Your textbook is most often the best place to identify a topic for your research and to find sources that will provide context on a topic. Book chapters are often accompanied by notes and/or a bibliography, both of which will point you to further reading. If you are checking for availability of a book that is listed, check by title in the USMAI Catalog; for articles, click Journal List (from the QUICK TOOLS menu on the Cook Library website) and type the title of a journal into the search box. If Cook owns it, you will be directed to the appropriate source/s.

There are a number of reference resources that might be useful for your reseach paper on products, consumers, and shopping. They generally fall into the areas of popular culture and social history. Most of them are located in the reference stacks on the main floor of the library. Some are available online and require that you enter your NetID is you want to access them from off campus.

NOTE:Once you pick a product, especially if it is related to a specific company, check for the website of the company. Company websites often have sections devoted to company history and historical advertisements. Also, check for a timeline of your product on the web. This will give you an idea of the years in which you should be searching for advertisments for your product.

American Eras: 1600 - 1899

• Look at the sections on lifestyles, social trends, and fashion

Ref
E169.12
A419

American Decades: 1900 - 1989

• Look at the sections on lifestyles, social trends, and fashion

Ref
E169.1 G7553
2009

Greenwood Encyclopedia of Daily Life in America: 1763 -

• Look at the category Material Life under each time period

St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture

• Also available in Reference stacks: Ref E169.1 S764 2000
• To get a good idea of what's included in the encyclopedia and to get topic ideas, look in the print edition, Vol. 5 under categories such as: advertising, brands, consumption/consumerism, daily life, fashion/clothing, magazines, foodways, products, retail, and toys/games
• Or look for the Category Index, by clicking on the Table of Contents tab, choose vol. 5: U - Z from the drop down menu on the top right of the resulting screen, select Category Index > once in it, scroll to page 313

Ref
E169.1 B7825 2002

Bowling, Beatniks, and Bell-Bottoms: Pop Culture of the 20th Century: 1900 - 1990s

• In each chronological volume, look at entries by topic categories such as: Commerce; Fashion; Food & Drink

Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century

• See articles on advertising, consumers & consumption, and merchandising

Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century

• See articles on consumption and marketing

Encyclopedia of American Social History

• See section - Patterns of Everyday Life, especially the article: Culture and Consumption

American Beauty Industry Encyclopedia

• Articles on topics such as: advertising; branding; designers; undergarments; grooming, male and male beauty; hair care products; hair straightening; wigs; African and Asian American and Latina beauty industries; various beauty/style magazines; tanning; tattoos; skin care; whitening/brightening/bleaching

Check the Library Catalog for books available at Cook Library. If you want a larger selection of books available in all of the University System of Maryland libraries, check the USMAI Catalog. Be warned that books are usually not your best resource for product history. Databases like America: History & Life and JSTOR may be better.

• Use the following as search strategies for identifying books:
  • Look at subject word/s such as: consumer*; shopping; shopping malls; consumption and search with other words such as: history; social aspects (For example: subject word/s..... shopping and social aspects; consumers history united states)
  • Look at the subjects that have been assigned to a book that you have found in notes or a bibliography
  • Subject beginning with.... product history (For example: tobacco history; coffee history; automobiles history)
  • Subject beginning with.... advertising product (For example: advertising beauty ; advertising beer; advertising cigarettes
  • subject word/s.....coffee and marketing

The focus of your research, often determines which research database you will use to find articles. Begin your search with America: History & Life. Once in the database, click on Choose Databases and select any of the following Ebsco databases listed below that seem appropriate.

• America: History & Life - historical, covering United States and Canada
• Historical Abstracts - historical, other than North America
• Academic Search - multidisciplinary, a little from all disciplines
• MasterFILE Premier - searches a selection of popular magazines like Good Housekeeping
• Social Sciences Abstracts - social sciences
• SocINDEX - sociology, anthropology, especially social aspects of a product
• Business Source Complete - current product research
• Communication & Mass Media Complete - current media and advertising practices

Try searching for your product OR industry ( For example: cosmetics or beauty industry, eyeglasses or eyeglass industry, beer or alcoholic beverage industry) AND it with the phrase.....consumer behavior or consumers' preferences or consumers. Also try searching your product or product industry AND the word.... history. Try adding the phrase.... or advertis*.....with your other consumer keywords, if you're finding little that is useful.

JSTOR is a non-Ebsco database that might also prove useful in your search for journal articles.

History Matters: Making Sense of Ads [hosted by George Mason University]

• See Advertisements Online for websites that are devoted to advertisements including tobacco, Coca-Cola, soap and others
  

Historical Advertisements [hosted by University of Pennsylvania]

• Bibliography of online sources, some that we can access, others that we cannot because the library does not subscribe to them

Vintagae TV Commercials [ Prelinger Library]

• Television commercials housed in the Internet Archive
• Browse to see the 43 collections that constitute the entire collection

Ad Access

• Duke University presents images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in US and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955
• See also: Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920

Vintage Ad Browser 

• Indexed by product, by year from 1800 - 2000s

AdFlip.com

• Bills itself as the most extensive collection of historical ads online, from the forties to the nineties

Classic Advertisements Gallery [Smithsonian Institution]

• Special exhibit from the Smithsonian Institute highlights twenty ads from power companies made between the 1880s and 1930s

Historical Newspapers [ProQuest]

• Includes: New York Times (1851 up to 3 years ago); Sun [Baltimore] (1837 - ); and five black newspapers, ranging in date from 1910 - 2005
• For newspaper advertisements on your product: Click on Advanced Search and search by company or product; choose two document types: advertisement, classified advertisement ; and limit by dates, if desired
  • For articles on a product: Select a date range, choose document type: Article, and try searching the product name in document title - TI, instead of all fields + text

Accessible Archives

• A database of magazines, newspapers, and other historical materials that provide access to primary sources
• Start by clicking on SEARCH on the menu bar at the top of the screen. Choose publications such as:
  • Godey's Lady's Book (1830-98) , Pennsylvania Gazette (1728 - 1800) , South Carolina Newspapers (1732-80), and the Virginia Gazette (1736-80).
• When searching Godey's Lady's Book, type the name of your product in the search box and select advertisements; limit by year, if desired.
• When searching newspapers like Pennsylvania Gazette or Virginia Gazette, type the name of your product and the word advertisement (For example: coffee advertisement) in the search box and limit by year, if desired (The newspapers do not have the option to select advertisments only, so you have to type the word advertisement as part of your search to compensate.)

Films on Demand is a research database that provides streaming video of films on many academic topics, including consumers, consumerism, and advertising. These films tend to focus on the current status of these topics, rather on the historical aspects.

• To see what is available generally on advertising, look under the subject Advertising & Public Relations within the database
• Or try a keyword search, by typing commercials in the search box
• Or try a keyword search, by typing consumer* in the search box and changing by segment to by title, to search in video titles only for consumer*

Check the QUICK TOOLS menu on the Cook Library homepage for Citing Sources for help in citing in MLA style. You will find three brief guides here that were created by Cook Research & Instructions librarians.

For a more extensive, but easy to use guide, I recommend Diana Hacker: Research and Instruction Online Choose the MLA list of works cited for instructions on how to cite specific types of resources.