Production History
- Author's ExperienceThe process of finding authorial interviews, diaries, and letters will vary greatly with time period. Add interviews to a WorldCat search for Delillo, or sources to a WorldCat search for Chaucer.
- Trade Publications for Publishers and BooksellersEspecially useful for modern and contemporary authors, although trade notices on print runs exist in newspapers back to the 18th and 19th centuries. See general sources like Lexis-Nexis, Academic Search Premier, or Scholar OneSearch rather than academic databases like MLA and JSTOR.
Bestsellers and Sales Figures
With much appreciation to the (no longer online) UC - Berkeley English Research Guide by Michaelyn Burnette.
- British Fiction 1800-1829: A Database of Production, Circulation & ReceptionFrom Cardiff University's Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, a listing of nearly 2300 works by around 900 authors. Information about format, editions, advertisements, and reviews.
Finding Archives
- WorldCat Advanced SearchUse the format drop-down for archival material.
- Archive FinderRequires BPL card. A database of archives collections. Will not get you to the full text, but will instead tell you where a particular author's papers are scattered, or particular manuscripts are held. Uncovers the existence of archives that are hard to find other ways.
- Internet Resources on ArchivesFrom the NU Libraries, using Archives and finding local collections.
- EuropeanaA master search of digitized objects from many of Europe's major cultural institutions.
- The GoogleOf course, you've used this already, but some Archives concentrate on placement in Google search results rather than official cataloging.
- Call Them!If you know of a repository with some related papers, give them an email or call -- almost every archive has a backlog, and they may know of other collections in your area.