English 55/Black Studies 29:
Childhood in the Caribbean and Africa
Fall 2001
Library Catalogs | Literary-Critical Sources | General Background | Dictionaries | The Web | Citing Sources
Library Catalogs
Start research in the online
Five College Library Catalog (one for Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke
and Smith, another for the University of Massachusetts). You can search
in the library catalogs by authors' names, by subjects, by titles of books,
or by keywords. To find a book about authors, look under their
names as SUBJECTs. (The AUTHOR category lists books by them.) Under
SUBJECT you can also find books about individual countries or regions.
To search in SUBJECT category you must use the vocabulary libraries have
chosen by libraries have selected. So if a name of a specific country
in the Caribbean does not turn up what you want, try "Caribbean Area",
as the catalog has called it -- or, even better, the more specific "Caribbean,
English-speaking". Be as attentive to official subjects about African
literature: Thak about country, region, language, etc. If you have any
doubts about formal subjects, try a combination of KEYWORDs. Once you
have found a few relevant books, you can click on a subject heading from
one reference and move directly into a search on that subject.
When you find books we don't own -- or when our copies are
checked out -- you can borrow books directly from other Five-College libraries
through the online library catalog. For directions, see FCD
(Five-College Delivery).
The online catalog shows you books and titles of journals.
It does not immediately give you the full list of articles in journals.
Look at the Library's Articles
page for advice about finding articles in journals.
Literary-Critical Sources
Contemporary Authors online and in print (Ref CT 220 C6): Biographies
of authors, lists of their books, notes on reviews, interviews, etc.
Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers: First, Second,
and Third Series (Ref PR 9205 A52 T88): Illustrated biographies of
selected major authors from Caribbean region and Africa. Lists both original
and critical publications.
Fifty Caribbean Writers: a Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook
(Ref PR 9205 A52 F54 1986): Essays by various scholars which give biographies
and critical essays on fifty major authors from Caribbean. Includes works
by and about authors. Now dated.
African Writers (Ref PL 8010 A453 1997): Two volumes of critical
surveys of major writers from Africa, with bibliographies.
Companion to African Literature (PR 9340 C65 2000): Quick one-volume
dictionary of authors, literary works, topics, etc.
Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (Ref PR 9080
A52 E53 1994): A two-volume set with brief articles about authors, genres,
topics, etc.
MLA International Bibliography: Reference to scholarly articles
about literature, folklore, linguistics, and more published since 1963.
You can search by an author's name; you can look up keyword topics. No
book reviews listed!
Finding Book Reviews: Library's webpage which gives tips
for finding reviews, an important source for evaluation of books, expecially
very recent books
Expanded
Academic ASAP: An index to articles published since 1980 from a wide
variety of academic journals. Covers film, history, Black Studies, Women's
Studies, etc., as well as literature. Reviews included. Many references
link to complete online articles.
Lexis-Nexis
Academic Universe: Under "News", access to complete articles from
many newspapers worldwide. A place to start looking for recent reviews.
General Background
Britannica Online:
For basic information, a good encyclopedia is often best.
The
World Factbook: Current, largely statistical, information about individual
countries, compiled by the CIA
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Cultures
(Ref F 1406 E515 2000): Short articles, sometimes with suggestions for
further reading, on places, people, music, cinema, and more.
South America, Central America, and the Caribbean (Ref F 1406.5
S68): An annual survey with background essays and country-by-country sections
with historical, geographical, and economic information. Most recent edition:
2002.
Caribbean History in Maps (Ref xG 1535 A8 1979): Good representation
of original inhabitants, European conquest and conflict, patterns of slavery,
economics, etc., up through the 1970's
Dictionaries
When you are reading any literature, an essential tool is a good, unabridged
dictionary. Now the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (Ref PE
1625 O87 1989) is available as the OED
Online. This dictionary gives definitions and also illustrates historical
changes in words' meanings; its size and scholarly inclusiveness mean
that you are likely to find even words which have recently migrated into
English. Occasionally, however, even the OED needs supplementing.
Try more specialized works, like the Dictionary of Caribbean English
Usage (Ref PE 3304 D33 1996), or, perhaps, A Dictionary of South
African English (PE 3451 D53 1996).
The Web
The Library offers several aids to jump start searching on
the web. Research provides
reasonably direct, organized access to Internet resources like library
catalogs in the U.S. and abroad, and
search engines for finding particular sites. (Right now librarians
think Google is the
best.) Take a look at Online
Resources by Academic Discipline. Obviously,
English is the best starting place; on that webpage you will find
links to meta-sites, online indexes and collections of electronic texts,
and other literature-related web resources. When you find websites, think
critically and evaluate carefully. For helpful hints, take a look at the
criteria for making judgments at
Evaluation of Web Resources.
Citing Sources
Be sure to credit the sources you use for a research project
-- whether printed books and journals or online texts, websites, etc.
The Bibliography Styles Handbook: MLA Format from the Writers
Workshop at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tells you how to
cite all kinds of sources for courses in literature.
Do you have questions about research in this course? Contact Margaret Adams Groesbeck (magroesbeck)