Bibliography of Native North Americans

What Information Is Presented By the Bibliography of Native North Americans?

The Bibliography of Native North Americans™ (EBSCO) addresses all aspects of native North American culture, history, and life, and covers a wide range of topics including archaeology, multicultural relations, gaming, governance, legend, and literacy. Dates of coverage range from the sixteenth century to the present. The Bibliography of Native North American's (BNNA) will appeal to anyone interested in exploring the contributions, struggles, and issues surrounding North America's indigenous peoples.

Information Covered in this Tutorial:

• Strengths and Weaknesses of BNNA
• Where to find more assistance
• Browsing the Database
• Performing a Basic Search
• Performing an Advanced Search
• Search Tips
• Special Features

Strengths Of BNNA

• The familiarity of the EBSCO database system is reassuring and easy for users to navigate; once they've learned to navigate one database on EBSCO, they know how to navigate all of EBSCO's databases.

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Weaknesses Of BNNA

• The BNNA does not yet have access to the EBSCO image database, so users will be unable to find images related to Native American studies and art at this time.
• The Visual search only works in Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari browser. It does not yet work with any reliability in Mozilla's Firefox, and will frequently lock up when users try to access it from this browser.

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Where Can I Get Help Using BNNA?

• EBSCO offers many resources under their help link from the database page. EBSCO tutorials can help teach you how to navigate through the many EBSCO databases. They also offer 24-hour assistance through their Support Site.

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Navigating the Bibliography of Native North Americans

Browsing the Database

You can browse the BNNA by using the pre-determined list of subjects in the Index section. For example, if a patron would like to know more about Sitting Bull, you could browse for more information as follows:

1. Just beneath the Basic Search tab, click the yellow link to Indexes
2. Select people from the drop down menu
3. Type Sitting Bull in the search box and click browse
4. Click the checkbox next to Sitting Bull on the results page, and then click the add button and the search term will appear in the search box at the top as "ZP 'Sitting Bull'". If you had checked multiple boxes, then each of those would appear in the box at the top.
5. Click search to perform the search.

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Basic Search

Performing a basic search in the BNNA will be familiar to those who have used EBSCO databases before:

1. Click on the Basic Search tab
2. Enter your search term(s) in the box
3. Click on Search
4. Click on the title of the result you want to view, or click Add to add it to your folder of items to review later

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Advanced Search

To perform an Advanced Search, just:

1. Click on the Advanced Search tab
2. Enter each search term or phrase in a search box
3. If desired, specify where you would like to search for that term (eg - search for "Sioux" in the Title field only)
4. If desired, enter additional search terms in the subsequent search boxes, selecting "and," "or," "not" from the drop down box at the left to include or exclude the terms in your second box.
5. Click on Search
6. Click on the title of the result you want to view, or click Add to add it to your folder of items to review later

Search Tips

• Truncation gives you more results: Use the * to search for the root of your search term, which will provide you with all instances (plurality, parts of speech, etc) of that word. For example, librar* will find library, librarian, libraries, librarians.
• Narrow your Results: Once you've performed a search, BNNA will provide the opportunity to narrow your search results according to subject. To narrow your search results, click on a subject title from the list in the yellow box on the left.
• Full Text: If you want to see only those articles that link to full text, click the Linked Full Text Checkbox on the main search page. To view the full text of an article, click either HTML full text or PDF full text below the title on your search results page.
• More Like This: BNNA can help you find similar items once you've found an article that matches what you are searching for. Just click on the Find more like this link from the article page.

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Special Features Of BNNA

• Translation: If you would like to see the full text article you are reading in another language, BNNA provides a basic translation service (only available for HTML full text articles). You can translate an English language article to Spanish, French, German and Portuguese. From your full-text article screen click on the choose language dropdown menu at the top, select your language, and click translate.
• Visual Search: A new way to navigate through your search results visually, Visual Search displays your search results as a series of interconnected spheres. You can navigate through the spheres (and thereby narrow your search) by clicking on a sphere:

The squares represent actual articles, and clicking on one of these will bring up the article on the right side of the screen:

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This page was created by Kathleen Houlihan in Spring 2007.
INF 382S: Library Instruction and Information Literacy, taught by Dr. Loriene Roy
School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin