Maria Cotera
3666 Haven Hall
Ann Arbor, Michigan
48109-1003

734.615.8867

mcotera@umich.edu

latino.studies@umich.edu


Getting Started | Research Tips | Building Your Website | Intellectual Property

Building a Bibliography

Every website project for AC213 requires an annotated bibliography that can be accessed from the front page of the project site. The bibliography lists every book, article, and web site that you draw upon in conducting the research for your project. Each entry in the bibliography should be formatted according to Chicago Style guidelines, and should include several sentences describing and evaluating the source. The finished bibliography should resemble the example provided here.

On this page you'll find some ideas on how to identify useful sources for your project. It's often helpful to begin with encyclopedias or other reference works to get a broad overview of your topic. Next you'll want to use MIRLYN to find books that offer a more in-depth treatment of your topic. Articles in scholarly journals are often very helpful sources of information about specific aspects of a topic.



The Library Catalog

You can search for books on your topic in the University of Michigan Library Catalog (MCAT) using MIRLYN. Here are some links to sites that will help you track down the books you need:

  • University Library Main Page - the Gateway to All University of Michigan library resources
  • MIRLYN Guides - a collection of handouts, available online as PDF files that will help you take full advantage of the web interface to the online library catalog
  • Library Navigator - helps you locate library materials once you've got their call numbers
  • Understanding call numbers - explanations of what call numbers mean and how they are arranged

Here is a great UM resource for scholarly articles:

  • Networked Electronic Resources - these are resources available through MIRLYN that offer full text versions of important journal articles. Using networked electronic resources is a great way of tracking down articles that you might want to include in your bibliography. JSTOR is a particularly useful resource for full-text versions of scholarly articles, though its collection of journals in Latina/o Studies is not that extensive.


Search Strategies:
  • Talk to a reference librarian before you search the catalogs. Librarians are excellent sources of advice and information, speaking to a librarian at the beginning of the reserach process will save you LOTS of time.

  • Keyword searching is generally the best way to begin a general search in any index, as it searches all fields of the catalog entries, including title and subject.
  • When you browse your initial keyword search results in MIRLYN or a journal index, pay special attention to the "Subject Headings" assigned to each item. Once you find a particularly promising source, doing a second search based on the subject headings from that source will often turn up similar books or articles that you might have missed in your initial keyword search.
  • Once you've found a book or article that seems particularly interesting or useful, be sure to browse that source's bibliography and footnotes for other potentially useful sources. This is often called "footnote-chasing," and it can often be one of the most efficient ways of building up a research bibliography.

Go on to Conducting Research on the Web | Go to Top of Page


(Most of the information in these link has been brought to you courtesy of Professor David Porter, who developed a number of website production resources for his course on 18th century England. If you'd like to take a look at some really exciting examples of what you can do with this project check out his class website, Eighteenth Century England.)

 

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