Documentary Studies: Getting Started

This guide has been created for faculty and researchers of Documentary Studies. There are a myriad of print, electronic, and human resources available to you in support of your teaching and scholarly pursuits. Each tab of this guide will lead you to librarians and materials to help you design courses and develop your research. Please don't hesitate to contact any one of the subject specialist librarians at Duke Libraries to help you navigate our hundreds of databases and millions of books!

Online (Freely available.)

• Duke University Libraries Digitized Collections
• Documenting the American South from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• North Carolina Digital Collections from the State Library of North Carolina
• American Memory Project at the Library of Congress

Document and Double Take are journals of Duke's Center for Documentary Studies. Print copies of these journals are available at the Perkins and Lilly libraries.

The library catalog lets you search for books, journals, DVDs, music, and research materials that are available in the Duke University Libraries.

When you know exactly what you want:

• Search the library catalog by title or author of the work (Ex. Mccann, Colum).
• Use the catalog's advanced search for the most precise searching.

When you are starting a search on a new topic:

• Use the default keyword search to see what books we have on a particular topic (Ex. civil war).
• Click on relevant suggested subjects for more focused search results (Ex. united states - history - civil war, 1861-1865).

Click on Research Databases from the Libraries homepage. Filter databases by Subject to orient yourself and find scholarly resources in specific fields.

Click on Get it @ Duke to locate the full-text for items you find in the databases. A box will pop up and tell you if the item is available online or in print.

If the item you want is not available at Duke, request it from another library using Document Delivery/Interlibrary Loan.