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Advanced Spanish Conversation & Composition

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

Where can I go for brainstorming and narrowing a topic?

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org)
A good source for brainstorming for ideas, and narrowing a topic. A communally-edited site. Non-scholarly. Compare this resource to Scholarpedia (http://www.scholarpedia.org/).

How do I find scholarly introductions to my paper topic?

history and culture of Latin America. . .

Encyclopedia of Latin American History & Culture ***RECOMMENDED***
Access: Trexler Library website (http://www.muhlenberg.edu/library) >
Catalog
Encyclopedia of Mexico ***RECOMMENDED***
Access: Trexler Library website (http://www.muhlenberg.edu/library) >
Online Reference Shelf
Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures (Ref Collection 972.01 098e).
Traditional Festivals: A Multicultural Encyclopedia (Ref Collection 394.2603 R888t)

film, dance, art, and music. . .

South American Cinema: 1915-1994 (Ref Collection 791.43098 S726a)
A Guide to Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino-Made Film and Video (Ref Collection 791.43098 R213g).
International Encyclopedia of Dance (Ref Collection 792.6203 I61e)
Garland Encyclopedia of World Music:South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean (Ref. Collection 780.9 G233e)
Dictionary of Art (Ref Collection 703 T948d).
Artcyclopedia (http://www.artcyclopedia.com/)

How do I locate scholarly books (in Spanish and English)?

Trexler Library Catalog
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website (http://www.muhlenberg.edu/library) > Catalog.
Catalog of all books and documents in Trexler Library at Muhlenberg College.

WorldCat ***RECOMMENDED***
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Library Catalogs > WorldCat
Catalog of books and documents in libraries throughout the world. Watch especially for the AREA LIBRARIES designation.

How do I preview books online?

Google Book Search (http://books.google.com/)

How do I locate peer-reviewed (scholarly) journal articles (in Spanish and English)

general indexes with full text. . .

Academic Search Premier 
NOTE: Access from the 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. English only.

Omnifile (WilsonWeb)
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
A subscription database. Includes extensive full text, from both popular and scholarly periodicals. English only.

Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/)
Nearly 3000 open-access peer-reviewed journals sponsored by educational institutions and other donors.

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 catalog to see if Muhlenberg has access to the full text. Good for Spanish-language.

subject-specialty indexes. . .

Anthropology Plus
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
Articles related to ethnicity, folklore, legends, fiestas, etc. English and Spanish.

Art Full Text
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
Standard index for art criticism. English and Spanish.

PRISMA ***RECOMMENDED***
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
Index and full text to journals published in and about Latin America, across the disciplines. In Spanish and English.

Historical Abstracts ***RECOMMENDED***
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
Index to historical research about Latin America and Spain. English and Spanish.

MLA
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
Standard index for literary and film criticism. English and Spanish.

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
Standard index for music and some dance criticism. English and Spanish.

Sociological Abstracts
NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website > Databases A to Z
Index to sociological research. English and Spanish.

getting to the full text. . .

Once you have found the citation of a journal article you're interested in, click on the Get It link found next to the citation, or run a journal title search in Trexler Library's catalog. NOTE: Access from Trexler Library website > catalog.

articles via interlibrary loan. . .

Journal articles not found in Trexler Library can be ordered on interlibrary loan.
NOTE: Access from 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.

Web search engines and directories

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

Google Espana (http://www.google.es/)
Non-selective, but allows limit to Spanish-language and Spanish-located sites.

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.

Evaluating resources

Visit Trexler Library's Evaluating Resources page. NOTE: Access from the Trexler Library website >Getting Started.

Citing sources

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

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

© Muhlenberg College
Last modified: 27 August 2009