GLS102: Politics and Power Worldwide: Intro to Comparative Political Analysis

Books are a great resource to use when conducting research, especially when looking for background information or an overview of a topic. The Bentley Library Search allows you to search both our print book collection and our eBook collections at the same time. 

Books are also the best place to find detailed, in-depth histories of countries you may be researching. So, if you were comparing and contrasting the governments of Poland and the Czech Republic, you might want to start by looking at the political history of those two countries.

You could try the following searches in the Bentley Library Search below:

• Poland AND history
• Czech AND history
• Czechoslovakia AND history

These searches bring up a number of books on the histories of these countries that would provide invaluable information for a paper comparing the two countries' political systems.

Note: The Bentley Library Search results will also contain a number of different types of sources in addition to books. Videos, government publications, articles, and more might be listed in the results. If you want to focus on just books, use the "Resource Type" limiter on the left side of the results to select Books.  

Call Number Search Tip:

The Bentley Library uses Library of Congress call numbers to organize our books. This means our books are organized by SUBJECT:

• Call numbers beginning with J have to do with Political Science.
• Call numbers beginning with H have to do with Social Sciences.
• Call numbers beginning with K have to do with Law.

If you can, go look for a book that you found in the catalog on the shelf yourself. You might find others nearby that will be helpful for your project!

Kent State University's University Libraries has a great Library of Congress Tutorial to help you get started understanding call numbers. 

Indicated in the image below, there are a couple of sections that are particularly helpful in looking at the book record to see if it is something that might be useful for your project.

• Bibliographic/Citation Information: The section at the top of the book's record will include helpful information such as the book's title, author or editor, and year of publication. 

Further down on the page, under the "Details" heading there are a couple of sections that can be helpful in learning a little more about the book before going to look at it on the shelf:

• Description:  The description section will contain a quick paragraph describing the contents of the book or providing an overview. 
• Contents:  You may see a Contents section will often include the chapter titles for the book.
• Subjects: Subjects are assigned to each item in the catalog to describe what the book is about. These can be helpful in a couple of ways - you can actually click on these subjects to find all of the other items in the catalog that also use the same subject heading and these subjects can be helpful in gathering ideas for search terms to use!

Want to broaden your search to find even more materials? You can search for resources from libraries around the world using WorldCat.org.

 If you find some books (or even just a chapter from a book) that we don't have in WorldCat that would be useful to you, be sure to request them through Interlibrary Loan.

When you are on-campus, you can place an ILL request directly via WorldCat. Look for the "Access from your libraries" option.

Click "View access options" to open a window that may look like the following:

Then, click the Request Item through Interlibrary Loan link. You will then be brought to a page to login to your ILL account (Bentley email and password) and it will fill in the request form for you!