Databases, Guides,  and Other Yale Philosophy Resources

• Full-text online databases
• Reference works in philosophy
• Biographies
• Book Reviews
• Manuscripts and archival sources
• Dissertations
• Dictionaries
• Encyclopedias
• Guides
• Locating materials beyond Yale
• Interlibrary loan
• Philosophy Study Rooms

Full-text online databases

Philosophy databases

• ARTFL (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) Corpus of texts, ranging from classic works of French literature to various kinds of non-fiction prose and technical writing. The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries are about equally represented, with a smaller selection of seventeenth century texts as well as some medieval and Renaissance texts.
• Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts Gives access to works from the Reformation and post-Reformation eras. These works include the theological writings of more than 300 Protestant authors, as well as a wide range of confessional documents, biblical commentaries, polemical treatises, and Bible translations.
• Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation Includes Catholic authors of the 16th and 17th centuries.
• Early English Books Online (EEBO) Based on the Bell & Howell microfilm collections Early English Books 1475-1640 and Early English Books 1641-1700.
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online Digital images of English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800, with particular attention to works published in the United Kingdom.
• Early American Imprints (Evans), Series I Evans Digital consists of over 36,000 works issued in America from 1639 to 1800.
• Past Masters Full-text, searchable versions of many important philosophical writings, including the works of Aquinas, Aristotle, Calvin, Hume, Kierkegaard, Locke, Luther, Plato, Wittgenstein and others.

Most philosophy reference works are located in the Main Reference Room of Sterling Memorial Library. A few can be found in the Philosophy Study Room (SML 609) and in other libraries on campus with significant philosophy collections (such as Divinity, Beinecke, Law and Cross Campus). Some examples of types of reference works are listed below.

• Bibliographies
• Biographical sources
• Dictionaries
• Encyclopedias
• Guides and Handbooks

Book reviews

• Book Review Digest Plus
  A list of English-language book reviews collected from general interest periodicals. Includes brief quotations from selected reviews. The print version goes back to 1905.
  
• Bibliographie der Rezensionen. Leipzig: 1940-43.
  Call number: SML, Reference Index Cases, AI9 B537 (LC)
  A very comprehensive index to book reviews in some 3,000 German periodicals, as well as about 2,000 periodicals in languages other than German. Covers many titles, not indexed in Book Review Index. Continued by:
• IBR International Bibliography of Book Reviews
  Internationale Bibliographie der Rezensionen wissenchaftlicher Literatur. International bibliography of book reviews of scholarly literature. Osnabriuck, F. Dietrich Verlag: 1971- .
  Call Number: SML, Reference Index Case, AI9 I57 (LC)
  
• An Index to Book Reviews in the Humanities. Michigan: P. Thomson, 1960-
  Call number: Z1035 A1 I53 (LC)
  Indexes several hundred periodicals, mostly in English, though a number of foreign language titles were added in 1970.
• The Times Literary Supplement Centenary Archive (N.B. click on "Subscribers")
  The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) Centenary Archive currently includes TLS issues published from 1902 to 1939 ; by the end of this year coverage will be extended to 1989. It's possible to search for reviews and articles by author or title of the book reviewed, by subject, or by contributor, and then to view the articles in facsimile.

 

Manuscripts and archival sources

• Using Manuscripts and Archives: A Tutorial
  A detailed guide to the collection in SML. Most of the collection can be found in Orbis.
  
• Archival Finding Aid Project
  The Yale University Library Finding Aid Project provides access to archival finding aids in a platform-independent electronic format, using SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) and HTML. Finding aids are inventories, indexes, or guides that are created by archival and manuscript repositories to provide information about specific collections. While the finding aids created by repositories may vary somewhat in style, their common purpose is to provide detailed description of the content and intellectual organization of collections. Access to finding aids through the Internet will assist scholars in determining whether collections contain material relevant to their research.
  
