Latin American and Iberian Studies  Tags: latin_american_iberian_collections  

Feel overwhelmed by all of the information available to you? Wondering why you can just use google and wikipedia? They're nice places to start identifying vocabulary and to find publicly accessible resources on your topic. But you can find lots more useful information on well managed databases, on electronic content sites and in -- good old fashioned- libraries and archives. Use everything available. This page should help you sort through the mess. Please contact me with any questions. My info is to the right of this message.

Library catalogs tell you where to find - sometimes physically and sometimes electronically -- books, journals, magazines, DVDs and other visual or sound resources. If we don't have something here, look for it on WorldCat. We can get it through Inter-Library Loan (ILL). Check the Internet archive as well for free access to lots of electronically/digitally available resources ..

As noted above, wikipedia is a good place to start, but it should never be the last place you visit. These encyclopedias will offer some of the same information and more because entries are written by people with expertise on the subjects covered.

There is nothing quite like an electronic book or text (screenplay, performance) especially for research purposes. Unlike the books on our shelves, these are always available and always accessible.These resources also allow you to hyper-text connect through subject terms or index terms and through tables of contents. Even better, you can use the "Control F" feature to search these texts for your keywords.

The best place to start your research is by accessing what others have already done. Thankfully, there are some great electronic bibliographies to help. Check these out

Databases collect articles from thousands of individual books, journals, newspapers and magazines. Better yet, they organize those articles into "metadata" which you can search with keywords, author's names, titles, subjects etc. Since they're organized to collect only articles from reputable journals, newspapers and magazines -- you won't have to wade through a lot of individual or organizational web pages, which may or may not be useful.

Examining events from first person accounts a great way to have fun with your research. Listed here is our manuscript finding aid: The Rocky Mountain On-line Archive, as well as our digital collections and other digitally available primary sources. Most of these are freely accessible to anyone from anywhere.

Some websites offer great infromation. Check these out.

News databases collect articles from thousands of newspapers. Just like other article databases, they organize those works into, what we in library land call, metadata, which you can search with keywords.