History and Genealogy

Database Critique

As I entered into the James E. Shepard Library Website to search for "History & Genealogy" sites to conduct a research on database critiquing of "Slavery and American History", the first thing that caught my eye was "North America Women's Letters and Diaries". This site offered letters from exactly 1,325 women of all ethnicity groups explaining their bibliographies and experiences they had living in the colonial times of the 1950's. This site could be useful for my topic because it gives accurate information of many women who been through the colonial times and got a chance to write their experiences down on paper, which later got published. I was intrigued by the information so I went into more depth than just clicking on the site to observe that I actually started to read some of the diaries and letters. The second site I found was the "Salem Press". This site included a drop-box so that you could search for what you wanted to. If you was unsure of what to search for (like myself), there was reference sets available. The reference sets offered were: Decades, Great Events from History, and Great Lives from History. The reference sets were helpful, yet time consuming. They were time consuming because you had to search through many pages ranging from 1-17 to find what you were looking for in that exact reference set. This site was not helpful to me because it didn't provide me the necessary information to conduct my research on without browsing through many pages. Being that I was interested in Slavery, all the information I seen didn't tie to my interest. The last site I found was "American History and Life." It was an index of literature that covered history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. The site allowed me to search for whatever I wanted to and many options were displayed. Being I was interested in American History as well as slavery, I searched for those things. This site was helpful for my research because the information was accurate and reliable in bibliographic references. Of all the sites I searched for, I've gained a lot of information on the material I was interested in. I learned new information on the American History and Slavery, and my mind became open for things I thought I would never be interested in.