In the First Person is an index to English language personal narratives, including letters, diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories. Some are available on the web, some through UNLV's subscriptions to Alexander Street Press collections, and some are held by repositories and archives around the world.
Perform in-depth field and keyword searches within Alexander Street Press databases and more than 700,000 pages of editorially selected materials spanning 400 years. This collection contains full-text narratives by more than 18000 individuals from all walks of life.
Search tips:
- You can full-text search this database and search for specific words or phrases that occur within the texts. When full-text searching you can use the standard Boolean operators, AND, OR, NOT in the following manner:
- The OR operator is capital OR. So "Slavery OR Prostitution" retrieves materials that contain either of the words 'slavery' or 'prostitution (e.g., slavery OR prostitution). A lower case "or" will retrieve the exact phrase. E.g. if you enter "Black or White" you will retrieve materials that contain the phrase "black or white".
- The AND operator is capital AND. So if you enter "girl AND education" retrieves materials that contain both the words 'girl' and 'education'.
- The NOT operator is capital NOT. If you enter "cigar NOT smoke" you will retrieve texts that contain the word 'cigar' but not 'smoke', 'smokes', or 'smokers.'
- When full text searching, search punctuation in the following manner:
- Hyphens: Hyphens act as word separators. Thus, you should treat hyphenated expressions as separate words excluding the hyphen (e.g., if searching for all-powerful, type in all powerful).
- Apostrophes: You must include apostrophes when searching words with apostrophes in them (e.g., only by typing God's will one find "God's"). In this database apostrophes do not act as word separators. Therefore contractions and elisions must be entered without spaces before or after the apostrophe.
- Ampersands: The ampersand (&) is not a searchable character. Avoid Phrase Searches where an ampersand may be used as a conjunction and realize that &c must be entered as simply c.
- The standard truncation character for this database is the asterisk *. It can be used at the end of any string to retrieve a endings of various lengths. For example, cigar* will retrieve cigar, cigars, cigarette, etc.
Where is it: Go to the UNLV Libraries' home page http://www.library.unlv.edu. Select the Articles and Databases tab, click on the A-Z List of Databases and then on the letter I and select In the First Person.
Quick Link: http://www.inthefirstperson.com/firp/index.shtml