Use the Tripod catalog for your home institution 
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to look for all books (print and digital) owned by your college as well as the print titles at the other two schools.
The following searches are a sampling of possibilities. To find materials on a topic, try doing a keyword search in the Tripod Catalog to find relevant materials and then use the subject headings assigned to those titles to find more books. Note that all these searches are in the Books+Media channel. In examples #1 and 4 below, using keywords (rather than subjects) will pick up results from chapter titles.
"public space*" AND "18th century" [Keyword search]
(clothing OR dress OR fashion* OR costume*) AND france [Subjects] AND ("18th century" OR enlightenment) [Keyword]
(child* OR children OR mother*) [Subject] AND (foundling* OR adopt* OR abandon*) AND ("18th century" OR enlightenment) AND history [Keywords] This search includes articles
("free speech" OR "freedom of speech" OR censor* OR "civil rights") AND ("18th century" OR enlightenment) [Keywords] AND (france OR french) [Subject]
** Try opening a search above and replace one of the topics with your subject interest.
WorldCat is an important place to look for many materials not owned by the Tricollege Libraries. This combined library catalog contains more than 500 million bibliographic records owned by libraries around the world. Many of these items are available to you though interlibrary loan. Use the 
button to place requests.
Doctoral students go through an exhaustive literature search when writing their dissertations. They also tend to work on new questions, sometimes ones that have received very little attention from scholars before. You can obtain many of these dissertations and benefit from all the bibliographic sources cited and discussed.
The databases below index dissertations and masters' theses and in many instances will provide full text copies. When that is not the case, search the web for the dissertation title (in quotation marks). Many are available in open university archives. When that strategy does not work, please request a copy through Interlibrary Loan. Some dissertation writers choose to not make their theses publicly available, but you may find related publications by searching for them as authors in WorldCat and journal databases.
