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ULM Library

The Juniors will be taking a field trip to the ULM Library on Thursday! A bus will be here at around 9:00 to take us there. Bring money to eat on campus.

You all received a brief orientation in class, but I though I'd post some of the information here, as well. First, we are going to the library for two reasons: because it's a very nice, local, university library; and because they have JSTOR (for "journal storage"), which is a subscription database. I want to start with JSTOR because it is by far the best resource I've found for full-text scholarly articles on literature.

A distinction needs to be clear regarding the difference between "popular" and "scholarly" periodicals:
  • Popular periodicals (i.e. Newsweek) focus on a variety of topics and give general information and editorial comments; they are published frequently, and although they are reliable sources, it's hard to find information for a literature paper, unless your thesis ties the work to something in popular culture
  • Scholarly periodicals focus on a particular area of scholarly interest; they are peer-reviewed, and they are published less frequently (i.e. quarterly)
We will be using a mixture of the two types of sources, but the majority of your articles are required to be from scholarly publications. As noted, JSTOR is an excellent source for those articles. JSTOR is only available through the Louisiana State Library system; therefore, we can only access this database IN the library. You'll find articles there that you can email home to yourself.

The link for JSTOR is conveniently linked on the library's home page. Of course, there are also several other useful databases available, as well as the entire university catalog. We'll talk about InfoTrac and EBSCO on Friday.

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