Trexler Library | Muhlenberg College

Dance and Society

Need help with your research? Contact:

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

Web search engines and directories

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

Intute (http://www.intute.ac.uk/)
Selective. 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.

Librarian's Index to the Internet (http://lii.org/)
Highly selective search engine and directory of web resources. Both scholarly and popular sites deemed important by a team of California-based public librarians. Entries are accompanied by paragraph-length descriptions.

Encyclopedias (print and online)

Encyclopedia Britannica Online (http://0-search.eb.com.library.muhlenberg.edu/)
The library subscribes to the complete version. Entries are unsigned, but recognized as a good starting point for research.

International Encyclopedia of Dance (Trexler Library Reference 792.6203 I61e)
Scholarly, signed articles on dance forms worldwide.

MSN Encarta (http://encarta.msn.com/)
Brief, unsigned entries. Recognized as a good starting place for research.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org)
A communally-written encyclopedia. Anyone can edit or contribute an entry, at any time. Excellent for locating controversies on a topic and getting ideas for research papers. The bibliographies often point to scholarly resources. ***Not itself a scholarly source per se, with no authority control. Seek corroborating evidence. *** Contrast with Scholarpedia (http://www.scholarpedia.org/).

Books (online)

Google Books (http://books.google.com)
Selected pages from published (often academic) books. Varies by copyright restriction.

Periodical articles (online indexes with full text)

Academic Search Premier
(http://www.muhlenberg.edu/library/articles/databases/alphabetical.html)
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.

Omnifile (WilsonWeb)
(http://www.muhlenberg.edu/library/articles/databases/alphabetical.html)
A subscription database. Includes extensive full text, from both popular and scholarly periodicals.

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 Journal Locator (see above) to see if Muhlenberg has access to the full text.

Evaluating resources

Visit Trexler Library's Evaluating Resources (http://www.muhlenberg.edu/library/guides/evaluating.pdf) page.

Citing sources

For tips on citing print and electronic sources, visit Trexler Library's Citation Guides for Print and Electronic Resources (http://www.muhlenberg.edu/library/reshelp/citations.html).