Site Map :: Occidental College > Library > Services > Instruction
 

CSP 62
The Hero vs. Death and God: The Early Years [Stocking]

Information Found Here!

Starters 
Books
Articles
Websites
More Help
 Topic Starters and Idea Generators
Encyclopedias and other types of reference sources are useful for answering questions. They offer convenient overviews to your topic, timelines, background and other information, often with bibliographic citations providing additional sources for your topic. 

Go to our Reference Shelves and browse around the call numbers BL300-325 [The myth. Comparative mythology],  PA4018-4209 [Homer], and PA6801-6961 [Virgil].

A Dictionary of Asian Mythology
Encyclopedia of World Cultures
World Mythology
The Oxford Companion to World Mythology [Electronic Resource]

The following reference source is older but may still be relevant for perspectives on classical mythology.

The Dictionary of Classical Mythology
Books: OASys and LINK+
OASys is Oxy's Catalog, which lists books, journals, online resources, and other library holdings. The LINK+  catalog combines the holdings of over 30 participating libraries.

To get started, you might try a keyword search in OASys. Be sure to notice the subject headings for the best items on your topic. Click on those headings to get more resources. Need more? Click over to LINK+ and continue your searching there. Need even more? WorldCat includes over 54 million entries from more than 45,000 libraries. You may place Interlibrary Loan requests. (Slower than LINK+)

Suggested Keyword Searches for this Course

Keywords will differ depending on the focus of your research. Here are some obvious examples.
 

keyword: Gilgamesh
keyword: Odyssey
keyword: Aeneid
keyword: Mahabharata

Tips:
Remember to be flexible with your terminology and try several different searches.
Use synonyms.
Truncate terms to retrieve records that mention all variations of the word in question.
To narrow search results, limit your search to certain locations [Book Stacks, Special Coll] or to specific Material Types [Elect. Resource, Text (Book)].
Caution: In a library catalog, keywords are usually found in the Notes, Title, and Subject Headings fields. Therefore, keyword searches may produce huge results or results that include the keyword(s) but be irrelevant to your topic.

Suggested Subject Headings for this Course

Gilgamesh
Homer
Homer. Odyssey
Virgil. Aeneis
Epic Literature
Heroes
Mythology, Classical

Advanced searches, combining subject headings with key words or phrases, yield a manageable number of targeted results. Here are a few examples:
[Subject] Odyssey AND [Any] (wom?n OR gender OR feminis*)
[Subject] Mythology AND [A] death
[Subject] (Odyssey OR Aeneis OR Gilgamesh OR Mahabharata) and [Any] hero

For more assistance with searching for books, please see Finding Books.

Articles in Magazines, Newspapers and Journals
Articles provide a variety of information ranging from entertainment to scholarly research. To search for articles you use indexes or databases that may include more than one type of article.  Learn how to recognize and distinguish between the different types of publications (academic, popular, etc.) and select the articles that fit your need the best.
For clues to identifying various citations, click here 

Selected Library Research Databases for CSP 62: 

MLA Bibliography (FirstSearch)
 Index to scholarly materials published worldwide in literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore.

Humanities Full Text (WilsonWeb)
Find citations, abstracts, and full-text for literature on archaeology, art, classics, film, folklore, journalism, linguistics, music, the performing arts, philosophy, religion, world history and world literature.

Arts & Humanities Citation Index (FirstSearch)
Find journal articles in the arts and humanities. Offers citations with lists of articles cited. Can be used to find citing articles.

JSTOR
Full-text archive of high-impact academic journals in many disciplines. The archive does NOT include recent issues -- included journals generally begin with the first issue and stop 3-5 years ago. You can browse journals by discipline or by title, and you can search articles by keyword.

If you are pursuing a multi-disciplinary approach, be sure to look at the wide range of databases available here at Oxy. DATABASES by Topic.

For more assistance with searching our databases, please see Finding Articles.

Web Sites
Like other information resources, Web sites may include personal opinion, deliberate hoax, credible information and scholarly material. It is very important for you to critically assess the information resource itself, as well as its content.

Some Criteria for Evaluating Information

Perseus Digital Library
 www.perseus.tufts.edu/

Voice of the Shuttle
http://vos.ucsb.edu/ 

Internet Classics Archive [MIT]
http://classics.mit.edu/

Classics-L Archive
http://lsv.uky.edu/archives/classics-l.html

Internet Archive [Texts]
www.archive.org/details/texts

Try a different search engine or a subject directory found on our Public Internet Search Tools page. For example, go to the Librarian's Index to the Internet, and try this search: Mythology AND hero

For more assistance with searching for web sites, please see Finding Public Web Pages.

 

   

This is an archival page and is no longer maintained on a regular basis. If you would like to have this page updated, please contact Marsha Schnirring at mschnirring@oxy.edu or x2542.


Page created by Nick Velkavrh.
Page last edited on 09/22/2008.
Reviewed by Marsha Schnirring on 03/31/2008.

We welcome your Comments and Suggestions.

 

Return to Top