SEARCHING THE LIBRARY CATALOG FOR  LITERARY RESOURCES

Searching for Authors
If you are looking for resources written or edited by a particular person, you will do an author search in the library catalog.  Author searches should be done last name, first name.  If resources are available by two different authors who happen to have the same name, look for clues to determine the appropriate author.  If you cannot determine the appropriate author by titles of works, birth and death dates are usually given for clarification.

If you are looking for books about a particular person, you will do a subject search in the library catalog.  Subject searches for information about people should also be conducted last name, first name.  Resources about authors are often broken down into particular categories using Library of Congress subject headings.  

Some Common Subject Headings Associated with Resources About Authors

Searching for Topics
There are two ways to search for literary topics in the library catalog, subject and keyword searches. Subject searches look in the Library of Congress subject headings, which have a consistent way of describing the information in library materials, leading you to very specific sources.  Subject searches will also clear up any confusion when searching for a word that is a homonym (for example depression).   However, occasionally you may miss some very relevant resources by only doing a subject search.

Some Common Literary Subject Headings

Library of Congress Classification Scheme
P Languages and Literature 
P Philology, Linguistics, Communication 
PA Classical Languages & Literatures 
PB-PH Modern European Languages 
PE English Language 
PN Literary History and Collections 
PQ Romance Literature 
PR English Literature 
PS American Literature 
PT Germanic Literature

Keyword searches look for the words you enter in every part of the records in the library catalog.  Keyword searches are very flexible, but may result in "false drops" or resources that have all the words you have searched for, but are not actually on the topic you were searching.  There are a few techniques to help you create better keyword searches.

AND  When AND is placed between keywords, it searches for all the words, but the words need not be near each other and the relationship between the words is not necessarily important
EXAMPLE:  Hemingway and criticism and short stories

OR  Using OR allows you to search for similar words in one search
EXAMPLE:  Hemingway and (criticism or analysis) and short stories

Truncation  Using a wildcard symbol (*) allows you to search for a root word with all of its possible endings
EXAMPLE:  Hemingway and (criticism or analysis) and short stor*

SEARCHING INDEXES AND DATABASES

All of the following databases are available from the library's homepage.

MLA International Bibliography  
The MLA International Bibliography, produced by the Modern Language Association of America, consists of bibliographic records pertaining to literature, language, linguistics, and folklore and includes coverage from 1963 to the present. The MLA International Bibliography provides access to scholarly research in nearly 4,000 journals and series. It also covers relevant monographs, working papers, proceedings, bibliographies, and other formats.

Most important fields in the MLA Bibliography
Author:  The AU field identifies the person(s) responsible for the intellectual content of the original document.  Author names appear last name first, followed by first name or initials. Search using the truncation symbol (*) if you do not know the exact format or spelling of an author name. For example, browner-stephanie* in au retrieves all variations of the name, such as "browner-stephanie," "browner-stephanie-patricia," and "browner-stephanie-p."
IMPORTANT:  Names in MLA are separated by a dash (-) rather than a comma.  

Descriptors:  The DE field lists the subject index terms that describe the contents of the document.

Language:  The LA field lists the language in which the original document is written. Search using complete language names.

Publication Type:  The PT field lists the format in which the document appears. Publication types include book, book-article, book-collection, dissertation-abstract, and journal-article. You must use a hyphen when searching for multiword publication types.

Publication Year:  The PY field lists the year in which the original document was published. You can search for a single year or a range of years in this field.

Source:  The SO field lists the bibliographic citation for a document. It includes the source in which the document appears, journal acronym, place of publication, volume, publication year, and pagination. For dissertations, the SO field includes Dissertation Abstracts number and degree-granting institution.

To view complete records in MLA, choose the change display button.  Choose "Display records with complete record" and then click on "confirm changes."

The MLA Thesaurus and Index
The thesaurus is a guide to suggest preferred terms, related terms, and synonyms for many descriptors. A plus sign (+) in front of a narrower term means that it also has narrower terms.
The index contains an alphabetical list of terms used to index the database. It excludes terms that appear in the limit fields as well as terms in the field-specific indexes. The index allows you to look up, select, and search for variations of a term. It is particularly useful if you are uncertain of the spelling of a term or how the terms appear in the database. Since the index shows terms used in indexing the database, searching directly from this index will always yield results.

ERIC  
ERIC, the U.S. Department of Educations Educational Resource Information Center database, contains citations and abstracts from over 980 educational and education-related journals. This database also contains full text of more than 2,200 digests along with references for additional information.

EJ  ERIC JOURNAL  Notes that this document was published in a journal
ED  ERIC DOCUMENT Notes that this document was never published in a journal, but may be proceedings from a conference, curriculum materials, etc.  These documents can be located on microfilm in Randall Library or from 1996-the present in the ERIC Documents Reproduction Center.

JSTOR 
JSTOR off campus
Archival collection of eleven scholarly journals in language in literature.  For more information, click here.

Gale Literary Index
Gale's Literary Index is a master index to the major literature series published by Gale Group, Inc. It combines and cross references more than 130,000 author names, including pseudonyms and variant names, and more than 160,000 titles into one source.

Last Update: December 12, 2005

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