Keyword Searching: You can search every field in the record (Search All) or specify a field to search.
Advanced Searching: Allows you to customize your search to look for words in the title, subject field or elsewhere in the record alone or in combination.
Browse Alphabetically: A good way to find what the HBLL has about an author: simply choose to search by alphabetic subject and enter the author's last name, first name (for example "Frost, Robert") and you'll get a list of subject terms about Frost: bibliographies, biographies, criticism and interpretation, etc.
Also try searching by subject alphabetical for terms such as "English Literature," "Canadian Literature," or "African Literature (English)", etc. You'll get a listing of a lot of subject headings dealing with various aspects of that literature. Click on the subject term that interests you to get a list of books for that topic.
Truncation: Use the "$" to search for the variations on a root word: "poet$" will retrieve "poets," "poetry," "poetic," "poetics," etc.
Subject Links: When you're looking at a book record in the HBLL catalog, check the highlighted subject links, you may want to click on one to bring up other titles in the HBLL that deal with the same subject.
Call Number Browsing: When you find a book on your subject, click on the "Nearby Items On Shelf" link on the upper left of the record to see what other books are near it on the shelf.
Suggestions for finding the standard editions of literary works:
A "Standard Edition" is" an authoritative edition of the works of a prominent writer, frequently in one volume and continuing year after year as the basic textbook. Some of these editions also remain definitive: established as the text closest to the author's original product and most inclusive in canon, through exhaustive textual collation and historical research, not yet superseded by subsequent discoveries." (from The Harper Handbook to Literature, 2nd edition, 1997)
Here are some sources for book reviews. Be sure to search in some of the subject specialized periodical indexes as well.
English (British) literature is classified in the Library Congress (LC) numbers PR 1-9680 in the circulation stacks as well as in Humanities Reference (Humanities Ref.), where we keep a selection of English literature reference sources. Below are some English Literatures call number ranges. Subclasses within British literature |
|
Scottish | PR 8500-8693 |
Post-Colonial Literatures in English | |
Canadian | PR 9180-9199 |
Latin American | PR 9200-9333 |
African | PR 9340-9408 |
Irish | PR 8700-8893 |
Welsh | PR 8950-8967 |
Asian | PR 9410-9418 |
Indian | PR 9480-9499 |
Australian | PR 9600-9619 |
New Zealand | PR 9620-9639 |
American Literature | PS 1-3576 |
Canadian Literature | PS 8001-8599 |