Our Recommend a Book service for students allows you to tell us about the books you need for your studies. If we don’t have the books you need, simply complete the web form and we’ll see if we can buy them. For books we already have in stock, if they are out on loan please make a reservation/hold request using Library Search.
In Semester Three, academic year 2021/2022 we successfully processed 21 requests from 13 students (8 PGR, 1 PGT and 4 UGT) in SAPL totalling just over £1600.
Our Recommend a Book service for students allows you to tell us about the books you need for your studies. If we don’t have the books you need, simply complete the web form and we’ll see if we can buy them. For books we already have in stock, if they are out on loan please make a reservation/hold request using Library Search.
In Semester Three, academic year 2021/2022 we successfully processed 32 requests from 12 students (11 PGR, 1 PGT and 0 UGT) in GPS totalling just over £2300.
We’ve got a wide range of specialist information resources for English literature students. We know it can be rather overwhelming knowing where to start, so this blog post gives you a whistle stop tour of what you can find.
Library Search and your reading lists are great starting points for finding books, journals and other resources for your modules, but we’ve highlighted below some more specialised resources which you’ll want to explore.
Interdisciplinary academic research databases
Interdisciplinary bibliographic databases, such as Scopus or JSTOR are a great starting point after Library Search, as they enable you to discover secondary literature, irrespective of the subject area, and have really helpful features to help you focus your search. This can be useful if your topic covers more than one subject area, or if you’re trying to scope your topic broadly. Content includes journal articles, conference papers, book chapters and reviews.
Specialist English literature research databases
Literature Online (LION) is an indispensable database for researching English literature. It comprises three main sections:
literary criticism: search articles from over 400 journals, together with the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature
primary texts: 350,000 works of poetry, prose and drama from the 8th century to the present
reference: encylopedias, topic overviews and author biographies
LION search screen
You can search all of these information types at once with the All button selected, or focus on a particular section by choosing the appropriate button.
If you haven’t used LION before, or would like a refresher, a good way to get an insight into the content, and different ways to search, is to try out the sample searches in this LION guide (Links to an external site.).
Film and Television Literature Index
If you’re researching a film or television studies topic, including literary adapations, then you may find Film and Television Literature Indexto be useful. It includes articles from academic journals and film magazines, and coverage is focused on film and television theory, writing, production and reviews.
Digitised archives
Romanticism: Life, Literature, Landscape
There is a vast range of digitised literary archives available, and it would be impossible to list every one, but we have picked out some major resources on the English Literature subject guide, in the General literary resources > archives section. These include:
Click on the links above for blog posts giving more information about these fascinating archives.
We also have a fascinating range of historic and contemporary literary archives in our own Special Collections section: please browse the web site by subject to find out more and read here for how to consult items and get further advice.
Literary texts: historic book collections online
Oxford World’s Classics
As well as the many individual literary print and e-books in our collections, we also have access to several major online collections of literary texts from different historical periods, which feature in-depth contextual information, facsimile images of the original texts, and sophisticated search and analytical features.
From Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), we have access to almost every book published in English from the fifteenth to nineteenth century, complemented by other specialist collections, such as Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.
ECCO screenshot
Our blog post gives an overview of five of the major collections. You can find all the individual books from these collections on Library Search, but we recommend searching and browsing the databases themselves (for example, EEBO) to get the best searching and viewing experience.
Audiovisual resources: Box of Broadcasts and Drama Online
Box of Broadcasts (BoB) contains over two million programmes from over 75 television and radio channels. Coverage mostly dates from 2007 to the present day. It’s a great resource for finding literary adaptations on television, film and radio, together with documentaries about writers, and arts review broadcasts. Find out how to get the best out of BoB via our BoB blog post.
Drama Online screenshot
The Library has purchased various collections from the Drama Online database, which comprises the text of over 3,000 plays, from ancient Greek drama to contemporary works, together with contextual works relating to drama theory and practice. We have also recently bought several video collections, featuring films of major theatrical productions from the National Theatre, Globe and Royal Shakespeare Company.
Read more about this exciting platform and the very latest content on our blog post.
English Literature Subject Guide
This posting is just a taster of all the great resources available for your subject area. To access them and find out more, visit your Subject Guide and explore the databases and other subject specific resources which we’ve curated for English literature.
The Library has lots of great collections and resources, so when it comes to finding wider reading for your topic or beginning research for your assignment or dissertation it might all seem a bit overwhelming. Library Search can be a great place to start looking for information but there are many other resources you might want to try. To help you get the best out of our resources we’ve put together this list of some of the most useful online databases and collections for the study of Language and Linguistics.
Let’s dive in!
Scopus
Scopus is a large, interdisciplinary database of peer-reviewed literature, providing an index of articles, book chapters, conference papers and trade publications.
One of the main advantages of using Scopus is that it provides a lot of useful information about the articles it indexes. This includes full reference lists for articles and cited reference searching, so you can navigate forward and backward through the literature to uncover all the information relevant to your research. You can also set up citation alerts, so you can be informed of new, relevant material automatically.
Video guide to expanding your search results in Scopus.
Scopus includes other smart tools that can help you track and visualise the research in your area, including author and affiliation searching, visual analysis of search results, a journal analyser, and author identifier tools. You’ll find tutorials and advice on using these features in the Scopus support centre and on their YouTube Channel.
JSTOR
JSTOR provides access to full-text materials including scholarly journals, books and book chapters in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It has basic and advanced search options that allow you to search by topic keyword, author, subject area, title or publisher.
Take a look at our Get more out of JSTOR blog post to find tips for advanced searching on this database.
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts is an excellent resource for those interested in the nature and use of language. The database focuses on academic resources for the study of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, and descriptive, historical, comparative, theoretical and geographical linguistics.
LLBA has the added advantage of including a specialised linguistics thesaurus, which you can use in advanced search to refine and focus your search. The thesaurus provides a searchable list of all the subject terms used in the database and highlights links between broader, narrower and related terms, helping you to select all of the keywords relevant to your topic.
ProQuest provide a helpful and detailed guide to LLBA which includes search tips for basic and advanced search as well as some sample searches you can work through to familiarise yourself with the database.
The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics
The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics is a comprehensive online reference work covering 27 key areas of the field, including Language Learning and Teaching, Bilingual and Multilingual Education, Assessment and Testing, Corpus Linguistics, Conversation Analysis, Discourse and Technology and Language. You’ll also find over 200 entries on the philosophy and history of applied linguistics and biographies of key applied linguists.
You can browse the Encyclopedia by topic or look for keywords using simple or advanced searches.
Accents and Dialects
Accents and Dialects is a searchable database of English accent recordings from the British Library Sound Archive. Recordings include early spoken word snippets from the 1890s onwards, Opie’s collection of children’s songs and games, an evolving English word bank, and a survey of English dialects. Each recording includes a detailed description, and some include additional linguistic descriptions too. Most recordings can be downloaded for academic use.
You can browse the database by project, county, or date. You can also use the search box on the top right of the page to look for specific keywords, including dialects or places.
The British Library have also developed an interactive timeline showing the evolution of the English language from the 11th Century to the present day. This requires Adobe Flash to view.
The Cambridge History of the English Language
The Cambridge History of the English Language is a six-volume work providing an authoritative account of the history of English; from Old English through to modern variations in Britain and overseas. Each volume gives a chronological overview of the data, links to scholarship in the area and considers the impact of current and developing linguistic theory on the interpretation of the data.
You can access volumes individually on Library Search or sign in via institutional login at the link above to browse all volumes together.
Historic Newspapers
The Library provides access to several million digitised pages of historic newspapers, dating from the seventeenth century. We have all UK broadsheet archives online (e.g. The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph) as well as titles which are strong in arts and culture coverage, such as the Times Literary Supplement.
If you want to search across a range of historic new sources, start with Gale Primary Sources, as this gives access to all our British newspaper archives, except The Guardian and The Observer. Gale also has a useful tool called term frequency that allows you to track the history of particular words and phrases.
You’ll find an overview of all our News resources on our Newspaper Guide.
Box of Broadcasts (BoB)
Box of Broadcasts allows you to access TV and radio broadcasts from over 65 channels, including most of the UK’s Freeview network, all BBC TV and radio content from 2007, and several foreign language channels. It’s a great resource for finding documentaries or critical opinions.
You can view archived programmes, create clips and playlists, and see transcripts to help with citation and translation. You can also search other user’s public playlists to see curated lists around topics similar to your own. There are lots of helpful tutorial videos on the BoB website.
Unfortunately, Box of Broadcasts is not available outside the UK.
English Language and Linguistics Subject Guide
This list was just a taster of all the great resources available for your subject area, to access these and to find out more visit the English Language and Linguistics Subject Guide and explore the journals, databases and subject specific resources we’ve curated for students interested in this field of study.
The Library has lots of great collections and resources, so when it comes to finding wider reading for your topic or beginning research for your assignment or dissertation it might all seem a bit overwhelming. Library Search can be a great place to start looking for information but there are many other resources you might want to try. To help you we’ve put together this list of some of the most useful online databases and collections for Translating and Interpreting studies.
Let’s dive in!
Scopus
Scopus is a large, interdisciplinary database of peer-reviewed literature, providing an index of articles, book chapters, conference papers and trade publications.
