Gemstone Vote-CP Team

Web page created by Gerri Foudy, Social Sciences Team, UM Libraries
Mentor: Abby Kiesa

The University of Maryland Libraries have many resources that will help with research for your Gemstone Vote-CP Team project. If you need additional information, please contact Gerri Foudy or Terry Owen the Team Librarians, or speak with a Reference Librarian at McKeldin Library's Reference Desk.

When accessing subscription databases from off-campus, you will be prompted to enter your last name and the 14-digit number on the back of your UM student id card.

Table of Contents

• Library Catalogs (Finding books, documents, and more)
• Voting and Elections Information
• Secondary Sources (News, background information, analysis, etc.)
• News and Current Events
• Political
• Political - Scholarly/Academic
• Educational
• Interest Groups
• Public Opinion Sources
• Finding Experts
• Maryland State Publications at the Maryland Room
• Citation Guides

Library Catalogs

• UM Libraries Catalog
  The Libraries' catalog provides information about the holdings of all libraries in the University System of Maryland.
  To search all of the UM System libraries, click on "multi-campus search."
  Books owned by other libraries in the system can be ordered at the computer for delivery to College Park (or elsewhere); click on the yellow "Request" button on the record's availability screen.

  Search the online catalog for books and documents on your topic. Start with a keyword search.
  Example: college student* and vot*

  Once you have found some relevant records by using a keyword search, you can use the subject headings in the records to find more materials.
  Example: College students -- Political activity

  You can also use the catalog to find out whether the Libraries subscribe to a particular journal. Go into the journals search (at the top of the catalog page) and do a "title beginning with search" for the journal title, NOT the article title.
  Example: Campaigns & Elections

• WorldCAT
  Combined catalog of books and other materials in libraries worldwide, including the Library of Congress. Items not owned by University System of Maryland libraries can be requested online for borrowing through interlibrary loan; click on the "FindIt" button and then the link for "Interlibrary Loan" to fill out the Interlibrary Loan Request form.

• RLG Union Catalog
  Contains information on the collections of major research libraries; academic, public, corporate and national libraries; archives and museums; historical societies and international book vendors Items not owned by University System of Maryland libraries can be requested online for borrowing through interlibrary loan; click on the "FindIt" button and then the link for "Interlibrary Loan" to fill out the Interlibrary Loan Request form. .

Voting and Elections Information

• Maryland State Board of Elections
  Voter registration and absentee ballot, General Assembly and congressional representative searching, maps, current and historical statistics, and links to county boards of elections.
  http://www.elections.state.md.us/

• Prince George's County Board of Elections
  Voter registration and absentee ballot information, polling places, municipal elections information, and election results.

• America Votes. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1956 - .
  Election data by state and county on Presidential, Gubernatorial, and Congressional races.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: JK1967.A8

• ANES: American National Election Studies
  "Produces high quality data on voting, public opinion, and political participation to serve the research needs of social scientists, teachers, students, policy makers and journalists who want to better understand the theoretical and empirical foundations of national election outcomes."
  http://www.electionstudies.org/

• Federal Election Commission Record
  FEC's monthly newsletter. Searchable by keywords.
  http://www.fec.gov/pages/record.shtml

• Congressional Districts in the 2000s: A Portrait of America. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003.
  Descriptive and statistical profiles of congressional districts.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: JK1341.C65 2003

• CQ Politics in America UM Only
  Profiles of all the current members of the U.S. Congress. Information includes biographical data, committee assignments, election results, CQ Key Votes, interest group ratings, CQ Vote Studies, and contact information; campaign finance, partisan caucuses, standing committees; detailed descriptions of each member's congressional district as drawn after the 2000 census, including updated maps and voting trends.

• Historical Voting Tables: Congressional Elections
  Voter turnout and registration statistics, November 1966 to 1994.
  http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/voting/vote-htabtcon.html

• Martis, Kenneth C. Historical Atlas of United States Congressional Districts, 1789-1983. New York: Free Press, 1982.
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  LOCATION: Government Documents Atlas
  CALL NUMBER: G1201.F9 M3 1982

• Rusk, Jerrold G. A Statistical History of the American Electorate. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2001.
  Includes a bibliography and index.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: JK1967.R87 2001

• Voting and Registration
  US Census Bureau site with "information on reported voting and registration by various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics is collected for the nation in November of congressional and presidential election years in the Current Population Survey (CPS)."
  http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/voting.html

Secondary Sources

• Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe
  Mostly full-text access to US and international newspapers, journals, wire services, news transcripts, and legal news, including the Washington Post, New York Times and the Diamondback. Choose "Guided Search" to be able to search the different types of news sources, including University News.

• MasterFile Premier
  Index & abstracts for over 3000 general, humanities, social science and science magazines and journals, with full-text available for over 1,000 of these sources, including major weeklies such as Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report.

• Alternative Press Index
  ndexes nearly 300 alternative, radical, and left journals, newspapers, and magazines and includes selected abstracts from research journals. 1991 to the present.

• Ethnic NewsWatch
  Full-text bilingual (English/Spanish) database of 200 publications of the ethnic, minority, and native press. 1990 to the present.

• CNN.com: Politics
  Includes latest delegate counts, election news, video clips, cartoons, and election calendars.
  http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS

• C-SPAN: Road to the White House
  Includes campaign ads and video clips.

• CQ Voting and Elections Collection
  Full-text database of statistics, analyses, definitions, and historical material on the American voter, major and minor political parties, campaigns and elections, and historical and modern races for Congress, the presidency, and governorships..

• CQ Weekly
  Weekly legislative news and analysis, full text from 1983 to the present.

