Westfield State College Ely Library
English &Literature Databases and Resources
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Literature Resource Center (LRC)  - Gale   Updated Monthly
Provides direct access to biographies, bibliographies and critical analyses of authors from every age and literary discipline in a single Internet-searchable database. Includes more than 38,000 full text critical analyses, 122,000 biographies of  novelists, poets, essayists, journalists and other writers, with in-depth coverage of 2,500 of the most-studied authors. In addition to biographical, bibliographical and contextual information from the Contemporary Authors® and Dictionary of Literary Biography databases, the LRC provides full-text criticism from the Contemporary Literary Criticism Select database. Search Guide

MLA International Bibliography (Ebsco)   – Modern Language Assn.     1963-            Updated Quarterly
Indexes 4,400 journals and series plus books from 1,000 publishers covering language, literature, and folklore. Includes the MLA Directory of Periodicals which contains information for more than 7,000 language, literature, and folklore journals and series providing addresses, advertising rates, and information about submissions for publication.WWW.  Search Guide

Literature Criticism Online (LCO) – Cengage / Gale         Multiple Series
The database includes the multi-volume content of two series: Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism: Provides critical opinion on early literature excerpting criticism on the works of philosophers, poets and playwrights, political leaders, scientists and writers from other genres. Short Story Criticism: The most-studied short story writers of yesterday and today are profiled in volumes that deliver a historical survey of the critical response to their work. Search Guide

Literary Reference Center - Ebsco   Current File                Updated Monthly
A comprehensive literary reference database providinga broad spectrum of reference information from antiquity to the present day. LRC is a completely full-text database that combines information from over 1,000 books and monographs, major literary encyclopedias and reference works, hundreds of literary journals, and unique sources not available anywhere else. LRC contains detailed information on the most studied authors and their works.

Literature Resources from Gale  - Cengage/ Gale  Updated Monthly
Allows simultaneous searching of several  literature databases in a single interface designed specifically for Literature research. Covers
literature criticism, biographies, work and topic overviews, reviews, and full text of many literary works—all searchable at the same time and returned in lists organized according to the type of research needs they serve.

Humanities Abstracts - Now searchable as part of  Wilson Select Plus   1994-
Abstracts from more than 450 journals in archaeology and classical studies, area studies, folklore, history, language and literature, performing arts, philosophy, religion, and related subjects.  FirstSearch / Search Guide

Project Muse – Johns Hopkins University             1995 -         Updated Monthly
Access to 223 complete, full-text journals covering multiple topics in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Sciences. List of Journal Titles.    WWW Search Guide

Humanities International Index - EBSCO                1975-                Updated Monthly
A comprehensive database covering journals, books and other important reference sources in the humanities. Produced by Whitston Publishing (an imprint of EBSCO Publishing), Humanities International Index provides cover-to-cover indexing and abstracting for over 1,700 journals and contains more than 1.6 million records. It includes all data from American Humanities Index plus bibliographic records from a multitude of international journals, books and reference works. This database provides citations and abstracts for articles, essays and reviews, as well as original creative works including poems, fiction, photographs, paintings and illustrations.

Contemporary Literary Criticism - Gale Research, Inc.          May 1999    Updated Monthly
Contemporary Literary Criticism--Select (CLC--Select) is an extensive collection of critical essays on contemporary authors. Each CLC--Select entry contains a biographical/critical introduction, listing of principal works, and sources for further study.    WWW  Search Guide

Contemporary Authors - This database is no longer available as a standalone system. Contemporary Authors is included in Biography Resource Center. You can limit your search to Contemporary Authors by doing an Advanced Search in Biography Resource Center; Enter the author's name on the first line; Type Contemporary Authors on the second line and select "source" from the drop-down menu. Click Search at the bottom of the screen. Contemporary Authors provides complete biographical and bibliographical information and references on approximately 112,000 U.S. and International authors.

Film Literature Index Online- Indiana University                            1976-2001        Closed File
Indexes 150 film and television periodicals from 30 countries cover-to-cover and 200 other periodicals selectively for articles on film and television. The periodicals range from the scholarly to the popular. More than 2,000 subject headings provide detailed analysis of the articles.  The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Indiana University a grant in 2002 to convert the print version of the Film Literature Index (FLI) to electronic form. The FLI Online contains approximately 700,000 citations to articles, film reviews and book reviews published between 1976-2001.

