Finding Literary Criticism Books

Welcome to the West Valley College Library video on how to search for books on literary criticism. This video will take you through the step by step process searching by an author's name and then by a title of a work. From the West Valley College homepage, click on the library link. This will bring you to the library's home page. Then click on the find books link and that will take you to our online catalog Note that any searches done here will retrieve print and electronic books from both West Valley and Mission College. Always start your search with keyword. And what I would recommend is start by searching the author's name in a set of double quotes. Here I am "anding" it to the word crit* truncated. So let's go ahead and dissect this search. First of all, the catalog will search these words only if they appear on the book's title page and sometimes it's table of contents. It is not searching the entire book. With the catalog it is really good practice to use the word and to link concepts together. So here I have two or more words that form a phrase or a name and I put them in a set of double quotes. Placing an asterisk after crit* is called truncation and it looks for all variations of that word: critic, critical, criticism, critics. When you are strategizing on the words to use for your search, it is good to employ this method to get all the variations of a word. After you hit submit your results will appear in relevancy order. From here, you can scroll down the list clicking on a title that will give you the electronic record of the book. Here it tells you the location, the call number, sometimes the table of contents with your words highlighted, and so what I would recommend doing is recording the call number and coming to the library to find a book on the shelf. Now that he found one book that is relevant, use the subject links found at the bottom of the record to focus your search to books by category. So remember your first initial search- you were using a key word that you thought of. Sometimes keywords are fine to use, but using the subject can actually speed up the research process and filter your results to exactly what you want. Here you see Oscar Wilde, his date of birth and death date and the worst criticism and interpretation after that. That's the key subject that you want to find for any offer that you're searching criticism an interpretation Clicking on that link, I am brought to a list of like subject headings with the one I chose highlighted. And here you see that there are eight books under that subject category. I went from 22 results in my initial keyword search down to eight using the subject heading. All eight of these are books that have been assigned the subject heading criticism and interpretation Now I can also search by the title of a work. so here I'm going to come up to subject go back to "keyword" and I will search one of his works "anding" it a crit* truncated and here I get one result. This book is at Mission College and I can actually request this book to be brought to West Valley are going ahead and clicking on the "request" button at the top of the page. I fill in the form with my last name and my ID number and I hit submit. Depending on the time of day it will be waiting at the checkout desk at West Valley either the next business day or the day after that! It's as simple as that and you'll get an e-mail letting you know that it is there. In our next video, see how you can find sources outside of West Valley/Mission using Link+. Thanks!