The MLA International Bibliography is an essential resource for literary and film study in modern languages. The MLAIB has subject headings, or keywords, that describe the content of articles. These subject headings can be very helpful in exploring a topic, finding examples of primary texts, and locating secondary texts.
The subject headings are located in the MLA Thesaurus in the upper right corner of the MLAIB.
In the thesaurus, enter a subject term like "Boom" or "ecocriticism." Change the option below the search box to "relevancy ranked" and click browse. Make sure you're using the second search box, not the main box with the green search button.
Our search for "Boom" found several options. Note that "Boom" is a blue link. This means that there are broader or narrower related topics that we can choose from by clicking the link.
In this case, the MLA suggests two broader terms. We can add these to our search by clicking one or both of the checkboxes next to the term, or we can click on either of these terms to find more keywords that may be helpful for our search.
Clicking on "Latin American writers" gives us several narrower terms that could make an interesting research project. We can also use the back button to return to our original search for Boom-related sources.
In our original search, we can choose both "Boom" and "post-Boom" to add to our search using the "OR" limiter. This will find articles and book chapters that contain one of these terms. Click "add" to create your search, click the green search button at the top of the page to retrieve all books, book chapters, and articles that have one of these subject headings as a keyword.
This search found 230 results. You can use the limiters in the left column to exclude dissertations and to set a publication time frame if you wish.
Some articles in MLAIB include a link to the full text within the item record.
Other articles have either a link at the bottom of the item record or will have a link that says "Check for Full Text at Wofford." If neither of these links leads you to the article, you can request the article through interlibrary loan.
Finally, MLAIB lists a number of books and book chapters, which will not be linked as full text.
You can search for the title of the book in Wofford OneSearch to see if Wofford owns the book, and if we do not, you request the book through Pascal Delivers.
To search for Spanish-language sources in OneSearch, change the language drop down in the top search box to "Spanish."
To retrieve sources in both Spanish and English, scroll down to the language section in the left search bar. Hover to the left of each language to bring up the check box, and click there to include a language. Click save to update your results list.
To search for a term or idea in English and Spanish at the same time, put the English phrase on one line in the top search box and the Spanish in the line below it. Change the drop down on the far left of the second line to "OR" to find either of the two sets of keywords in a single results list.
