March 2000
Newsletter #34
 

Off- Campus Storage Frees Space for New Books

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

Study Carrels Wired

Untangling the Web: Specialized Search Engines

Electronic Reference Shelf

Literary Gold Mine Online

CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts

Tax Forms Available

Food for Fines

Barbecues: an Occasion for Sin?

Jon Reynolds, University Archivist

Third Century Campaign Progress

CNDLS: Collaboration to Focus on New Learning Environments

There’s a new literary database in a growing list of humanities databases that will ease the research process for your students and allow you to introduce yourself quickly to authors you might not have read since graduate school. It’s called Literature Resource Center (LRC ), and it presents, in full-text electronic format, information from such respected literary reference sources as Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Shakespearean Criticism, the Scribner Writer Series, and the Twayne Authors Series. Designed for the undergraduate student of literature, LRC offers full-text, excerpted, and commissioned critical material on 2400 of the most-studied authors, including biographies, bibliographies, work overviews and explications, links to authors’ Internet sites, interviews, excerpts from scholarly journal articles, and full-text articles from more than 20 literary journals (e.g., Essays in Criticism; Modern Language Quarterly; Victorian Studies; Modern Philology; Studies in the Novel).

Let’s say your students were writing about Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl. They would find in LRC a current, full-text journal article from the African American Review; five critical essays from books and journals such as Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960 and Southern Literary Journal; a biographical and critical overview of the author; a plot summary; background information on slave narratives and on events in history at the time the autobiography was written (e.g., slavery and free blacks in North Carolina, Nat Turner’s rebellion, fugitive slave law); contemporaneous reviews of Incidents; and a list of further readings about the author.

Literature Resource Center allows searching by author, title, genre, literary movement/time period, and literary theme. Your students can also do a custom search, which enables them to search by nationality, ethnicity, year/place of birth/death, occupation, or even within the full text of LRC contents.

Other main menu options include Gale’s Literary Index, which your students can use to create a list of authors by nationality or by birth date/death date range. The Research Guide link from LRC’s main menu compellingly illustrates the development of a real literary research paper about Toni Morrison’s Beloved—from choosing a topic, crafting a thesis, identifying information sources, taking efficient notes, and organizing ideas to drafting and revising the paper and preparing a Works Cited page. There’s even a link that tells students how to cite documents found in LRC. And the link to Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature will enable students to look up authors, works, literary landmarks, literary and critical terms, mythological and folkloric figures, fictional characters, and literary movements and prizes.

When combined with searches in MLA Bibliography and Humanities Index and with the textual analysis capabilities that Literature Online (LION) affords, LRC helps create a robust literary research experience for you and your students.