Library Research Guide to Asian & Latino Immigration Since WW II                  California State University, Long Beach University Library

 PRIMARY  SOURCES  What are they?

Where to Find Books?

COAST Library Catalog provides locations to more than 1 million print items, (books, maps, DVDs, films, print government documents and journals.

Here are some techniques to find original material relating to immigration.

Group 1 Terms that will bring up first hand accounts:

SOURCES will find books containing original documents, letters, correspondence.

PERSONAL NARRATIVES will find first hand accounts. "This is what my experience was as an immigrant..."

INTERVIEWS will find journalists or historians asking questions of someone.

BIOGRAPHY will find someone's life story

Group 2 Terms relating to immigration (try singular and plurals)

IMMIGRATION

IMMIGRANTS

MIGRANTS

ALIENS

REFUGEES

Group 3 Terms that will bring up ethnicity. Also use singular and plural terms

Asian Americans

Chinese Americans

Vietnamese Americans

Filipino Americans

Japanese Americans

Mexican Americans

MEXICANS

Hispanics

Latinos

Combine the terms above in different groupings. See these examples as applied to COAST:

Sources and Mexican Americans

Personal Narratives and Asian Americans

Immigrants and Interviews

Refugees and Personal Narratives

Immigrants and Biography

COAST Search Tips:

Use truncation. Type in Asian* (asterisk will find Asian or Asians)

For more relevant results, try the suffix SU: This will find keywords in each subject heading of a book. See this link as an example:

SU:MEXICAN AMERICANS AND SU:IMMIGRATION

SU:REFUGEES AND SU:PERSONAL NARRATIVES

Keyword searches will produce results by publication date, newest to oldest. You can go back in time to find books published at the same time as the event happened, useful to get into the mindset of writers at the time.

Try some of these exact same search techniques in LINK+ to get books quickly from other libraries. You can get a lot more from LINK+ than from our COAST catalog.