Biography Resource Center - Gale      Current File  Updated Monthly
Combines nearly 80 of the most frequently consulted biographical sources with more than 250 full-text periodicals to provide in-depth, full-text information. This reference database integrates more than one million thumbnail biographies from the Complete Marquis Who’s Who®, the Encyclopedia of World Biography, Scribner’s Encyclopedia of American Lives, Who’s Who Among African Americans, Dictionary of American Biography, and many more sources. Search Guide

JSTOR-  Jstor Inc.                Coverage Varies                         Updated Daily
A full-text collection in PDF format of retrospective issues from 162 scholarly journals of prime importance in their fields. Subject coverage includes African-American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies,  Ecology and Botany,  Economics, Education, Finance, General Science, History, Literature, Mathematics, Philosophy, Political Science,  Population  / Demography, Sociology, and Statistics.  Dates of coverage: Varies depending on journal title; most have a moving wall that excludes the most recent 2-5 years of coverage. Search Guide

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals    -    Lund University Libraries, Sweden            Current File            Updated Weekly
This service covers 1642 free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals covering all subjects and languages. Currently 413 journals are searchable at article level. More than 75,000 articles are included in the DOAJ service. Subject areas covered include: Agriculture and Food Sciences, Arts and Architecture, Biology and Life Sciences, Business and Economics, Chemistry, Earth and Environmental Sciences, General Works,  Health Sciences, History and Archaeology, Languages and Literatures, Law and Political Science,  Mathematics and Statistics, Philosophy and Religion, Physics and Astronomy, Science General,  Social Sciences, and Technology and Engineering.

Gale Literary Index – Gale Reference, Inc.      Current          Updated Monthly
A master index  to the printed editions of Gale's 43 literary series. It combines and cross references more than 130,000 author names including pseudonyms and variant names and more than 140,000 titles into one source. The Gale series contain complete biographies on authors and critical essays on their writings. WWW.

Online Literary Criticism Collection
The IPL Online Literary Criticism Collection contains 1576 critical and biographical websites about authors and their works that can be browsed by author, by title, or by literary period. The collection is not inclusive of all the work on the web, nor does it plan to be. WWW.

Children's Literature Comprehensive Database - Childrenslit.com        Current File    Updated Regularly
CLCD is an acquisition, research, and reference database that provides more than 200,000 reviews of children's books--all full text searchable from 33 review sources. The CLCD  also includes Teaching Tools - lesson plans and teaching guides plus entries for more than 339,000 awards, prizes, best book lists and reading lists entries. The database also provides access to over 30,000 book jacket images as well as information provided by various Reading Measurement Programs such as Accelerated Reader, Degrees of Reading Power, Lexile, and Reading Counts. Also included are links to more than  60,000 web pages featuring individual authors or illustrators.

Other Periodical Indexes and Databases

Academic Search Premier  Ebsco               1975-                    Updated Daily
The world’s largest scholarly, multi-discipline, full text database designed specifically for academic institutions. With a collection of 4,000 peer-reviewed, scholarly full text journals, this database offers critical information from many sources found in no other database. The database includes full-page images as well as color embedded images.  Scholarly, full text resources are provided for nearly all academic areas of study: social  sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, language and linguistics, arts ? literature, medical sciences, and ethnic studies.  WWW  Search Guide

Academic OneFile - Gale                     1995-                                     Updated Daily
Contains more than 3,000 full text journals, including peer-reviewed journals and reference sources with extensive coverage of the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, literature and other subjects. Includes full-text coverage of the New York Times back to 1995.  Search Guide

General OneFile  -  Gale                1980-                Updated Daily
Provides desktop access to more than 6,000 full text periodical titles including 121 wire services; full indexing of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Christian Science Monitor newspapers; and a total of more than 10,000 periodical titles with 25 years of backfile coverage from 1980 to present.  The database uses the same search engine as our other InfoTrac databases.  Content includes more than 508 million records from  periodical and news content and indexing from a variety of mainstream and specialized sources including refereed academic journals. WWW Search Guide

Expanded Academic ASAP – Gale                      1980-                Updated Daily
Access to 3,500+ journals and magazines including more than 2,100 in full text. WWW. Search Guide

LitFinder – Thomson/Gale              Current              Updated Monthly
Access to full text poems, essays, speeches, stories and plays plus references to anthologies and sources. Searchable indexes and multi-genre searching WWW.  Search Guide

Inter-Play Database
Provides easy access to the locations of printed plays in collections, anthologies and periodicals. Most of the plays cited are not indexed in the standard printed play indexes such as Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections or H. W. Wilson's Play Index. For plays by the most familiar authors (e.g. Shakespeare), you should also consult Ely library's catalog. Approximately 16,130 locations are currently cited to plays in many languages. Separately-published plays are not included as these may also be located through local library catalogs. Inter-Play is updated frequently in order to include recent publications. All citations for the location(s) of each play are searchable by author and/or title. Full source information is provided to lead the user to the location of the desired play. WWW 


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