ENGLISH 118
The British Imperial Romance and its Critics
Winter, 2007, Prof. Babli Sinha
This selected list of information sources is intended to help your research and writing this quarter. It includes printed and electronic resources. If you have difficulty finding material on your topic, ask a Reference Librarian to assist you. If you wish to discuss sources for your specific project or assignment, you should schedule an appointment with Jan (email: jgoldsmi@library.ucla.edu; phone: 310/206-7403).
To locate books and periodical titles in the UCLA Library collections, use the UCLA Library Catalog at http://catalog.library.ucla.edu (or from the Search and Find dropdown menu on the UCLA Library's Home Page at http://www2.library.ucla.edu ). Check the catalog if you know the name of an author and want to find out which of that author’s books are in the library’s collection, or if you are looking for a book whose title you know, or if you want books on a given subject or person. The catalog record for each book indicates the names of the campus library that owns it and also gives the book’s call number, to help you locate it in the library. You would also use the catalog to find a periodical by its title or periodicals devoted to a particular subject. The catalog does not have information about articles in periodicals.
You can also find locations and call numbers for books in the UCLA Library in the MELVYL Catalog, a catalog of the books and periodicals in all the UC libraries. (http://melvyl.cdlib.org ). You can access MELVYL from the Search and Find dropdown menu on the UCLA Library's Home Page. For hints on searching refer to the section on Boolean Operators, below, and also use the HELP screens provided for the databases you use.
If you are looking for periodical articles on a given subject, by a known author, or in a named periodical, you can use an electronic article database or a printed index to published periodical literature. A number of online indexes include abstracts of articles, the full text of some articles, or both, but only the citation to others. Most databases have links to the MELVYL (UC e-links) catalog and will display UCLA Library locations and holdings. If the database does not have this link, check in the UCLA Library Catalog, under the title of the periodical, to see if it is available at UCLA.
Hot links to online indexes and full text journals in the humanities are available through the YRL Collections, Reference and Instructional Services page at http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/yrl/referenc/index.htm Click on Libraries and Collections on the Library's Home Page. Select Libraries; select Research Library, and then select Research. Then select Article Databases . The databases are organized by subject. The databases can also be accessed from the Library’s Home Page. Use the Search and Find dropdown menu. Click on the link to Article Databases. This list, which includes the sciences, may be searched by subject or the name of a specific database.
The following databases represent a selection of those that you could use for your research:
America: History and Life. Index and abstracts of articles on the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present, published since 1964.
Expanded Academic ASAP. Indexes both scholarly and popular periodicals from 1988 onwards. Includes full text for many recent articles.
LexisNexis Academic. A group of full-text databases including a wide range of journals and English language newspapers from around the world, and some in Western European languages. It covers the last ten years, though coverage goes back to circa 1980 for some titles. It also includes book and film reviews, though generally recent ones.
Literature Online. Full texts of over 300,000 works of English and American literature, including periodical articles.
MLA International Bibliography: Indexes journals, dissertations, collected works in the fields of literature, folklore, and linguistics from 1963 to the present.
WORLD WIDE WEB RESOURCES
Documents are loaded onto the Web by public and private organizations, businesses, central and local government, and by individuals. You should treat all sources of information with caution, there being no guarantee that the information is accurate and free of bias. The library subscribes to some of these databases so that you may use them without charge. To make the best use of the Web look at some of the reliable guides to Web searching, like the one created by the College Library:
http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/college/help/guides.htm#WebSearching
If you want the results of your searches to be relevant, you must have a basic understanding of the terms used to index the database and the ways in which these terms may be combined. These notes offer a brief introduction to a few of the concepts involved in database searching.
Boolean operators come into play when you use two or more keywords to search an electronic database. The operators link your keywords in quite specific ways that affect the results of your search. The most commonly used operators are OR, AND, and NOT (sometimes AND NOT).
Operator Function Example
OR Broad, romance OR Britain (finds all records
with the word “romance” and also all
Inclusive records with the word “Britain”)
AND Limiting romance AND imperialsim (finds all
records in which both terms, “romance”
and also “imperialism” appear.
NOT Limiting romance NOT gothic (finds records
that mention the word “romance”, but excludes all records that mention the word “gothic”, even if the term “romance” appears in them)
Efficient searching depends on being clear about the information you want, on selecting a relevant database, on understanding how the Boolean operators work in the database you are using, and on using the controlled indexing language employed by the database. For example, most academic library catalogs make use of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). These headings provide a controlled approach to subject searches in ORION2. However, each article databases uses its own unique system of headings.