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- Anne Garrison, Humanities Librarian (SC)
- Amanda Watson, Reference and Instruction Intern (SC)
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ENGL 009J : Battling Against Voldemort (SC)
Getting started:
Tripod
Tripod, the catalog for the libraries of Swarthmore, Haverford, and Bryn Mawr, is your first stop for finding materials in our collection. You can search for specific authors or titles, or use the keyword search to find books on your paper topic.
WorldCat
Provider: OCLC
WorldCat is a meta-catalog that provides access to the online catalogs of over 57,000 libraries. If you can't find something in Tripod, try looking here to see if it's in another library nearby.
Tri-College Borrowing and Interlibrary Loan
Need to request books, articles, or other materials that aren't on campus? Start here.
Tools for close reading:
Oxford English Dictionary
The OED, as it's known for short, is a massive historical dictionary of the English language. Look up a word and you'll find quotations illustrating how people have used it from the earliest known usage to the present. It's especially useful if you want to know the history of a word, or understand how it was used at any given time.
Tools for finding criticism:
Literature resource center
Provides access to biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from every age and literary discipline. Covers more than 120,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and other writers, with in-depth coverage of 2,500 of the most-studied authors.
MLA international bibliography
Provider: ProQuest
This is the primary bibliography for literary criticism. Provides citations to journal articles, books, working papers, conference proceedings, bibliographies, and other materials. Areas covered include literature, language, linguistics, film, theatre and folklore.
ProQuest Research Library
Provider: ProQuest
Provides citations and full-text magazine and journal articles in a wide variety of disciplines, both scholarly and popular in scope. You can limit a search to reviews by selecting "More Search Options" and then choosing "Review" from the list of document types.
Book review index
Provider: Gale
A comprehensive online guide to book reviews with over five million review citations from thousands of publications.
Assembling a bibliography, citing sources, avoiding plagiarism:
Swarthmore Libraries' research FAQ
Includes a guide to citation styles and instructions for using the EndNote citation software package; also includes the library's handout on evaluating sources.
Guide to Citing Sources, from Duke University
This guide deals with the proper way to cite various kinds of sources, demonstrating all the major citation styles (MLA, Chicago, Turabian, APA). See the "Assembling a List of Works Cited" guide for help with putting together a bibliography.
Citation, Paraphrasing, and Avoiding Plagiarism
A handout from the Writing Center, explaining how to avoid plagiarism and when citations are necessary.
More resources for writing:
Swarthmore College Writing Center