Fulltext searching can retrieve overwhelming search results. To avoid problems, think about your medical missionary's name and write down variants for the name:
"Minnie Bere" OR "Minnie A Bere" OR "M A Bere"
You may see occupational titles or honorifics:
"Nurse Bere" OR "Miss Bere"
For complicated name forms, see "Proximity searching" on this Penn Libraries guide:
When viewing results, put the results list's sort order to "Oldest First" or "Newest First", so that you see your missionary's life in chronological order. Also, if you know your missionary's active dates, the use the database's date filters to narrow the results - but allow a few years after the missionary's last known date, so you can see memorials or reminiscences.
Use these to identify and locate magazine and journal articles written by and about medical missionaries, from the 19th and 20th centuries. Penn Libraries research guides provide links to our digitized historic magazine and journal databases:
Yale Divinity Library maintains a Mission Periodicals Online guide. This alphabetical list of Yale's missionary periodicals, linked to Orbis (Yale University Library's catalog), is useful for identifying periodicals but does not provide digitized fulltext.
Newspapers may provide interviews or reports from missionaries in the field, accounts of local lectures or visits by missionaries, and advertisements or other announcements. These Penn Libraries research guides will point to additional historic newspaper resources:
Franklin Catalog, the Penn Library's online catalog, lists more than two million books, journal titles, and other materials contained in campus libraries. Note: The Biddle Law Library has its own completely separate catalog, LOLA.
You can search Franklin by author, title, journal title, subject, or keyword. For information on searching, consult Franklin Catalog Search Help.
Keyword: Use keyword searching to combine concepts (X AND Y)and to search for particular words or phrases that might appear in titles or notes or subjects:
Author: Try corporate bodies such as:
Subject: Some useful headings are listed below, with links to Franklin searches. These subjects can be combined with geographic terms (e.g. Philadelphia) to narrow your search.
And don't forget those personal-account subject terms!
Although the Penn Libraries' collection is large, there are still many reasons you might seek materials elsewhere. Listed below are options for finding books at other libraries.
