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

The best place to find detailed, in-depth histories of the countries you're researching is in the books in our library's collection. 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 Catalog 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.

You could replicate these searches in the WorldCat Catalog to look for books outside the library's collection on these countries. If you find some books that we don't have in WorldCat that would be useful to you, be sure to request them through Interlibrary Loan.

You can use the library's search to find many books and other materials such as videos, government publications, and more. 

Searching for EBooks

Can't make it into the library or want to see all of the options available to you? Try looking at some of our Ebook collections! Some of these books are discoverable while using the Library Search, but others can only be discovered by searching the databases themselves. Here are some of the best bet places to look for eBooks:

Take a look at a full list of databases which include ebooks.

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!