Cuisine as Culture

Need help with your research? Contact:

Kelly Cannon
Humanities & Business Librarian
phone: x3602
email: kcannon@muhlenberg.edu
IM (AIM, Yahoo, MSN): refcannon
Reference desk IM: talktotrexler

Group Project #1: The history and culture of a particular food
Group project #2: The intersection of space and food in an Allentown Hispanic immigrant community
Long paper #1: Forbidden foods in Hispanic history and culture

Encyclopedias

Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America (Ref. Collection 305.800973 V413g)
American Immigrant Culture (Ref. Collection 305.800973 L657a
Food and Drink in America (Ref. Collection 641.3003)
Countries and Their Cultures (http://0-infotrac.galegroup.com.library.muhlenberg.edu/itweb/mul_coll?db=GVRL)
Encyclopedia of Food and Culture ***RECOMMENDED*** (http://0-infotrac.galegroup.com.library.muhlenberg.edu/itweb/mul_coll?db=GVRL)
Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture ***RECOMMENDED***(http://0-infotrac.galegroup.com.library.muhlenberg.edu/itweb/mul_coll?db=GVRL)

Books (secondary and primary resources)

Trexler Library Catalog
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > catalog.
Catalog of all books and documents in Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College. Some useful subject headings are:

Food habits and United States
Foodways
Lehigh/Allentown Latinos/Hispanic

WorldCat
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Library catalogs
Catalog of books and documents in libraries throughout the world. Watch especially for the AREA LIBRARIES designation.

Statistics

American Factfinder (U.S. Census Data)***RECOMMENDED*** (http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en)
Passport Reference ACCESS: Trexler Library website> Online Reference Shelf
Statistical Abstract of the United States (http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS2878)
Pennsylvania State Data Finder (http://pasdc.hbg.psu.edu/)
Pew Hispanic Center (http://pewhispanic.org/)

Market research

Reference USA
ACCESS: Trexler Library website> Online Reference Shelf

Passport Reference
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Online Reference Shelf
A subscription database. Contains illuminating market research about shopping and diets for various countries and the ethnic groups therein.

Periodical articles (popular and scholarly)

general indexes with full text. . .

Academic Search Premier
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
A subscription database. Good starting place for journals, and includes the full text of about 3000 journals. Limit to "peer reviewed" to find only scholarly articles. Back issues of journals begin as early as 1990. Recent issues may not be included yet, due to publisher agreement. Journals held in Trexler Library are marked accordingly.

LexisNexis Academic Universe
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
See especially this section: General > Power Search > Ethnic News

Morning Call via Proquest ***RECOMMENDED***
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
Lehigh Valley news,coverage 1984 to present.

subject-specialty indexes (scholarly). . .

Historical Abstracts
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
A subscription database for European history. Some full text.

PRISMA ***RECOMMENDED***
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
A subscription database for Latin American history and culture.

Sociological Abstracts
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
A subscription database. Standard index for sociology.

getting to the full text. . .

Once you have found the citation of a journal article you're interested in, click on the Text at Trexler link found next to the citation, or run a journal title search in Trexler Library's online catalog. ACCESS: Trexler Library website > catalog.

articles via interlibrary loan. . .

Journal articles not found in Trexler Library can be ordered on interlibrary loan.
ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Interlibrary Loan

Can I search all the library databases and catalog together, in one search?

Most of the databases and the library catalog can be searched together in a new library search engine called Search Central found on the Trexler Library website. Most useful when working with narrow topics where you need everything that's available. Several search features are missing from the original databases, like relevance, and language and peer review limiters.

Search engines

Popular

Google (http://www.google.com)
Non-selective. One of the largest web crawlers.

Scholarly (use with discretion)

Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com)
An open-access web crawler that looks for content it identifies as "scholarly." Emphasis is on books and journal articles. Intended as a "federated search" to search across disciplines (weighted toward sciences and social sciences). Not always full text. Check our Journal Locator (see above) to see if Muhlenberg has access to the full text.

Intute (http://www.intute.ac.uk/)
The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in the database and write high quality descriptions of the resources.

Local resources

Map of Allentown

List of restaurants in the Lehigh Valley (updated Fall 2009)

Blog: Beyond Scrapple - A Guide (http://www.beyondscrapple.com/)

Other helpful websites

International Potato Center (http://www.cipotato.org/)

Google Maps how-to

My Maps (http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68480)

Powerpoint best practices

Powerpoint: Best Practices (http://www.turpincommunication.com/articles/pptbestpractices.htm)

Creating a bibliography

For tips on citing print and electronic sources, visit Trexler Library's Citation Guides for Print and Electronic Resources. ACCESS: Trexler Library website > Citation Guides.

For automated citation, try the shareware Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/).