ENG 200: Advanced Composition -- Writing Identity: Books

Voyager

• Voyager should be your first stop whenever beginning a new research project. It holds the record for every item (books, journals, newspapers, microfilms, videos, audio recordings, manuscript collections and etc.) in every library in the UH system, from Hilo to Kauaʻi. While Voyager allows for many complex searches, on the most basic level what it is doing is allowing you to search for materials by title, author and subject. It does NOT generally allow you to search for the titles of articles within journals or the titles / authors of chapters within books (there are other strategies for these kinds of searches ... see below). There are occasional exceptions to this rule -- some book contents are listed in Voyager records; some journal articles have been cataloged separately in Voyager by title -- but as a rule of thumb when starting your research, assume that you are going to be searching for title, author or subject.

• Before you start searching, it's a good idea to log into the Voyager system, which you can do by clicking on the "Login to your account" link in the upper right hand of the Voyager search screen. This will not only save you a step when you begin requesting books, but also allows you to save your search results for future reference -- very useful when it comes time to cite your references in a paper. Use the "Add to My List" button to save search results, which will then appear when you click the "My List" tab at the top of any Voyager screen.

• The simplest way to begin searching is via a keyword search. In the "Basic" mode, simply type some words that you think might describe your needs (for instance, Samoans Hawaii) and hit search. This will give you a broad sampling of materials, some of which should be related to your topic. When you find something that is of interest, look at the "Subjects" field -- you can click on these links to find other materials that are on the same topic.

Google Books

• Google Books can at times be a useful tool for searching within the contents of books: It searches the full text of books that have been scanned by Google. If a book is out of copyright or if Google has made arrangements with a copyrighted book's publisher, you will often be able to look at full-text on screen. In other cases, you will be able to see a small "snippet" of the text.

• When full text is not available online (or even if it is, but you prefer to read the printed version), keep in mind that virtually all of the books you find on Google Books will be available in print in the UH library. So you can also use Google Books as a supplement to our Voyager catalog: Search the contents of the books using Google, then search Voyager for the title.

For Hawaiian and Pacific research, all of the same tools exist as for any other kind of research. There are region- and subject-specific dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographies, histories, newspapers, academic journals and etc. Two very good starting points for general information: