Literature / Foreign Language Databases

Over 1,000 books, literary encyclopedias, and hundreds of literary journals.

Literary Reference Center contains full text for 27,500 plot summaries, synopses and work overviews, nearly 100,000 articles/essays of literary criticism, 140,500 author biographies (including 20,000 in-depth bios), 350 literary journals, 535,000 book reviews, 54,000 classic and contemporary poems, 14,500 classic and contemporary short stories, 4,000 author interviews, 8,400 classic texts and much more.

Articles, criticism, reviews, and biographies covering over 130,000 writers.

The Literature Resource Center consists of Contemporary Authors Online, offering biographical coverage of more than 124,000 writers; Contemporary Literary Criticism Select, featuring entries on all authors appearing in CLC since vol. 95 of the print series and complete profiles of 266 most studied authors from editions prior to vol. 95; and Dictionary of Literary Biography Online, containing more than 11,700 biocritical essays on authors and their works written by academic scholars.

Other features include over 5,100 explications and overviews of prominent literary works; links to 4,900 websites focusing on major authors and their works; over 6,700 timeline events to help place literature in its historical and social context, 2,300 author portraits; a guide to writing a Modern Language Association-style research paper; access to the Literary Index, an online database that indexes the content of all of Thomson Gale's literature products; and more.

Citations covering research in literature, linguistics, and folklore.
Coverage: 1980 - current

MLA International Bibliography(produced by the Modern Language Association), contains over 1.8 million citations from more than 4,400 journals & series, and 1,000 book publishers. The indexed materials coverage is international and includes journal abbreviations and acronyms for almost 3,500 titles and nearly 11,000 subject names and terms. Subjects consist of literature, language and linguistics, folklore, literary theory & criticism, dramatic arts, as well as the historical aspects of printing and publishing. Listings on rhetoric and composition and the history, theory and practice of teaching language and literature are also included. In addition to the bibliography, the database includes the MLA Directory of Periodicals.

Broad collection from leading journals, newspapers and reference sources.
Coverage: 1980 - current

Academic OneFile contains over 60 million records from the following types of sources: Periodicals — General interest magazines; refereed academic journals; business publications; technology periodicals; plus specialty titles in law, health care and computers. Newspapers — The full text of The New York Times from 1990, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Christian Science Monitor. Newswires — 121 wire services covering agriculture, general news, broadcast news, government, business press releases, industry topics, sports and current events from all over the world. Audio — listen to any National Public Radio program, as well as read transcripts, for shows produced by NPR from 1990 to present. Podcasts from government agencies such as the Census and the State Department are also available.

Nearly 4,500 multi-disciplinary journals covering most subjects.
Coverage: 1975 - current (earlier for some titles)

In addition to full text that includes over 3,600 peer-reviewed journals, Academic Search Premier also offers indexing and abstracts for all 8,144 journals in the collection. This scholarly collection offers information in nearly every area of academic study including: computer sciences, engineering, physics, chemistry, language and linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, ethnic studies, and many more.

Nearly 2,000 classic works of French literature and non-fiction.
Coverage: Medieval - 20th century

Besides the Main ARTFL Database, resources include French Women Writers, Provençal poetry, Journal de Trévoux, full-text dictionary searching and the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) Database. Eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century texts are about equally represented, with a smaller selection of seventeenth century, medieval, and Renaissance texts. Subjects include literary criticism, biology, history, economics, and philosophy. In most cases standard scholarly editions were used in converting the text into machine-readable form, and the data contain page references to these editions.

Biographical information about current and historical people.

Biography in Context integrates over 1,000 volumes of Thomson Gale publications with full-text magazine articles, images, and website links. Search for current or historic people by name, occupation, nationality, ethnicity, birth/death dates and places, or gender, or by keyword and full text. Narrative biographies provide an in-depth overview of the subject's life and accomplishments. Over 538,000 full-text magazine articles bring coverage of the subject up-to-date and broaden the view of his or her place in history, society, a particular field of endeavor, or the news.

Helps bring readers and literature together.

Books & Authors offers new ways to explore the endless possibilities and combinations of books, authors, genres and topics. Combining over 140,000 titles, 50,000 authors, and thousands of read-alike, award winner and librarian's favorites lists, Books & Authors helps bring readers and literature together.

Biographical and bibliographical information on U.S. and international authors.

Contemporary Authors contains biographical details on current writers, along with the most-studied literary figures of the early 20th century, as well as authors from around the world. In many cases, information provided by the authors themselves is used to create sketches. In instances where an author is deceased or direct responses to questionnaires and query letters are unavailable, details are drawn from published interviews, feature stories, book reviews and other materials provided by the authors’ publishers.

Critical essays on contemporary authors now living or who died after 1959.

CLC Select presents significant published criticism on the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, short story writers, and other creative writers. Each entry contains the following: a biographical essay that discusses the author's life, works, and critical importance; critical essays or excerpts taken from books, magazines, literary reviews, newspapers, and scholarly journals; and, where available, interviews with featured authors. A complete bibliographical citation prefaces each critical essay and most essays are introduced by a brief annotation that establishes a context and purpose for the criticism. Entries also provide suggestions for further reading.

Over 470 full-text reference resources from 66 different publishers.

Credo Reference aggregates authoritative high-quality reference works for online delivery to libraries worldwide. There are currently over 470 reference titles in Credo Reference, with over 3 million entries, all fully integrated and intelligently cross-linked. Reference resources include Dictionaries and Encyclopedias; Statistical Resources; Atlases, Maps, and Gazetteers; Handbooks and Guidebooks; Bilingual and Biographical Dictionaries; Thesauri, Chronologies, and Glossaries.

Bibliographic citations pertaining to the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods.
Coverage: 400-1700

Iter contains more than 935,000 citations from articles, essays, books, dissertation abstracts, encyclopedia entries and reviews collected from over 6,600 publications, including over 1,600 journals. The search interface permits expert searching by keyword, title, author and, for selected records, by Library of Congress subject headings and Dewey Decimal Classification. The interface supports Boolean and positional operators, and allows limiting by language, publication type and publication year. Results lists can be sorted by author, subject, title, relevance or publication year. Records can be marked and conveniently e-mailed or downloaded.

Arts & Science Collections I - IV offering over 500 full-text journals.
Coverage: 1800s - 1 to 5 years before current month (varies by title)

UML has access to JSTOR Arts & Sciences Collections I through IV. These collections combine to offer 509 full-text academic journal titles from the first issues until one to five years before the current month. Most of these titles include decades worth of issues, some dating back to the nineteenth century. Topics covered branch across all aspects of the humanities including literature, history, folklore, music, mathematics, economics, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and much, much more.

The definitive authority on the etymology of words in the English language.

The OED is the excepted authority on the evolution of the English language. It traces the usage of over half a million words, both present and past, from across the English-speaking world. It is currently being revised, with the preparation of an updated third edition. Draft material from the revision programme is published online, alongside unrevised entries from the 20-volume Second Edition, first published in 1989, and its 3-volume Additions Series, published in 1993 (volumes 1 and 2) and 1997 (volume 3). Revised entries are added to the online Dictionary every quarter, replacing versions from the Second Edition and Additions Series.

Access over 300 journal titles covering the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Coverage: varies (earliest date 1995) - current

The Project MUSE Standard Collection is an interdisciplinary collection of high quality, peer reviewed journals focused extensively in the humanities and social sciences. It is particularly strong in literature and history, but also global in scope with political and social coverage of Africa, Latin America, Asia, Canada, and the Middle East.

Bio-critical scholarly essays covering world literature in 22 critical editions.

The Scribners Writers Series delivers online access to numerous Scribner publications: American Writers, African American Writers, Ancient Writers: Greece and Rome, British Writers, European Writers, Modern American Women Writers, Supernatural Fiction Writers, Writers for Young Adults and many others. In total the series contains more than 2,000 original, scholar-signed biocritical entries. Each entry averages 15-20 pages in length and includes a concise essay, hyperlinks for cross-referencing, and biographical information that places the author’s work in personal and historical context. Many authors examined from multiple perspectives through two, three or sometimes four essays. Coverage of literary topics includes African Americans, Writing and Nature; Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon Poetry; The Bible as Sacred Literature; The Female Detective; Gay and Lesbian Mystery Fiction; The Gothic Novel; Renaissance and Short Fiction; Greek Lyric Poets and many more.

Literary reference combining Twayne's U.S., English, and World Authors.

The Twayne Authors Series is a literary reference resource that combines Twayne's U.S. Authors, Twayne's English Authors, and Twayne's World Authors publications. Each of these individual titles provides literary criticism for approximately 200 authors, bringing the total number of authors covered in the Series to nearly 600. All titles feature comment elements, such as a chronology, a biography, a comprehensive critical analysis, and an annotated bibliography. The discussions of each author in the series are between 175-200 printed pages.

Search for books, journals and non-print materials.

Search millions of bibliographic records from libraries around the world.
Coverage: Before 1000 BC - current

WorldCat contains all the records cataloged by OCLC member libraries -- more than 57 million -- for books, manuscripts, maps, journals and magazines, films and slides, musical scores, sound recordings, computer programs,articles, chapters, papers, and more. Includes records representing 400 languages.

Biographical analysis of contemporary novelists writing in English worldwide.
Coverage: 7th edition 2001

Entries in Contemporary Novelists include personal and career information, addresses, a detailed bibliography, a list of further reading sources, and more. Each entry also includes a signed critical essay covering each poet's career and works, written by an expert in the field.

Biographical analysis of contemporary English-language poets.
Coverage: 7th edition 2001

Entries in Contemporary Poets include personal and career information, addresses, a detailed bibliography, a list of further reading sources, and more. Each entry also includes a signed critical essay covering each poet's career and works, written by an expert in the field.

Over 70,000 ebooks, many published by leading academic presses, covering 16 key subject areas. Works best on a PC in IE.

Signup for your own personal account so that you can create a personal bookshelf in order to create and save highlights, notes, and more. Download the ebrary Reader in order to take notes, highlight, and use other advanced features. Click on the help icon above for information on how to take advantage of the many special features in ebrary.

Over 5,000 ebooks covering all major subject areas.
Coverage: Publication dates 1990 - current

Ebsco purchased Netlibrary eBooks in 2010 and came out with a new interface in late-July, 2011. What was once Netlibrary is now titles simply "eBook Collection." The content is the same, but the interface replicates all other Ebsco database products. titles are searchable by using up to four criteria including title, author, keyword, ISBN, or publisher plus limiting by publication year and language. Individual titles can then be read online in the Online Reader, browsed by table of contents, or keyword searched. Up to four books can be held in the Reader simultaneously. Books cannot be read offline, downloaded, or "checked out." The Reader is cleared at the end of each session. By creating a free account, access is available from anywhere using your personal EBSCOhost login and titles can then be saved to your Favorites list.

Best resources chosen by a UML subject specialist librarian.