Quicksearch
QuickSearch is the libraries google like search engine, which searches both the Libraries physical and electronic collections and most (but not all) of the databases. You can use QuickSearch to look for ebooks, print books, journal articles, newspapers, media, book reviews, dissertations and even archival and government documents.
Ways to Search:
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Search for Specific Materials: if you already have a specific item in mind, search by specific title, the first 5-6 words or the entire title in quotes, and/ or author
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Basic Search: The basic search option from the Libraries homepage searches authors, titles, subjects, and abstracts and fulltext, if available, across most of the Libraries resources: books, scholarly articles, news sources, videos, etc.
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Advanced Search: more precise searches once you have a hold on your topic
www.libraries.rutgers.edu
How to Strengthen Your Search
Key Word Searching:
Keyword searching is the default way to search our (and most) search interface(s). Use it when you're not quite sure what you're looking for, or when you want to survey the libraries' holdings on a topic. Generate key words based on the central terms related to your area of interest.
- Example Topic: I am interested in how enslaved women in the Caribbean generally navigated daily life and motherhood.
- Possible Key Terms: "enslaved" "women" "Caribbean"
And as you go, consider the reoccurring terms in abstracts, tables of contents etc.
Boolean Operators:
Boolean operators are connecting phrases that, when used in library databases (typed between your keywords) can connect your search words together to either narrow or broaden your set of results.
- AND: narrows results; tell the database that ALL search terms must be present in the resulting records
- OR: broadens results; telling the database that ANY of your search terms can be present in the resulting records;
- NOT: narrows results; exclude words from your search; tell the database to ignore concepts that may be implied by your search terms
- Ordering Boolean Operators:
- Use AND First, databases usually recognize AND as the primary operator, and will connect concepts with AND together first.
- If you use a combination of AND and OR operators in a search, enclose the words to be "ORed" in parentheses.
- Examples : enslaved AND (persons OR Africans OR people)
- Wildcards: use an asterisk after a term to search all forms of a word
- Example: slave* searches slave, slaves, slavery, slaveholder
- Quotation marks: use quotes to perform a search of an exact phrase
- Example: "enslaved women"
Advanced Searching
Advanced Search
As opposed to the default basic search, Advanced Search lets you search with more flexibility and precision by searching for words and/or phrases in specific "fields" (author, title, subject) in the records of the Libraries' books and resources
For example, if you wanted to find books by Martin Munro on the Caribbean:
- On the first line: Author ... is (exact) ... Martin Munro
- On the second line: Subject ... contains ... "Caribbean Area"
Finding Books in the Library
After you find the book you want in Quicksearch, jot down the call number to find it in the stacks at the holding library. Make sure the book is marked as being in the STACKS. Form items marked as being in REF or Special Collections, you'll need to use them in the library.
What are Call Numbers? A call number is the combination of letters and numbers that classify and tell us where to that indicates where an item can be found in the library based on its subject. Most call numbers are located on the spine or front of a book
Map of the libraries to help you determine where to find your book based on the first letter of the call number.
Common Caribbean Studies Call Number Ranges:
- F1601 - F2191 - History of the Caribbean and Caribbean Area
- PN849 C3- PN849 C32 - General Literature of the Caribbean
- PQ3940-PQ3949.3 - Literature of the Francophone Caribbean (Haiti, Guadalupe & Martinique)
- PQ7361-PQ7442 - Literature of the Spanish Caribbean (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico)
- PR9205-PQ9230.9 & PR9260-PR9279.9 - Literature of the Anglophone Caribbean
Need a book not at Alexander Library?
If you need a physical copy of a book from another Rutgers Library, you can request the book in the library catalog record. Click "Request Item" then login with your netid. You'll receive an email when your materials are ready for pickup at the library of your choice. You can also ask to have a chapter of a book sent to you by clicking Digitization.
Need a book not at Rutgers?
If you cannot find what you're looking for in Rutgers' catalog, or you find a book but it is marked "unavailable," you can borrow from another library via the following borrowing systems:
- E-Z Borrow. This is the fastest way to get a copy of a book that is not owned or available at RU. E-Z Borrow is a regional borrowing system and books are normally received within 3-5 weekdays.
- Interlibrary Loan request: If a book is not owned by the Rutgers Libraries and is not available via E-Z Borrow, you can place an ILL request, which is an international borrowing system that can take longer.
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WorldCat to search for other libraries that hold materials you need and then request them through Interlibrary Loan.
Books To Consider
The Creole Archipelago by ISBN: 0812299973Publication Date: 2021-10-08In The Creole Archipelago, Tessa Murphy traces how generations of Indigenous Kalinagos, free and enslaved Africans, and settlers from a variety of European nations used maritime routes to forge social, economic, and informal political connections that spanned the eastern Caribbean.
Awakening the Ashes by ISBN: 9781469676845Publication Date: 2023-10-17In Awakening the Ashes, Marlene L. Daut situates famous and lesser-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers within the global history of ideas, showing how their systems of knowledge and interpretation took center stage in the Age of Revolutions. While modern understandings of freedom and equality are often linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US Declaration of Independence, Daut argues that the more immediate reference should be to what she calls the 1804 Principle that no human being should ever again be colonized or enslaved, an idea promulgated by the Haitians who, against all odds, upended French empire.
Contested Bodies by ISBN: 0812249186Publication Date: 2017-06-20It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves' interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners' medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children.
Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean by ISBN: 0812224639Publication Date: 2020-04-03A groundbreaking study of slavery and power in the British Caribbean that foregrounds the struggle for survival Atlantic slave societies were notorious deathtraps. In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another. Grounded in the nineteenth-century British colony of Berbice, one of the Atlantic world's best-documented slave societies and the last frontier of slavery in the British Caribbean, Browne argues that the central problem for most enslaved people was not how to resist or escape slavery but simply how to stay alive. Guided by the voices of hundreds of enslaved people preserved in an extraordinary set of legal records, Browne reveals a world of Caribbean slavery that is both brutal and breathtakingly intimate.
Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 by ISBN: 1423720148Publication Date: 2004-01-01While the rise and abolition of slavery and ongoing race relations are central themes of the history of the United States, the African diaspora actually had a far greater impact on Latin and Central America. More than ten times as many Africans came to Spanish and Portuguese America as the United States. In this, the first history of the African diaspora in Latin America from emancipation to the present, George Reid Andrews deftly synthesizes the history of people of African descent in every Latin American country from Mexico and the Caribbean to Argentina. He examines how African peooples and their descendants made their way from slavery to freedom and how they helped shape and responded to political, economic, and cultural changes in their societies. Individually and collectively they pursued the goals of freedom, equality, and citizenship through military service, political parties, civic organizations, labor unions, religious activity, and other avenues. Spanning two centuries, this tour de force should be read by anyone interested in Latin American history, the history of slavery, and the African diaspora, as well as the future of Latin America.
