FYE Library Survey

Tutt Library is surveying all FYE students this year to find out how much you already know about using college libraries. This may look suspiciously like a test, but don't worry; we are only interested in all first years' answers as a whole, not in any one person's particular answers. So please take the FYE library survey.

Basics of library research

The Colorado College librarians have created a group of web pages called FYE Central, designed to help teach you the basics of using the library and to introduce you to what is available here at Tutt Library.

Constructing a search

Doing library research is an iterative process, which means you have to do many searches, using many different search terms and many different catalogs and databases.

Before you even begin to search, you should think of words that describe the concepts that you are working on. You'll need to search many times to hit all the aspects of your topic.

In order to come up with as many sources as you need for your project, you will probably need to skim at least twice as many to find ones that are really appropriate.

Find Books and more with Tiger and Prospector

Tiger and Prospector are library catalogs.

Instructions for searching Tiger are part of the FYE Central pages.

Prospector is a library catalog that lists the holdings of libraries across Colorado, including larger university libraries like CU Boulder and CSU. You can borrow books from Prospector right online and they usually arrive in few days. You can search Prospector directly using the link from the Tutt home page, or if you do a search in Tiger, you can repeat that same search in Prospector just by clicking on the blue "Prospector" button.

You can also get books from farther afield via Interlibrary Loan (ILL), but that usually takes more than a week. You will likely find all that you need in Tiger or Prospector.

Find articles using indexing and abstracting databases

Tiger will tell you what journals the library subscribes to, but it won't help you find specific articles. For that, you need one of the article databases the library subscribes to.

Sometimes you'll get the "full text" of the article right online, but many other times you will need to look at the citation, and use Tiger or Journal Finder to see if we have access to the journal you need.

General Databases
Arts and Humanities Search	1980 - current	Indexes 1,300 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals.
Humanities International Complete	1929 - current	A comprehensive humanities database, with almost 500 full text titles and indexing and abstracting for more than 1,700 titles. Subject areas include (but are not limited to) literature, philosophy, the arts, history, culture-oriented and multi-disciplinary humanities titles with some coverage going back as far as 1929. This database replaces Humanities Abstracts.
MLA Bibliography	1963 - current	Literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore from over journals and series published worldwide.

Online Journal Collections
Blackwell Journals	varies; usually late 1990's to current	Searchable collection of full text periodicals. Scholarly sources. Coverage dates vary.
JStor	late 1800's - most recent 5 years	Archival access to many scholarly periodicals. JStor does not cover the most recent three years of any journal. WARNING: JStor articles can take very long (
Oxford University Press Journals	varies; usually late 1990's - current	A searchable collection of full text periodicals. Scholarly sources. Coverage dates vary.
PCI: Full Text	1770 - 1993	PCI Web is an electronic index to the contents of thousands of periodicals in the humanities and social sciences, from their first issues (in some cases the 1920's or 1930's) to 1990/1991. Every article is indexed. Mostly citations. Full image access to a select number of journal runs.
Project Muse	1993 - current	Project Muse provides access to the full text of the Johns Hopkins University Press journals. Offers current and back issues. Browse their holdings

English/Literature Article and Information Databases

Background information from reference sources

Reference books are good for finding background information. They also often have bibliographies with each entry which might lead you to good scholarly sources. Here are a few suggestions (you'll find more in Tiger or by browsing the reference section)

• Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
  Also at: PN81.J554 1994
  
• Cassell Dictionary of Classical Mythology
  1st Floor North-Reference BL715.M37 1998

Find web resources

You can always search Google, but to make sure that you are finding good scholarly resources that belong on your bibliography, try using the sites below first.

• Voice of the Shuttle is a large directory of humanities sites. Search or browse by topic
• Perseus Digital Library: material on the Classical period
• Utopian links: list of web sources on Utopian topics

Identify appropriate scholarly sources

For your annotated bibliography, you should use scholarly sources, rather than ones written for a popular audience. Take a look at the FYE Central page on evaluating sources to learn about the difference.

Help

For more help with your research, visit the Tutt Library Reference Desk, call us at 389-6662, or IM us.