• ArchivesUSA
  ArchivesUSA integrates three resources: The National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMUC), The Directory of Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the US (DARMUS), and The National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States (NIDS). Researchers can search descriptions of manuscript collections in the United States, link to information about the repositories, and locate the finding aids in NIDS, a microfiche collection in the Microtext Center of SML. (Fiche B1333)
  
• Ricci, Seymour de. Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1935-40.
  Call number: SML, Reference, Z6620 U5 +R53 (LC)
  Also in: Beinecke, Reference, Z6620 U5 +R53 (LC)
  A catalogue arranged alphabetically by states, cities, and libraries. Descriptions include probable date and place of origin, material on which written, size, number of leaves, binding, provenance, and reference to printed descriptions.

Dissertations

• Locating Yale dissertations: Orbis contains records for dissertations submitted at Yale since 1965. Search by author, title or keyword (for example, epistemology and thesis and yale). For earlier dissertations, check the card catalogue in Manuscripts & Archives. Dissertations on microfilm are kept in the Microform Reading Room in SML.
  
  
• Use Dissertations and Theses - Full Text to identify dissertations written at Yale and other institutions in the United States and Canada since 1869.
  
• Theses Canada Portal (National Library of Canada) Provides access free of charge to full text electronic versions of Canadian theses and dissertations that were published from 1998-2002. You can also search bibliographical records of over 220,000 Canadian theses dating back to 1965.
  
• Index to theses with abstracts accepted for higher degrees by the universities of Great Britain and Ireland and the Council for National Academic Awards (London: Aslib, 1970-.) This source provides author, title, university, degree, year, and keyword access to dissertations completed in the universities of Great Britain and Ireland since 1970. Abstracts have been included since 1986, and bibliographic records extend indexing coverage back to 1716. The new and enhanced service provides total bibliographic control of all theses ever produced by British and Irish Universities. Also available in SML, Starr Main Reference Room Z5055 G6 I53 (LC)+.
  
• Records for dissertations accepted at universities in Spain since 1976 can be found in the TESEO database.
  
• Records for many foreign dissertations can also be found in the CRL catalog (description below). These are available via Interlibrary Loan.
  
• Other sources for identifying foreign dissertations can be found by doing a subject search in Orbis: dissertations academic--[name of country]--bibliography.

Locating materials beyond Yale

• Books in Print
  Use Books in Print to find records for in-print, recently out-of-print and forthcoming books from over 44,000 North American publishers.
  
• WorldCat
  WorldCat is an online "union catalog"; that is, a bibliographic database of over 39 million records of books and other materials held in thousands of academic, public, special and national libraries around the world. Use WorldCat to locate materials outside of Yale, in almost any area of study, or to locate items in specific libraries and research collections. WorldCat provides catalog records for books, journals, newspapers, maps, sound recordings, musical scores, and films held in academic, corporate, and public libraries. All searches can be printed, downloaded or e-mailed directly to you.
  
• The Center for Research Libraries catalog
  "The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is an international not-for-profit consortium of colleges, universities and libraries that makes available scholarly research resources to users everywhere. CRL is governed by the major research libraries of North America and is funded by fees, grants and contributions. Open to scholars and researchers, its outstanding collections include more than five million volumes of research materials rarely held in North American libraries."
  
• The English Short Title Catalogue
  The English Short Title Catalogue describes works printed in any language in England or its dependencies from the beginning of printing through the end of the eighteenth century, as well as works printed in English anywhere else in the world during that period. Updated daily, ESTC contains more than 423,000 records.
  
• A list of other important online library catalogs, including links to those of the New York Public Library, The British Library, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, can be found here.

Interlibrary Loan

The Interlibrary Loan office in SML will help you obtain materials not held at Yale either through Borrow Direct, eDD (Electronic Document Delivery), or standard interlibrary loan services.

Yale University Library Research Guide in Philosophy
Comments and questions to Anne Oechtering
Prepared by David L. Eastman
Illustration from René Descartes' Principia Philosophiæ, 1677
©2007 Yale University Library