Library Guides: British Studies: Reference

Introduction

University Libraries subscribes to a wide variety of digital collections of interest to British Studies, particularly history and literature. We have additional print resources, but in this guide we will focus on the electronic collections.

Below we have listed some of our main electronic reference resources of interest to British Studies.

We have arranged this Research Guide into primary and secondary sources in history and literature. Primary sources is further broken down by:

Archives and Genealogy
Books
Literary Texts (under the literature category)
Newspapers
Periodicals

We have put indexes to articles, such as C19 and Periodicals Index Online in the secondary sources sections.

Reference

Credo Reference
Online reference library providing access to a large number of encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri and other reference books, including Who's Who, and Who Was Who.
Dictionary of Irish Biography
A collaborative project between Cambridge University Press and the Royal Irish Academy, involving 700 contributors and spanning 9,000 lives.
Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)
The official digital dissertation archive for the Library of Congress and the database of record for graduate research.
English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC)
Lists over 460,000 items published between 1473 and 1800, mainly in Britain and North America, mainly, but not exclusively, in English, and from the collections of the British Library and over 2,000 other libraries.
Gale eBooks
Includes multi-volume encyclopedias, biographical collections, business plan handbooks, company history compilations, consumer health references, and specialized reference sources.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB)
A collection of 50,000 specially written biographies of the men and women who shaped all aspects of Britain's past, from the fourth century BC to the year 2000.
Limited to 10 concurrent users.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
The online version of the 20-volume dictionary. Not only useful for pronunciation, etymology, and historical meanings, but also a rich source of quotations and first-known usages.
OED