• National Journal Group's Policy Central
  Full-text, searchable database of the National Journal Group's publications (National Journal, Hotline, Congress Daily, Almanac of American Politics) plus markup reports, public opinion data, and an archive of television campaign ads with streaming audio and video.
  

Political - Scholary/Academic

• International Political Science Abstracts
  Indexes and abstracts from national and international periodicals, 1989 to the present.

• Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
  Citations, abstracting, and indexing of more than 1,300 international political science journals. Some full-text links are available. Many records from key journals published since 2000, also include the references cited in the bibliography of the source article. 1975 to current. Current articles have linked references.

• PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) International
  The PAIS International database contains references to more than 460,000 journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, grey literature, research reports, conference reports, publications of international agencies, microfiche, Internet material, and more. Newspapers and newsletters are not indexed.

• America: History & Life
  Abstracts of information available in journal articles, books, and dissertations on US and Canadian history.

• The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics
  Online journal from Berkeley Electronic Press with many articles on U.S. elections.
  http://www.bepress.com/forum/

Educational

• ERIC
  Provides access to information from over 1000 education and education-related journals as well as a variety of non journal materials, or ERIC documents. It also provides the full text of more than 2,200 ERIC Digests (short reports on topics of current interest in education.)

• Education Abstracts
  Provides citations to over 400 English-language periodicals, yearbooks, and selected series related to education. It also cites book reviews.

Interest Groups

• Campus Compact
  "Campus Compact envisions colleges and universities as vital agents and architects of a diverse democracy, committed to educating students for responsible citizenship in ways that both deepen their learning and improve the quality of community life. We challenge all of higher education to make civic and community engagement an institutional priority. "

• CIRCLE: The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement
  "Promotes research on the civic and political engagement of Americans between the ages of 15 and 25."

• Harvard University Institute on Politics
  "A memorial to President Kennedy, The Institute of Politics' mission is to unite and engage students, particularly undergraduates, with academics, politicians, activists, and policymakers on a non-partisan basis and to stimulate and nurture their interest in public service and leadership."

• MaryPIRG: New Voters Project
  Home page of the Maryland Student Public Interest Research Group.

• Moblize.org: Moblizing America's Youth
  "Mobilizing America's Youth (MAY) is an all-partisan network dedicated to educating, empowering, and energizing young people to increase our civic engagement and political participation. We work to show young people how their lives are impacted by public policy and in turn, how we can impact public policy."

• Youth Vote Coalition
  Links to many organizations involved in promoting political participation among young Americans.

Public Opinion Sources

When accessing subscription databases from off-campus, you will be prompted to enter your last name and the 14-digit number on the back of your UM student id card.

• Roper iPoll
  This databank is a comprehensive, up-to-date source for questions asked on U.S. nationwide public opinion surveys since 1935. It provides question wordings, response percentages, and full survey-level citations. In order to start using iPOLL, click "iPOLL Login" and complete the "iPOLL New User Registration" page on the website.

• Gallup Brain
  Searchable database of Gallup Poll questions and responses back to 1935, plus current Gallup Poll News Service articles and replicas of news stories and press releases linked to the survey.

• Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe
  Go into "Reference" and click on "Polls & Surveys" for information from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. Includes sources in opinion polling such as Gallup, Harris, Roper; ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC; Los Angeles Times, New York Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal.

• National Journal's Policy Central
  Go into "Poll Track."

• American Public Opinion Index. Louisville, KY: Opinion Research Service, 1981 -.
  Index to opinion data contained in companion microfiche American Public Opinion Data.
  LOCATION: (Index) MCKREF STACKS, (Microfiche) MCKPER MFICHE
  CALL NUMBER: (Index) HM261.A463, ((Microfiche) HM261.A4632

• Harris Poll. Los Angeles: Creator's Syndicate, Inc., 1988 - .
  Issued weekly; polls on a wide range of subjects.
  LOCATION: MCK FOLIO (Latest issues in MCKPER CURPER)
  CALL NUMBER: HM261.A211

• Polling the Nations
  A compilation of questions and responses from more than 12,000 national, state, local and special surveys, conducted by 700 polling organizations in the United States and 70 other countries from 1986 through the present. Choose topic "Voting" and then do a keyword search in the "Question Box."
  

Finding Experts

• Washington Information Directory
  Contact information, descriptions, and organizational charts for over 10,000 federal, congressional, and state government offices, nongovernmental organizations, policy groups, and foundations. Ability to export contact information into letter templates and other formats, and to create your own profile of saved favorite documents.

• Ness, Immanuel. Encyclopedia of Interest Groups and Lobbyists in the United States. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2000.
  Includes information on group histories, current and future activities, finances, and bibliographies.
  LOCATION: MCKELDIN REFERENCE STACKS
  CALL NUMBER: JK1118 .N47 2000 vol. 1-2

• Political Advocacy Groups
  Kathleen Fountain, a librarian at CSU-Chico, has developed a comprehensive listing of links to U.S. lobbying organizations, arranged by subject area.
  http://www.csuchico.edu/~kcfount/

• Political Science Resources: Think Tank Directory
  "Think tanks" are policy research and advocacy organizations which usually have a political slant. This site from the University of Michigan Libraries gives an annotated list of links to think tank home pages. Most think tanks post research and position papers and other documents on the web.
  http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/psthink.html

Citation Guides

• Citation Guidelines: Assembling a List of Works Cited in Your Paper
• Documentation Guidelines: Citing Sources Within Your Paper
• Brief Guide to Citing Government Publications
• Reading Legal Citations

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