Welcome Back!

Happy first day of classes at UConn, and welcome back!

For those who are new to this blog, it is designed to be a resource for human rights students and faculty with updates on events, collections, new resources and research tips.  Feel free to comment or email me with questions and research topics that you’d like explored.

For the next couple of weeks, I’ll also be updating about my participation in a human rights delegation to Rwanda this summer, and those updates will all be labeled with a Rwanda tag. 

Happy reading, and enjoy the first day of classes!

All the best,
Valerie

Finally, an update!

Hi Everyone,

Sorry for the long gap in posts– I’ve been trying to update weekly during the academic year, but even that hasn’t always happened.  During the summer when there aren’t students in session, I failed to update entirely, mostly because I was in Rwanda myself, away from the speedy internet connection that I’ve grown to depend upon here.

But, apologies aside, there will be more frequent posts coming soon, and my goal is twice a week.  If anyone has ideas for posts, topics, and research questions they would like to see me address, please let me know.

Thanks for reading and sticking with me!

How to Find Full Text Articles on Human Rights

Looking at the stats for this blog, it looks like many people who come here do so after googling “full text human rights articles” or something similar. 

For those looking for full text articles on human rights, there is good news and there is bad. 

First the bad:  Using Google, Yahoo!, or any other internet search engine is going to provide very limited results.  You may come up with a random article that someone cut and pasted and added to their website.  You may come up with essays on human rights that people have written on personal blogs.   Unfortunately, neither of these results are appropriate for academic human rights research

Instead, you need to find articles in peer-reviewed journals.  Examples of peer reviewed journals include titles like The Journal of Human Rights and Human Rights Quarterly, While there are a few journals freely available online, such as the Harvard Human Rights Journal, the bulk of them are only available through subscription databases such as Academic Onefile (formerly InfoTrac), Proquest Research Library, J-STOR, Academic Search, etc.

But now the good news!  University students only need to go to their school’s library website to access subscription databases for their research.  UConn students have a number of tools available to them for finding journal articles.

The Human Rights Research Guide, http://classguides.lib.uconn.edu/humanrights, has an entire page devoted to databases and finding journal articles on a variety of human rights subjects.    For UConn students, all you have to do is click on the database links.  (If you’re off campus, login to the UConn Virtual Private Network (VPN) first.)

Once you’re inside the database, many of them have ways to search for full text articles only.  But what if the perfect article for your paper comes up and it isn’t available full text?

For example, this citation, taken from the PAIS International database.  The article does not come up as full text.

Global Challenges: Climate Chaos and the Future of Development.
Sachs, Wolfgang
IDS Bulletin, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 36-39, Mar 2007
… development issues including economic growth & equity, human rights & wellbeing. He argues that the growth of the West was made possible by unsustainable exploitation of carbon resources & the colonies, & this can never again be repeated. The …
View Record | InterLibrary Loan |

But, don’t despair! 

Click on the button at the bottom of the citation.  When you do this, a new window opens telling you that UConn does in fact have this article available full text in another database. 

If you find an article that isn’t available full text in any of UConn’s databases, you can request the article through Document Delivery/Inter-Library Loan (DD/ILL) and a pdf copy will be emailed to you within 2-5 days.

For human rights articles in particular, here are a couple of databases that I recommend.

Academic Onefile

Includes most disciplines (multidisciplinary) with good coverage of both popular and scholarly publications.  Click on the boxes to limit to peer reviewed articles.  Can also limit search to full text only.

Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO)

Articles and reports on international affairs. Includes scholarly articles, papers from university research institutes and non-governmental organizations, foundation-funded research projects, and conference proceedings.

Update on (not) Updating

My apologies for the lack of updates during the month of March.  This was not intentional, just a reflection of an extremely busy time in the semester.  I do plan to update much more regularly now, and with more information on archival materials, new books in Babbidge, and as always, human rights events and lectures happening on campus. 

Thanks as always for reading!  If you have any research questions, or suggestions for things to blog about in the world of human rights libraries and archives, definitely drop me a line.

Welcome to the New Human Rights Research Blog

This blog has several goals:

1.  To provide human rights research tools to students and faculty at the University of Connecticut, as well as researchers at other universities and the interested general public. 

2.   To showcase human rights resources available through the Homer Babbidge Library and Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut.

3.   To provide information about human rights programs and events on the UConn campuses and surrounding areas.