Ethnic American Literature Research: Home

Gwendolyn Brooks' "Piano After War"

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Rohrbach Library can hook you up with powerful information in an amazing variety of formats. The library's Web presence serves as a portal to a vast wealth of resources.

A search of the online catalog on the subject of African literature, for example, exposes an intiguing range of possibilities. Scroll down to the 42nd line and click on it to see a long list of books and other items that focus on analysis and criticism.

Be aware that the many search options in the catalog an save you time: you can use Set single limit to restrict your results to only videos, or only reference books, for example.

When you have specific research interests, catalog searches on your topic can lead you toward sources that speak to them. These might include magazines & journals, e-journals, and videos as well as books; all are listed in the online catalog.

Browsing the shelf area of a book that resonates with your interests is a potent discovery technique. The catalog necessarily holds finite information about each book, so a concept that is invisible to a catalog search may well be in a book on the shelves. Sometimes looking through the index of a book is the best path to the information you seek.

Another fantastic option is now available: When you find a possibly relevant book in the catalog, see if there's a link, near the bottom of the page to "About This Book" information. That takes you to Google Books, where you may be able to see the pages and do word searches within the full text of the volume.

Google Book Search and the Internet Archive include nearly ten million volumes, with full-text searching.  This enables you to find books using key words and phrases, instead of having to rely on titles, authors, or subject terms as is often the case with library catalogs.  Many of the books in these two collections are entirely or partially available to read online.