Barnard Library: Finding the Best Resources

Librarian: Lois Coleman

| 212-854-9095 | 104 LeFrak, Barnard Hall
First-Year Writing (ENGL BC 1210): Women and Culture - Fall

Starting Your Research

  • Online Research Guide: On the library home page, library.barnard.edu, click on “First Year Writing Guides.” Or click on “Research Guide” in CourseWorks.
  • Research Help: E-mail or call me, or use the online chat on the library home page.
  • Consultations: Request a longer one-on-one consultation – send me an email.

Know Item Searching

A book:Sophocles. Antigone. University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.

  • Go to CLIO and use the Catalog search in CLIO (the Catalog shows you the titles of books and journals in the Columbia libraries, but NOT the articles in journals).
  • Noticethat in a book citation the publisher’s nameis given.

A chapter in a book: Nagy, Gregory. “Homer and Greek Myth.”The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology, edited by Woodard, Roger D. Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 52-82.

  • You can use the Catalog search in CLIO and put in the book title, or use the Articles search and put in the chapter title.
  • Noticechapter title in quotes, book title in italics, the words “edited by,” the publisher’s name, and page numbers for the chapter.

An article in a journal: Murnaghan, Sheila. “Maternity and Mortality in Homeric Poetry.” Classical Antiquity, vol. 11, no. 2, 1992, pp. 242-64.

  • You can use the Catalog search in CLIO and put in the journal title, or use the Articles search and put in the article title.
  • Noticearticle title in quotes, journal title in italics, volume number and issue number, and no publisheris given.

Keyword Searching

All Fields keyword search:

  • Use “quotes” for a phrase, and* for truncation (for variant endings), e.g. femini* finds feminism, feminist, feminists, feminine, etc.

Boolean Keyword searching (see library.barnard.edu/find-books/boolean):

  • AND finds records which have all the search terms you entered
  • OR finds records which have one or moreof the search terms you entered – OR finds MORE. Group terms with parentheses, e.g. (womenOR gender OR sex*) AND “ancient Greece” AND (religio*OR cult*)

Figuring out what keywords to use

  • Write down in one or two sentences a summary of your research paper proposal, focusing on an interesting or important question that you think you will need to research.
  • Underline the most important words or phrases in the question and write them in a vertical list underneath it.
  • Next to each word or phrase, write synonyms for each word, or alternative ways of expressing the concept. To help come up with synonymous concepts, use a thesaurus (e.g. thesaurus.com) and brainstorm using reference books and web searches.

Examples:

  1. I want to take a Freudian or Jungian psychological approach to look at the meaning of the underworld in the story of Persephone and Demeter, relating it to the meaning of Hades for Greeks of that time period.

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  1. Using a feminist lens, I’ll look at how the writer of the Hymn to Demeter uses both masculine and feminine points of view on the “marriage” of Persephone to Hades; male characters describe the abduction as a marriage, but when female characters speak about it, the emphasis is on rape and violence.

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  1. I’m interested in the Eleusinian mysteries and I want to take a historical approach to examine how and why the cultic rites developed out of the myth of Demeter.

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Finding Scholarly Articles

Scholarly databases

To access a database, go to CLIO and search for its title, then click on the resolver URL. If you’re off campus, you must use your UNI and password to access (most of) them.

  • JSTOR, the Scholarly Journal Archive: full-text articles from scholarly journals.
  • Humanities Full Text: scholarly sources in the humanities, as well as lesser known specialized magazines (included in EBSCOhost Research Databases).

Platforms that search multiple databases at the same time

Can also be found via CLIO.

  • Ebscohost Research Databases: a multidisciplinary database of magazines, newspapers and scholarly journals, including Humanities Full Text and the MLA Bibliography.
  • Proquest: citations and full text of scholarly journals, dissertations, magazines and newspapers, in many difference disciplines. (Do not use dissertations for First Year Writing research.)

Federated search engines

These search through everything, or nearly everything, we have at Columbia.

  • CLIO Articles: finds journal and newspaper articles, e-books, conference proceedings, etc.
  • Google Scholar: searches the full text of articles and books, and retrieves only scholarly material. You can search in the titles only, using the Advanced search. To enable "eLink @ Columbia" go to Settings.

Zotero

  • An add-on for Firefox (with Chrome or Safari, use Zotero Standalone) that enables you to save your references and put them into your papers in the correct style.
  • A guide to Zotero is at library.barnard.edu/find-books/guides/zotero

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