Holocaust topics will have a great deal of material available. To keep from being overwhelmed with results, you will need to use focused searches and take advantage of limiters and filters.
In Summon, try searching:
Note that some reference databases are not included in Summon, and must be searched separately. See the next section for some suggested searches.
Reference databases contain articles from general and specialized reference works, like encyclopedias. They are usually intended for a reader who wants to get an overview or introduction to the topic.
As such, they may be a good choice for this assignment. Be aware that some articles may be too short, so be sure to check the length!
Keep search terms simple when searching a reference database. Below are some suggested searches for each database.
The Holocaust Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is an excellent web resource. It is an especially good source for information on Jewish badges and other identifying marks.
EBSCO is one of our big periodical databases. It includes articles from newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals, covering almost any topic.
A search in Summon will include results from EBSCO, but searching directly in EBSCO lets you access advanced search features that give you more control over your results.
When searching EBSCO, put one concept in each search box. The following examples show some of the advanced search features. You can also click on any image to see the results of that search.
In this search, for articles about liberation of the Nazi camps, we use three search terms, each expressing one concept. Each term goes in a separate box of the advanced search, with "and" in the dropdown menus between them. This tells the database that we want results that have all three terms, but they don't have to be right next to each other.
In this search, for articles about epidemics in the Jewish ghettos, the boolean operator "OR" connects synonyms in the same search box. This tells the database that we want articles that have at least one of the words from that box, along with "ghettos" and "Holocaust."
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In this search, for articles about Jewish resistance to the Nazis, the wildcard * tells the database that we will take articles that have the words "Jew" and "resist" with any ending, like Jews or Jewish, and resistance or resisted. Note that this technique uses only the spelling of the word, not the meaning, so related words that are spelled differently, like Judaism, would not come up. In addition, unrelated words with the same spelling will come up. For instance, if you put "Resi*," you would get articles with words like reside and resident, as well as resist and resistance.
In this search, "Himmler, Heinrich, 1900-1945" is used as a subject term search. Subject terms are a part of the database record chosen by a human to describe what the article is mostly about. They are chosen from a list, so that the same term will be used for every article that is about that topic. Subject searching is useful when there are a lot of results that just mention your topic, so you can focus in on the ones that are really about the topic, rather than just having the word in there somewhere.
Searching by subject can be tricky, because you don't know what words the list has for your topic. However, if you've already found at least one article, you can look at the subject terms on the record. Clicking on a subject term will bring up a new search for articles that have that subject term. Here, the subject term for Heinrich Himmler includes his dates of birth and death, to distinguish him from other people who may have had the same name.
