Inequality with great recommended terms and links to datasets
Notre Dame: a multimedia guide on Poverty Studies.
Do you need particular details about how medicine or hygiene was practiced in early 20th century America?
UNC Chapel Hill: Food and Nutrition through the 20th Century (with a whole section on race, gender, and class)
Brown University: Primary Sources for History of Health in the Americas
Duke University: Ad*Access, a digital collection of advertisements from the early 20th century, with a section on beauty and hygiene
You can learn about Japanese Imperial maps, the American West, controlled vocabularies, Crimes against art and art forgeries, anti-Catholicism, East European and Eurasian vernacular languages, geology, vaudeville, home improvement and repairs, big data, death and dying, and conspiracy theories.
Because you’re searching library collections, you won’t have access to all the content in the guides, and there will probably be some link rot (dead links), but you can still request resources through your own library with interlibrary loan, or even request that your library purchase the resources! Even without the possibility of full-text access, libguides can give you the words, works, people, sites, and collections to improve your research.
Search [your topic] + libguide and see what you get!
More people should know this