Senate House Library has a combination of print and electronic resources that will be useful for your research and you will find these resources in multiple collections in the library. This is a very general introduction to resources in Senate House Library that can help get you started.
Print materials: Your research will probably take you to every open floor of Senate House Library, where you will find primary sources on the fourth floor in Special Collections and history texts on the fifth floor in History, as well as literary resources in English and Western European languages. The sixth floor will be useful for you, too, with helpful titles in US Studies, Latin American Studies and Commonwealth Studies. Lastly, a trip up to the seventh floor will give you access to texts in Sociology, Politics, Economics, History of Science, and Religion.
A great place to begin is by finding the books on your reading list in the library catalogue. For example, if you search for Euan Cameron’s Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History the catalogue gives you a few ways to find more books on the same subject. First, you can click on the classmark, MCA Ear in this case to virtually search the books shelved next to the Cameron book. You can directly browse the classmarks using the classmark search as well, if you find that easier. To browse classmarks, you might search for OQB, which will include books on the rise of major Islamic empires in Eurasia.
A second way to find books in the library catalogue is by subject. Using Cameron’s Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History, again, you can see that there are three subject headings listed in the record that you can click on the subject links to take you to books on the same subject. Subject terms are a controlled vocabulary that are shared by multiple libraries, so you can use the terms in the Senate House Library catalogue or other databases and catalogues. Useful examples of subject searches might include:
Peace of Westphalia
Renaissance
Enlightenment
Reformation
Persecution
Conversion
Christianity
Islam
Judaism
There are trickier subject searches you can try, such as searching for books on the Scientific Revolution. The best way to find books on this subject are to search under the subject term science, then the geographical location or country. For example, for books on science in England, you can conduct a subject searches on Science — England — History — 17th Century and Science — France — History — 17th Century. You can find more subject terms by searching the Library of Congress subject authorities for searching the Senate House Library catalogue, as well as other catalogues and databases.
Online resources: There are a number of indexes and databases you can search online to find secondary sources. The list includes potentially useful resources, including:
ATLA Religion Database: Index to articles, essays, and book reviews in the field of religion. (With this resource, you will only be given the title, author and journal or book name and issue, then you can search for the journal or book on the library catalogue).
Bibliography of British and Irish History: An index of resources on historical writing dealing with the British Isles, the British Empire and Commonwealth, from 55BC to the present. (With this resource, you will only be given the title, author and journal or book name and issue, then you can search for the journal or book on the library catalogue).
Historical Abstracts: A complete reference guide to the history of the world from 1450 to the present
IngentaConnect: An index 17 million articles from over 28,500 academic and professional publications
Jstor: A database with full-text online access to back issues to selected scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, demography, mathematics and other fields of the humanities and social sciences.
Primary Sources
Special Collections: Senate House Library’s special collections may have some interesting resources to help your research. The following collections might be especially useful and you can find out more about using the collections by clicking the links below.
Goldsmiths Library of Economic Literature: This collection holds primary sources on economic and social history, with 70,000 printed books, pamphlets, periodicals, manuscripts, broadsides and proclamations from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. (Texts published before 1851 can usually be found in full-text via The Making of the Modern World).
Porteus Library: Approximately 4,000 volumes, including 300 volumes of pamphlets, mostly published between 1750 and 1809. Most are in English, with some in French and a few in Latin. The collection is primarily the working library of Beilby Porteus. Its emphasis is theological (ecclesiastical affairs; sermons), but the collection covers a wide range of subjects, including the French Revolution, travel and topography, history, classics, and English literature (especially contemporary). Items relating to slavery and the slave trade, the subject of a separate manuscript catalogue compiled by or for Porteus himself, are especially significant. Pamphlet coverage further includes the American Revolution, India, the Union with Ireland, and the Regency.
E. G.R. Taylor Collection of Historic Printed Maps: A collection of over 900 map sheets, representing 96 individual and series titles, and dating between 1700 and 1900.
Digital: The electronic resources listed below will provide you with access to primary sources for your research.
Jisc Historical Texts: 300,000 historical books published in English or in England before 1800 and 65,000 19th century books from the following historically significant collections: Early English Books Online (EEBO); Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO); 19th Century books from the British Library collection.
Electronic Enlightenment: Letters and documents, document sources such as manuscripts and early printed editions, scholarly annotations, and links to biographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, newspapers, and other online resources by the greatest thinkers and writers of the long eighteenth century and their families and friends, bankers and booksellers, patrons and publishers. (Start with the guided tour!)
Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice: A digital library documenting the history of slavery worldwide over six centuries.
Global Commodities: A digital library of primary source materials for the study of global commodities in world history.
17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers: A digital collection of the British Library’s newspapers, pamphlets and books collection by Reverend Charles Burney.
Internet Library of Early Journals: This project includes digitised eighteenth and nineteenth-century journals.
The Making of the Modern World: A collection of digital facsimiles of literature on economics and business published from the last half of the 15th century to the mid-19th century, with materials on commerce, finance, social conditions, politics, trade and transport; documents the dynamics of Western trade and wealth; focuses on economics interpreted in the widest sense, including political science, history, sociology; special collections on banking, finance, transportation and manufacturing.
French Revolution Digital Archive: This is a digital collection of the research resources of the French Revolution, including the Archives parlementaires and a vast corpus of images first brought together in 1989 and known as the Images de la Revolution française.
Best of luck and do not hesitate to contact me with questions.