What is background information?
Background information, or reference information, is the type of information you could get from Wikipedia. These resources will give you trustworthy overviews of a topic and provide you with basic things like dates, events and facts about your topic. Generally, you can think of this information in terms of the who, what, where and when of a topic.
Sociological Information
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Global Road Warrior This link opens in a new windowPractical business travel guide to over 175 countries. In addition to basic geographical information such as climate and demographics, has great information about doing business in the selected country. Information includes business ethics, how meetings are conducted, proper business attire & attitudes toward time and punctuality. Social and cultural information such as education, language, music, and food are included. Technical information about internet connections, communications, health and medical for the traveler is also included. World Trade Press
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Dictionary of the Social SciencesThis resource contains concise, clearly written definitions of important terms in anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, human geography, cultural studies and Marxism
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Gun Regulation and Legislation in America This link opens in a new windowThis HeinOnline collection brings together more than 500 titles dealing with this difficult and important topic. Included are periodicals, key compiled federal legislative histories, relevant congressional hearings, CRS Reports, Supreme Court briefs, and more. Links to nearly 500 scholarly articles, an extensive bibliography, and a balanced selection of external resources to further research this subject are also provided. Hein
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Where to Find Background Information
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Credo Reference This link opens in a new windowThis Complete Core Collection includes over 1200 from major reference works, to multi-volume subject encyclopedias, to field guides, to scholarly handbooks, to animations and countless other award-winning sources – spans across all disciplines with something for libraries of all types. Also included are nearly 2,000 short reference videos, more than 550,000 high-resolution art images, photographs and maps across all subject areas. Credo
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Gale eBooks This link opens in a new windowA database of full-text encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research. Gale
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MasterFILE Complete This link opens in a new windowDesigned specifically for public libraries, this multidisciplinary database provides full text for more than 2,000 general reference publications with full text information dating as far back as 1922. Covering virtually every subject area of general interest, it also contains full text for more than 1,000 reference books and over 164,400 primary source documents, as well as an Image Collection of over 502,000 photos, maps & flags. EBSCO
