Sommervogel Archive Research Instructions

Search for a record using the following steps:

  1. Click on the magnifying glass at the top of the Status Area (see image on right). This switches the database to Find Mode.
  2. Select the field you wish to search. For example, to find articles by author's name type the author's last name in the Author field.
  3. Click the Perform Find button in the left.
  4. View the search results. You may do this in three different ways.
    • Browse individual entries by clicking on the book pages in the center of the Status Area.
    • List all entries by clicking on the View As menu button and selecting List.
    • View the entire results by Table by selecting that option from the View As menu.

Note that the number of items found by your search appears in the center of the Status Area and is labeled Found Set. If you find too many items and wish to view only a subset, you can combine search terms to focus on your specific area of interest. For example, if you want to search for all articles published by Spilka since 1980, enter Spilka in the Author field, >1980 in the Year field, then click Perform Find to view the results. Likewise, if you want to see only those articles written by Spilka and Allen, type Spilka Allen (without the word "and") in the Author field.

Database Fields Explained

Authors: Names are separated by semi-colons; there is no ampersand (&) before the last name. I prefer to give the full names of all authors, and do so when I can.

Year: When a date is hyphenated (1975-1976), as is done by journals like Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, it "sorts" as a higher number than "single" dates.

Article: The title in its original language is given first; translations of the title into English appear in brackets. Title of theses and dissertations appear in this field.

Addl page info: "Additional page information" shows "additional pages" when the pagination is non-continuous, and "supplement" when that is the case. This simplifies sorting tasks.

Book length: Only for (a few) books, not anthologies.

doi / ISBN: This is also a new field. When available, I give the "digital object identifier" which serves as the ISBN for articles on the internet. In theory, it is an identifier which will be attached to the article, come what may with URL formats. ISBN are listed infrequently.

ProQuest: the identifier for dissertations and theses in the ProQuest database.

Type of Degree: Completed only for dissertations and theses.

Language and Type of Source are drop-down lists, helpful if , for example, you want to restrict the search to English-language journal articles.

Series, subtitles: The series to which a book belongs is placed here, even in those cases in which APA format would require it to begin the title of the book. Lengthy subtitles, or the original source of published proceedings are also placed here.

Notes: primarily contains errata

Summary: In about 6,000 fields, the name (Blasi) appears here; these are summaries provided by Anthony Blasi who allowed me to incorporate his earlier work on a similar project into this one. Other summaries are are attributed to other authors, or to the publisher's catalogs.

Other sources: In general, the oldest source (e.g., an article) is presented as the record in the archive and later sources (e.g., anthologies) are listed here.

Topic: Also a drop-down list. Helpful, but far from complete; only about a third of the entries have topics, and the topic list is far from exhaustive. Check this list before starting your search to see if your topic is available. At least 100 articles on a given topic had to be in the archive before a topic name was produced; otherwise it is simpler to jut search Articles or Source.

Contents: As in table of. There are only 250 of these, so far.