Always start by using the Wellesley College Online Catalog.

To get to the Catalog, go to the college's Home Page, scroll down to Computing/Library, then to Library, & Library Catalog. Click on Databases A-Z, Research Guides by Subject, and move to the subheading, Tips & Tools. Under that heading, click on Starting Your Research and Citing Sources with useful information once you start work on any assigned papers. Other sites of interest would be our new Reference Books Online section, (including Britannica Online ), and the Interlibrary Loan (ILL) page. If you need up-to-date information on France ( or any foreign country), go to the CIA World Factbook (the online electronic version).

[A cautionary note about using the WWW --- Literary comments from articles with no designated author, or an author with no stated credentials, should be suspect. Because it is on the Web does not mean the information is accurate!] Click on the Subject page and look at the mentioned resources, both paper and electronic. These are reliable, scholarly resources that should be helpful as you do research for your chosen topic.

FindIt! @ Wellesley (click on the title for more information) is one of our newest features and helps retrieve more full-text articles than ever before. It will also link the user to NExpress or ILL if our libraries do not have access to the title.

For Background Reading:

Cambridge Companion To Modern French Culture - Clapp Lib DC33.7 .C27 2003

Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity & Representation in French Cultures - Clapp Lib PQ307.S73 R67 1998

Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture - Clapp Ref DC33.7 .E53 1998

France in Focus: Film & National Identity - Clapp Lib PN1993.5.F7 F67 2000

French Culture - Clapp Ref DC33.7 .F726 1995

French Cultural Studies: Criticism at the Crossroads - Clapp Lib DC33.9 .F76 2000

Gender and Fascisim in Modern France - Clapp Lib PQ307 .F3 G46 1997

Handbook of French Popular Culture - Clapp Ref DC33.7 .H29 1991

French Journals Available at Wellesley:

Cahiers du Cinema: from 1968 to the present. Clapp Lib - qPN1993 .C25

Communications: from 1975 to the present. Clapp Lib - P87 .C6

Esprit: from 1939 to the present. Clapp Lib (Off-campus holdings before 1970) - AP20 .E78

Francais Moderne: from 1933 to the present. Clapp Lib (Off-campus holdings before 1970 - PC2002 .F3

Paris-Match: from 1969 to the present. Clapp Lib - fAP20 .P342

Le Point: from 1987 to the present. Clapp Lib - qAP21 .P6

Les Temps Modernes: from 1945 to the present. Clapp Lib - AP20 .T42

Use WorldCat (via FirstSearch) to find books and other materials not here at Wellesley.

Databases for French Topics:

To locate scholarly articles dealing with various topics in 1st Search, choose ATLAReligion (via CSA) which has articles, books, and essays dealing with all fields of religion.

Academic Search Premier The world's largest scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database. Dates of coverage vary by title

MLA Bibliography (via CSA) This database covers topics in international literature, linguistics, film, and folklore.

PAIS International /Public Affairs Information Service (via CSA) has articles which cover political, public affairs, social and economic issues.

Infotrac General OneFile: Expanded Academic ASAP or General Reference Center Gold are the two databases in this product that provide artiles on current events, popular culture, the arts, social science, and sciences.

JSTOR - A collection of humanities, social sciences, & natural science journals from the earliest issues but NOT the latest 5 years. A full-text source.

LexisNexis Academic - This resource provides full-text articles from Le Monde & L'Express. We also receive both titles in paper. Once microform arrives, the paper copies of Le Monde are discarded and patrons must use that format or search in LexisNexis.

New York Times is an historic database of the newspaper with exact replicas dating from 1851-2001.

Periodicals Index Online is an index to articles published in over 4,500 periodicals, in as many as 40 languages, and covering topics in the humanities and social sciences.

Project MUSE - This database has the latest 5 years of academic journals in humanities and social sciences. This source will bring up articles dealing with French politics and culture, but in English, not French.

Free Internet Databases:

There is a great deal of information in OU Call, & Tennessee Bob's Famous French Links--- especially "Finding New Francophone Sites" at this latter address. Please note: Ou Call, Ohio University's French language and culture site, has not been updated since 1998, so some addresses may no longer be valid.

Citation Information:

For electronic version citation information, go to the e-Reference Collection on our Catalog's Home Page, click on Style Manuals, then Documenting Electronic Resources in MLA [or APA]. Scroll to Formatting & Documenting Sources MLA Style, click on the Word icon next to the MLA Citation line, then click “Open” and this will bring up MLA Style Citation with many examples for print and electronic sources. The examples for print sources are given first, and you will have to scroll down to find Full-Text Resources from Subscription Databases. A number of examples using databases from our A-Z list are illustrated in that section. Further down you will reach Internet Resources, and various examples are given for information gathered from the WWW .

For print version citation information, go to the main desk in the Ref Room. Copies of Kate Turabian's Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, & Dissertations, (6th ed.), MLA Handbook, (6th ed.), and Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), (5th ed.) are kept there for the convenience of students working on papers in the library.

If there are further questions on this material, or if anyone would like to have a one-on-one session, please feel free to contact me via e-mail (see link below) or by phone

Jacqueline B. Fitzpatrick x3497 - email address: jfitzpat@wellesley.edu

Wellesley College Library

Date created: September 27, 2004 - Revised September 17, 2007