Includes full text literary commentary and criticism, author biographies, work overviews, and reviews.
Literary texts, including many hard-to-find or out-of-print works, as well as important copyrighted works that may not be available in electronic format elsewhere.
When you place words in a library database's search box you are conducting a keyword search in the record for an item. The record contains information about the item, whether it be a book or an article, such as the title, author, year it was published, a summary, subjects, and in some cases the entire text of a work. Researchers in English and Literature can run into trouble because of the way keywords work and differ from subject headings and other fields.
Let's say we wanted to look in the catalog for Octavia Butler's Kindred as an example. If you simply type in kindred, you get the book itself as well as a lot of random things. If you add butler, you get a lot closer.
The library's advanced search allows you to specify what part of the record you want to look in. You have the option to search for a title, author/creator, subject, or ISSN (which you are unlikely to need).
The title and author are self-explanatory, but the subject requires a small explanation. Library databases assign subject headings to records as a way of tagging something as being about something. This can be especially helpful if you are looking for works that are about Octavia Butler rather than written by Octavia Butler.
Located under "Subject Terms" (the third link in the top menu), the thesaurus will help you identify the best term for your search as well as allow you to search for resources tagged with that term. There is a significant difference between the results when you search as a keyword and when using the subject term.
You've likely used or seen them used before, and while you don't need to know too much on the technical end, there are some that will help your search:
The asterisk extends the word, in that it will search for every word in the database that starts with the letters you typed before the asterisk. Be careful and thoughtful when using, since if you don't give enough of the word you can find a lot of unrelated words.
Putting two or more words in quotes groups those words together as an exact phrase, which will give more relevant results if it is two words that have a different meaning when used together than when used separately. For example, the words international and adoption have their own meaning as individual words, but when combined mean an adoption where the adopter and adoptee live in two separate countries.