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LIBA 101: Literary Ghosts and Hauntings (Prof. Reynolds)

Research Librarian

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Emily Witsell
she/her

Local History and Hauntings

Find a Local Ghost or Haunting

Find your local historical society, library history room, or local archive.

Your local history organizations often keep records about local culture, including ghosts! To find an organization, try Googling:

  • Name of your city + "historical society"
  • Name of your city + "public library" and look for links on the website to a local history service
  • Name of your city or local university + "archives"

If you don't find any information online, email the librarian or archivist - they often know about materials that haven't been put online yet, or will be able to point you in the right direction.

Keyword and Search Ideas for OneSearch and Google:

  • Name of city + ghosts, paranormal, hauntings
  • Name of location (cemetery, battlefield, historical site) + ghosts, paranormal, hauntings
  • Name of city + "ghost tour"
  • Name of ghost

Wofford OneSearch

Wofford OneSearch is a single search platform that contains books, ebooks, journal articles, magazines, newspapers, audio, video, and reference materials. It is a great place to explore your topic and find scholarly resources, but it can sometimes be overwhelming due to the amount of information a normal search will pull up. Think of it like shopping on Amazon: you should tell OneSearch exactly what you're looking for using keywords and choosing the right limiters in the left column of your search results.

Library homepage with OneSearch search box in the center of the page.

 

 

For example, a search for genetic engineering retrieves nearly 1.7 million results. You can narrow your search by adding additional keywords or using the limiters in the left column.

In OneSearch, the first box has the keywords "genetic engineering." Below, 1.7 million results are listed.

 

 

Choosing only scholarly and peer reviewed articles and limiting our results to articles published in the last 5 years reduces the number of articles to about 160,000. 

 

 

Finally, we can add additional keywords to make our search more specific. Adding the keyword food to our search brings up scholarly articles published in the last five years about the genetic engineering of food. Play around with your keywords and limiters until you find articles or books that will work for your project.

 

 

When you find resources that you'd like to save, click on the pushpin icon next to the item. Log in using your MyWofford credentials to save the items to your OneSearch account.