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Almost all of the resources described are accessed through the links on the OSU Libraries’ homepage:
OSCAR is the OSU Libraries’ online catalog. Use it to find records of library materials
of any kind (books, audio and videocassettes, maps, etc.) located in the Libraries’ collections. OSCAR also shows records of periodical holdings, but cannot be searched for articles within the periodicals that it lists. Individual records in OSCAR show the location of the item (which OSU library has it), the Library of Congress call number for the item (where it is located on the shelf), and, most important, whether it can be checked out. If the status bar shows the designation “AVAILABLE”, any user at any of the OSU libraries can request it. Items requested from other OSU libraries generally arrive within a week but for planning purposes, users should expect that a loan transaction might take two weeks to complete. An OSCAR search can be defaulted to a specific location, but the user will be needlessly denying herself useful materials if this is made a standard practice. The designation for the Newark Campus Library in OSCAR is NWK.
OhioLINK is the network of 79 college, university, community and technical college libraries (plus the State Library of Ohio) to which OSU belongs. There is a link to its central catalog on the Libraries’
homepage; all students, faculty and staff at member institutions may request materials in the same way that they can order items in OSCAR. OhioLINK also provides access to many reference databases such as periodical indexes, online encyclopedias, and other information sources. Also, it sponsors a statewide document delivery service that allows users to request copies of periodical articles and other materials that their own institution does not own.
Periodical Indexes give citations to specific articles in magazines, professional journals, and sometimes to other sorts of information such as chapters in books or Ph.D. dissertations. The Newark Campus Library owns many indexes in hard copy, but cancelled most of the subscriptions in 1995, when the OhioLINK online indexes became available. Increasing numbers of the online indexes have links to the full test of the articles cited; the article can be printed from the record in the index. The NWK library does not charge for articles printed in this way. Many of the indexes in the list below exist in both hard copy and online format. Those in the list will be the most generally useful for English majors:
Arts & Humanities Citation Index: Citations to articles in over 1,000 professional journals. Cites many articles written in languages other than English; a limit to English may be applied when searching. Online only; has full-text links.
Book Review Digest: A major source of book reviews. Online and hard copy; full text links.
Book Review Index: Another source of book reviews; does not duplicate coverage in Digest. Hard copy.
CIC Electronic Texts in the Humanities: Full text sources from the collections of the Big Ten Universities plus the University of Chicago. Useful for primary sources. Online.
Contemporary Authors: Biographies and bibliographies for 100,000+ modern authors, both American and international. Online.
Essay & General Literature Index: Indexes information sources such as essays, which are found in collections; find citations and then locate source. Coverage includes both social sciences and humanities. Online and hard copy.
Humanities Abstracts: Indexes and abstracts contents of 400+ journals; coverage of modern and classical literature, folklore, the visual and performing arts, history, archaeology and philosophy. Online and hard copy; full-text links.
Index to American Periodicals: Indexes 18th and 19th century magazines and journals. A tremendous information tool for finding primary sources. Online.
Index to English Literary Periodicals: Indexes over 300 journals published in England in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries; these will contain articles by and about the major authors of the period. OSU owns the complete set of microfilms. Online.
Literary Index: This source is a master index to the information in the various series published by Gale; these include familiar series such as Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Authors. Online.
MLA International Bibliography: This is a major tool for finding literary criticism. Indexes over 2000 journals, plus books, Ph.D. dissertations, and other sources of literary information. Online and hard copy. Full text links.
Newspaper Abstracts: Indexes and abstracts articles from 27 newspapers. A potential source of articles about contemporary authors, book reviews, and essays about literary topics.
Periodical Abstracts: Citations and abstracts from over 1,000 magazines and journals. Source of book reviews, some literary criticism, articles about culture and society.
The Gateway to Information: A massive multi-subject guide to books (generally reference), periodical indexes and abstracts, both hard copy and online, and reviewed websites. The link to the Gateway is on the Libraries’ homepage.
A Few Tips: The reference
collection-
The Library of Congress designation for Language and Literature is P; reference books dealing with authors, plots of books, and literary criticism are found in PN through PS,
as are books of quotations and some collections of speeches. General dictionaries and thesauri are found in PE. Bibliographies will be either in the PR-PS range or in Z.
Shelving of fiction and criticism-
In the LC system, books by an author and works about that author are shelved together; the novels of Jane Austen and critical works dealing with Jane Austen are on the same shelves. (In the public library, by contrast, fiction usually has a separate section in which books are shelved by the author’s last name; literary criticism is in the 800’s.)
Using all available resources-
Smaller public libraries are less useful to serious researchers, while large public libraries (Cleveland Public Library, Columbus Metropolitan Library) are research institutions in every sense of the word. However, members of even the smallest Ohio public libraries have access to research databases subscribed to by OPLIN (the Ohio Public Libraries’ Information Network). Use your public library card to access the OPLIN databases using this URL:
Select your public library from the list in the window at
the top of the page and enter your card number in the space provided.
Select your database from the list using the window at the top of the
page (database descriptions are on the same page).
02/21/01