Tips for Spanish 138 Research Assignment
Fall 2004

For this class you are required to create a bibliography of Mexican short stories. There are several places you will need to look to find them.

Reference Books
There already are many print bibliographies identifying authors and collections of their works. Here are some titles to get you started:

• A Bibliographical Guide to Spanish American Literature: Twentieth-Century Sources.
  Main Reference Z 1609 L7 R438
• Mexican Literature: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources.
  Main Reference PQ7141 F67
• Spanish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibibliographical Source Book.
  Main Reference Z1609 L7 S6
  Ethnic & Gender Studies Library (EGSL) Reference Z1609 L7 S6
• Dictionary of Mexican Literature.
  Main Reference PQ 7106 D53
• Diccionario de literatura espaņola e hispanoamericana.
  Main Reference PQ 6006 D528
• Jewish Writers of Latin America: a dictionary.
  Main Reference PQ 7081.3 .L63
• Latin American Writers.
  Main Reference PQ 7081 A1 L37
• Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: a bio-critical sourcebook.
  EGSL Reference PQ 7081.3 .F62
• Spanish American Authors: the twentieth century.
  Main Reference PQ 7081.3 F57

Finding Books
To find books owned by UCSB's libraries, use Pegasus. Do a KEYWORD search using the terms short stories Mexican. You can also try short stories Mexico.

Pegasus shows you what UCSB owns. For this assignment it is also useful for you to get items from other UC campuses. You can do this by using Melvyl (linking to it from the Library Home Page. Do the same KEYWORD searches in Melvyl that you did in Pegasus. You can request items from other campuses through Melvyl.

In creating an exhaustive bibliography, you will want to include some titles of books you did not get to physically touch, but which are relevant to your topic/time period. To see what other books exist in other libraries in the U.S., search WorldCat. If you are trying to use this from off-campus, you will need to use the proxy server. From the Library's home page, select RESEARCH then ARTICLE INDEXES & DATABASES to find WorldCat and the article databases listed below in the "finding articles" section.

In WorldCat, go to the Advanced Search screen. You will want to type Mexico or mexican in the top box and short stories or cuentos in the second box.

Finding Articles
To find articles, you must first use an article index. Then you do a TITLE search in Pegasus using the JOURNAL TITLE as your search terms. Here are some suggested article databases for your Span 138 research:

Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI)

• Coverage is 1970-present
• Contains references to articles and book reviews; no full-text, no abstracts
  • Links to full-text in JSTOR, Project Muse and SCIELO when available
• To find literary criticism about a certain author, search that author's name as a SUBJECT
• To find articles ABOUT Mexican short stories in general, type cuentos or short stories in the KEYWORD field and type Mexican literature in the subject field
• Sometimes authors publish short stories in journals. These are indexed in HAPI with the subject heading "short stories." Unfortunately, the country of origin of the author is not indicated; you'll need to look that up in a different source.

MLA International Bibliography

• Bibliography of the Modern Language Association
• Use MLA to find articles of literary criticism or history, NOT to identify collections of short stories
• Use MLA to identify authors who write about a certain theme
  • Use the Keyword Search Strategy worksheet to help you brainstorm the terms you want to use
  • Here's an example of that worksheet filled out
  • example search: Mexican AND (short story OR cuentos) AND (women OR female OR feminist OR mujer)

Clase/Periodica

• Database from UNAM
• Use this database to identify articles about literary criticism or history
• Must use Spanish-language search terms

You can also talk with a librarian about your searches as you begin working on your class project. The librarian for Spanish & Portuguese (Anne Barnhart) holds office hours in the small room next to the Spanish/Portuguese departmental library (4th floor of Phelps) 11:30am - 1:00pm Wednesdays. There is a reference librarian at the reference desk in Davidson Library Monday - Thursday 9am-9pm, Saturday 1pm-5pm, and Sunday 1pm-9pm. You are welcome to ask any librarian for help.