A Guide to World History

(formerly Primo) contains roughly 90% of WashU Libraries’ holdings, including books, journals, periodicals, and multimedia. The default search also shows results from a large index comprising billions of records for popular and scholarly articles, as well as other materials. You can set your search criteria in a variety of ways, both before and after obtaining results.

searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database (more than 40 million titles). Google allows four levels of access: full view (books not under copyright can be read in full online and downloaded); preview: (a percentage of the book can be read online); snippet (2-3) lines of text surrounding the queried search term – is displayed in can be read), and No preview (these books have not been scanned, so only the metadata is available.

Google Scholar is the largest single indexer of academic literature on the planet. Please access it through this link or the Libraries' homepage, so that it identifies you as someone affiliated with WashU. If you don't, you may not get access to all you have rights to by virtue of your association with WashU.

is a meta-catalog which searches for materials held by tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries) worldwide. It contains over 540 million bibliographic records in 483 languages. Many items in WorldCat can be borrowed through Interlibrary loan (ILL).