HIUS 144: Lost San Diego Neighborhoods: Home

This guide provides advice for doing library research on San Diego neighborhood history.

Don't hesitate to contact us directly for additional research assistance. For help with basic questions, you can also review the information & contact options at the library's Get Help page.

~Heather, Mike, and Kelly

San Diego general plans and community plans are great resources to learn about the development plans and policies of the city as a whole (general plan) or individual neighborhoods (community plan, e.g. "downtown"). The current plans are available on the city's website, while several older plans are available in the Library's government documents collection. You can use UC Library Search to discover which plans are available in the library; try a keyword search such as "san diego" and "general plan" or "san diego" and "community plan". If using the "community plan" search, you can add an additional keyword to focus your results on a specific neighborhood/area.

Choosing Keywords About your Topic:

• Consider more specific words (to narrow your focus) or more general terms (to expand your search). For the Community name, try also: official community name, neighborhoods within the larger community, major streets, major businesses/buildings/geographic features, major people (council members, developers, philanthropists, etc.). For the variables, try: housing, population demographics, average income, access to transportation, access to development funds, etc.

About your resources and how to find them:

• Books and reports: an online library catalog like UC Library Search or Circuit
• Government information: online library catalogs, agency websites
  • Tip - include site:.gov [that's site colon dot gov] in Google searches to limit results to government websites. You can also use a more precise domain limiter, like site:sandiego.gov to limit to the City of San Diego's website.
• Scholarly articles: 
  • discipline specific databases such as America: History and Life (which indexes the Journal of San Diego History) or Urban Studies Abstracts
  • interdisciplinary databases such as Academic Search Complete, Google Scholar, JSTOR, and use default search on UC Library Search
• Census and other Data: specialized databases (e.g. Social Explorer) or websites
• Digitized historical materials from UC San Diego Library Digital Collections related to San Diego
• Maps: UC Library Search and check the Maps tab of this guide for more details.
• Archival Collections: UC Library Search and our UCSD Manuscript and Archival Finding Aids hub page. Also search OAC and other aggregators. Check the Websites for Local Historical Websites tab of this guide for more details.
• Ephemera: UC Library Search and Digital Collections websites.

About your search strategy:

• In most databases, you can combine terms with and (both terms must appear in the hit) or or (one term must appear in the hit—good for synonyms/related terms), e.g. San Diego and City Heights | Logan Heights or Southeastern San Diego
• In many databases, you can use a symbol such as * or ! to take the place of letters to get hits with multiple endings of a word, e.g. communit* will find "community" and "communities"
• Experiment with various combinations of keywords. When you find a hit that looks especially relevant, look at the subject headings/descriptors used to classify that item; then run a new search using one or more of those terms to find similar items.
• When searching for historical primary sources, this chart may help you consider what formats or genres of sources to look for.

About your bibliography:

• Be sure to get citation information for all your sources; maybe email records to yourself as a backup
• Some databases can export the citation in a specific format (e.g. APA, Chicago, MLA)