Jim Crow Justice, Hist 3142/AFRS 3142: State Govt Docs

One very effective strategy for finding state and federal documents is to (1) identify agencies, departments, or other units of government that had jurisdiction over matters of interest, in these examples, prisons or penitentiaries in Georgia from 1865 to 1900. Then, (2) do more focused searches for materials issued by those agencies/departments and for materials about those agencies/departments.

HathiTrust

1. Choose Advanced Catalog Search.
2. Keyword search on terms that are likely to be in the bibliographic record.
3. Author search on the name of the state.
4. Limit by time period of interest.
5. Restrict to "Full view only".
6. Look in the results list for materials published by state agencies or departments and make note of their names.
7. Iteratively revise your search as you come across more possible search terms.
8. Once you have a list of state agencies or departments, do a more focused search on the names of the agencies/departments.

WorldCat

1. Keyword search on terms that are likely to be in the bibliographic record.
2. Author search on the name of the state.
3. Limit by time period of interest.
4. Look in the results list for materials published by state agencies or departments and make note of their names.
5. Iteratively revise your search as you come across more possible search terms.
6. Once you have a list of state agencies or departments, do a more focused search on the names of the agencies/departments.
7. To try to find the full text, search other databases by the names of the state agencies/departments.

Other databases

Of course, also search other databases in this guide for state documents.