ENGL 316: Library Research

Mackenzie Brooks

Assistant Professor & Digital Humanities Librarian

English Department Liaison // Leyburn 218

February 10, 2017

By the end of this session, you will...

• have experience with literature databases
• have a framework for evaluating sources
• be ready to start your research paper!

How do you research?

Research!?!

words of wisdom

1. Research is iterative.

2. Information overload = filter failure.

3. There is no perfect source. There is no perfect database.

4. Have fun!

Search Everything

• a product the library pays for
• combines all our print + electronic collections
• can be overwhelming
• good for starting out + interdisciplinary research

MLA Bibliography

• Specific to languages and literature
• It's an index, so not all full text
• Search by publication title

Google Scholar

• Run by a corporation
• Content = mostly journal articles
• Updates quickly!
• Connected to library holdings
• Good for citation chasing... "Cited by 37"

Early English Books Online

• Pages images and full text (50%) of works in English from 1473–1700
• Search by variant spellings and forms
• Continues to be updated
• Based on Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement aka microfilm.

Gale Literary Sources

• Reference/encyclopedia content like biographies, overviews, reviews as well as criticism
• Search by "name of work" or "name of person" or peer-reviewed
• Topic Finder + Term Frequency

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

• Safer than Wikipedia
• Biographies on 60k + people in British history
• Browse biographies by theme

Kindred Britain

http://kindred.stanford.edu/

• network visualization tool of 30k people in British history

Worldcat.org

• All the books!
• 2 billion library holdings from across the world.
• An attempt to record all published books.
• We can interlibrary loan books from other libraries.

Zotero is your friend.

library.wlu.edu/zotero