SPAN 302:
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Spring 2008 · Professor Elena Gascón-Vera

Contents:

Find dictionaries & thesauri
Find background information
Find books
Find scholarly journal articles
Key scholarly websites
Evaluating what you find

• $300 award for a paper or project of any length from a 100 or 200 level Wellesley College course (2 awards)
• $750 award for a paper or project of any length from a 300 level Wellesley College course, excluding 360s, and 370s (1 award)
• Deadline: April 1, 2008

• Oxford Language Dictionaries Online (Spanish)
• Tesauro de SIGNUM - finds synonyms & antonyms in Spanish
• Diccionarios - La Página del Idioma Español
• Specialized Spanish dictionaries in print: Clapp Reference PC2625 (regional variants, slang, technical vocabulary, etc.)
• Spanish-English and English-Spanish dictionaries in print: Clapp Ref PC4640
  

• Diccionario del Quijote - Clapp Reference PQ6353 .L33 1994
• Cervantes Encyclopedia - Clapp Reference  PQ6337 .A2 2004 
• Cervantes and Don Quixote - Literature Resource Center
• Spanish Dramatists of the Golden Age - chapter on Cervantes - Clapp Reference PQ6051 .S63 1998
• Literary Reference Center
  

Use the Wellesley library catalog to find books, videos, and journals (not individual articles).

• a few tips:

  • do a *subject* search on your author to find books about her or him
    • some useful subject terms for this class are:
      • Cervantes Saavedra Miguel De 1547 1616 Don Quixote and related sub-topics
      • Cervantes Saavedra Miguel De 1547 1616 Humor
      • Cervantes Saavedra Miguel De 1547 1616 Iconography
  • look for the subject phrase criticism and interpretation – very helpful
  • use synonyms to find all the ways your topic is expressed  (symbol or representation or theme)
  • use truncation to save time (spani* for spanish, Spaniard)
  • use Advanced Search and combine multiple concepts using AND for best results
    
    
• or use a keyword search for simple concepts
  
  
• find a book that looks useful, click on the title, then click on the Full Record tab to see the subject terms
• click on each subject term to find "more like this"
  
  
• If our copy is checked out, click on or to the right of the title to request a book quickly (2-4 days)
  
  
• Search WorldCat to find material we don’t own, click on and request through ILL (interlibrary loan)
• In a hurry? Get a BLC card and borrow the book directly from a nearby library
• Search Google Books to explore the contents of books (use Advanced Search for more precision), then search our catalog to find or borrow the book

tips:

• to find the full text of an article, click on the title for the full record, then look for the Find It! @ Wellesley button to link to the full text (online if we have it, or in print, or to the Interlibrary loan request if we don't own the journal)
• to find the full text of an article from a print citation, use Citation Linker (fill in the journal title, year, volume, issue, and pages if you have them)
  
• do your searching early and place interlibrary loan requests NOW for books and articles we don't have -- then, when you're ready to start reading and writing, you'll have a great selection of materials. If you wait, your choices will be very limited.

most useful databases

• MLA Bibliography
      index to articles on all things literary - all genres, all cultures, all languages (tip: search using English & Spanish terms)
  
  
• Literature Resource Center
      full text articles of literary criticism, covering all genres - more Western/Northern in coverage
      *search an author or title, then select the literary criticism tab
  
  
• Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America - fully indexed in MLA Bibliography (much easier to search there and link to full text in this Bulletin)
  

databases with some useful content

• Academic Search Complete and Expanded Academic ASAP
      great starting points for scholarly & popular articles in every discipline; mostly full text from about 1980 to present
     tip: limit to scholarly or peer-reviewed articles
  
• Periodicals Index Online
      index to articles published in over 4500 journals in the humanities & social sciences in 40 languages, 1665 to 1995, many links to full text
  
• JSTOR
      full text of scholarly articles in all fields, up to 3 to 5 years ago (not recent articles!)
      tips to improve your results in JSTOR:
  • go to Advanced Search
  • change search type from "full text" to "abstract" (dropdown menu)
  • below the search boxes, select Type: Article and Discipline (of journals): Language & Literature
       
• Google Scholar (use Advanced Search for more precision) - click on Find It@Wellesley to get to the full text (or the interlibrary loan request)

• Centro Virtual Cervantes
• Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes
• H-Cervantes: Life, Times, and Work
• Iberian Language & Literature Web
  

Criteria to keep in mind when choosing and using soures:

• Accuracy - Does the author cite her/his sources and are they legitimate?
• Authority - Who wrote the source? Are they credible?
• Objectivity - Does the author have a bias, political or commercial or persuasive?
• Currency - Is this information new or based on outdated sources? Can you tell how current it is?

Wellesley College Library • WCIS • Laura Reiner • last modified:February 29, 2008