| 
name_____________________________
Cabrillo
Library: Introduction to Literary Research
| Biography Resource Center |
1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage.
2. Click on Full Text Articles, then on Biography Resource
Center (under Literature in the center column; if you are coming
in from off campus, type in your library card number to get access.)
Look up information
on your author. For example, here's what I found when I searched for Ernest Hemingway:
Your author________________________________
Your notes________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
| Literature
Resource Center |
1. Go to the
Cabrillo College Library homepage. If you are at an Information
Workstation in the library, just click on HOME at the top of
the screen.
2. Click on Full Text Articles
3. Click on Literature
Resource Center (under Literature in the center column; if you
are coming in from off campus, type in your library card number to
get access.)
To get acquainted with this resource, start off with an Author
Search, which is the default. Type last name first, then click
on Search. For example:
Note that you can tap into various types of resources. One that might be quite interesting is the Literary-Historical Timeline.
The information
you find can be extensive. Typically, part of it will be biographical,
and part of it will be critical. You can do title searches as well.
Check out "Additional Resources" -- these are quality Web
sites about the author, pre-selected by the editors.
Your author__________________________________
Make notes here
about what kind of information you found:
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
Both Literature
Resource Center and Biography Resource Center are
from Gale Research Corporation, which also publishes print editions
of many of these resources. For those of you who like to settle down
with a book version -- it's possible you could
do that!! Just ask a reference librarian to point you in the right
direction.
| Finding
Books in the Library |
1. Go to the
Cabrillo College Library homepage
2. Click on Library Catalog.
To check for autobiographical materials (the author wrote about him/her self), do an author search:
Strategies
to use when searching for criticism
-- You will find considerable commentary and criticism about an individual's
work in books about the person. The person's name, then, is
the subject that you are searching. Have to put last name first. For example:
This search will
retrieve books that are biographies, as well as critical works. But,
to find books that are devoted to criticism, consider that the word
criticism is probably in the record for the book, as part of
the subject or title, or in a note. So, try an Advanced Keyword Search using the author's name (last name first) in the subject field and the word criticism in any other field. For example:
From the results list, click on the line under
its title to get more information about a particular book.
Title_____________________________________________________________
Location_______________
Call number________________________
Status_________________
The Library has many
books about authors grouped by ethnicity and gender and genre. Your particular
author may be given excellent coverage by these kinds of books. To discover
them, do subject searches using subject headings such as the following:
- AMERICAN LITERATURE
AFRICAN AMERICAN
- AMERICAN LITERATURE
HISPANIC AMERICAN
- AMERICAN LITERATURE
WOMEN AUTHORS
- POETS, AMERICAN
The library also has reference books that provide extensive coverage of authors and their works. A good place to browse in the reference books in the library is the reference PR section for British literature and the reference PS section for American literature. Here are some examples:
- British Writers ref PR85.B688
- Dictionary
of Literary Biography: Chicano Writers ref PS153.M4C48
- Modern
American Women Writers ref PS151.M54 1991
- Native
American Literatures ref PS153.I52W47
An important set
of reference books for placing authors within their times and the events
around them is Literature and Its Times ref
PN50.L574
There will be examples
of these kinds of works on a book truck in the front of the classroom
when your class is here.
1. Go to Cabrillo College Library homepage
2. Click on Full Text Articles
3. Under General, select Academic Search
Premier
4. On the next screen, click on 
5. To retrieve articles that will be fulltext in the database, click
in the small box next to Full Text
6. Type in your search terms. Then click on the Search button
From the Results list, you can click to limit to Academic journals:
You can also search for discussion of a theme in relation to a person or a work, as in this example:
Try searching Academic Search Premier for articles on a topic of interest to you. From the Results screen, click on an article
title to get to the screen with full information.
Identify
an article on your author. Note basic information about it here:
Article title__________________________________________
Periodical title________________________________________
Publication date_____________
Notice that once you have the full article on the screen, you can
email it, print it, or save it (see buttons for doing those things
towards the top of the screen).
Provides
content from hundreds of reference books covering every major subject.
There are over 2 million entries, 65,000+ images (art, diagrams, maps
and photos), and over 93,000 audio pronunciation files. The content
is enriched by a network of cross-reference links that cut across topics,
titles and publishers to give you accurate, contextual results. Try
it!
1.
Go to Cabrillo College Library homepage
2. Click on Full Text Articles
3. Credo reference is in the center column, under
Encyclopedias/Background information
Look
up a person or a concept and see what you get. Make notes here:
________________________________________
________________________________________
________________________________________
The library provides
access to over 18,000 electronic books. You can get to these from on
and off campus -- it's 2 am and you forgot to check out books for that
paper due at 10? No prob. ; -)
1. Go to Cabrillo
College Library homepage
2. Click on Full Text Articles
3. Under
General (top left), click on NetLibrary E-Books
Look
up a person or a concept and see what you get. Make notes here:
________________________________________
________________________________________
________________________________________
Importance
of Evaluating Web Resources. Basic criteria: Authority. Accuracy.
Objectivity. Currency. Coverage.
Suppose I was interested in death as a theme in Hemingway's writing. My search could look like this in Google: Use quotation marks to keep words in phrases together, e.g.,
Getting
to a list of Internet Search Engines
Use
the search engines to search for quality Web resources on your topic.
Make notes below about 3 quality Web sites you find.
Since
I often get asked, here's the skinny about emailing Web pages
-- You can't email Web pages from public machines in the classroom.
However, you can go to your email and copy and paste the URL into
an email message to yourself.
1.
URL____________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
2.
URL____________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
3.
URL____________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
If
you're a little tired of using Google, thy these! Exalead.com
|| Clusty.com
You
all no doubt know about YouTube
and Google Videos. But the
really good stuff is at Blinkx.com.
Try it!!
Brief
guide to MLA citations
WorldCat.org -- find libraries that have the resources you need! Once you have identified a book or a periodical article, you can click on Citethis Item! Wow!!
Getting
to this page on the Internet
- Go to the Cabrillo
College Library homepage <http://libwww.cabrillo.edu>
- Click on Internet
Links
- Click on English
- Under Course-Related
Materials, click on ENGL 1B, Composition and Literature,
J. RIchey
J. Richey; T.
N. Smalley 6/08 |