One of the main advantages of using Scopus is that it provides a lot of useful information about the articles it indexes. This includes full reference lists for articles and cited reference searching, so you can navigate forward and backward through the literature to uncover all the information relevant to your research. You can also set up citation alerts, so you can be informed of new, relevant material automatically.
Video guide from Scopus demonstrating how to expand your search results.
Scopus includes other smart tools that can help you track and visualise the research in your area, including author and affiliation searching, visual analysis of search results, a journal analyser, and author identifier tools. You’ll find tutorials and advice on using these features in the Scopus support centre and on their YouTube Channel.
JSTOR
JSTOR provides access to full-text materials including scholarly journals, books and book chapters in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It has basic and advanced search options that allow you to search by topic keyword, author, subject area, title or publisher.
Take a look at our Get more out of JSTOR blog post to find tips for advanced searching on this database.
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts is an excellent resource for those interested in the nature and use of language. The database focuses on academic resources for the study of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, and descriptive, historical, comparative, theoretical and geographical linguistics.
LLBA has the added advantage of including a specialised linguistics thesaurus, which you can use in advanced search to refine and focus your search. The thesaurus provides a searchable list of all of the subject terms used in the database and highlights links between broader, narrower and related terms, helping you to select all of the keywords relevant to your topic.
ProQuest provide a helpful and detailed guide to LLBA which includes search tips for basic and advanced search as well as some sample searches you can work through to familiarise yourself with the database.
Bibliography of Interpreting and Translation (BITRA)
BITRA is a bibliographic database containing over 80,000 records, including books, book chapters, journal articles and PhD theses, on topics relating to translation and interpreting. You can search the database precisely by subject, author, publication date and language, or choose from a selection of keywords (controlled vocabulary) to broadly search all records containing those keywords in the subject field.
Item records provide bibliographic information and an abstract to help you decide if the item is relevant to your research but you’ll need to use Library Search or Google Scholar to find full text copies of useful resources.
Nexis – International Newspapers
Newspapers can be a great source of information, with news stories and editorial opinion offering a fascinating angle on your research topic.
The recently updated Nexis Uni database enables you to search over 17,000 news, business and legal sources. This includes most UK national and regional newspapers, together with international sources, including newspapers, newswires and news magazines in multiple languages. Coverage of news titles often dates back to the 1990s and includes today’s news. Coverage is text only, and doesn’t include images, layout, adverts etc.
The simplest way to search is by selecting the News button from the Guided Search section on the database homepage:
Screenshot of the Nexis home page showing Guided Search with News highlighted.
Type in your search term (use ” ” if searching for a phrase), select your date range, and click Search.
If you would like to try more complex searching (e.g. searching in a particular section of the newspaper, or combining terms together in various ways), then click on Advanced search from the home page, and select the ‘News’ tab.
Our Nexis blog post provides more details on how to get the most out of the database and you can explore Nexis Uni Video Trainings via the Help button at the top of the database homepage. You can find out more about the Library’s collection of international news resources in the international section of our Newspapers guide.
Remember to use your critical thinking skills when using newspapers as they may present biased opinion and inaccurate facts – watch out for Fake News!
Box of Broadcasts (BoB)
Box of Broadcasts allows you to access TV and radio broadcasts from over 65 channels, including most of the UK’s Freeview network, all BBC TV and radio content from 2007, and several foreign language channels. It’s a great resource for finding documentaries or critical opinions.
You can view archived programmes, create clips and playlists, and see transcripts to help with citation and translation. You can also search other user’s public playlists to see curated lists around topics similar to your own. There are lots of helpful tutorial videos on the BoB website.
Unfortunately, Box of Broadcasts is not available outside the UK.
Translating and Interpreting Subject Guide
This list was just a taster of all the great resources available for your subject area, to access these and to find out more visit your Subject Guide and explore the journals, databases and subject specific resources we’ve curated for Translating and Interpreting studies.
The Library has access to the digitised State Papers Online from 1509 to the end of the State Papers series in 1782, providing a fascinating research resource for early modern Britain and Europe.
What are the State Papers?
They are predominantly official papers of the Secretaries of State from the period, and include correspondence, reports, memoranda and civil service drafts, covering a wide range of domestic and international matters, and emanating from the highest levels of power. The collections include letters from popes, diplomats, and rulers of other countries, as well as records such as military and naval registers, and thus provide a fascinating record of the Tudor, Stuart and early Georgian periods in England and beyond.
A selection of entries
It is an major resource for researching themes such as the monarchy, law and order, religious conflict, wars and treaties, international trade and the emergence of party politics.
What’s in this collection?
The digitised collections comprise the papers themselves, digitised from the original manuscripts, as well as the ‘calendars’, which catalogue and briefly describe or summarise the manuscripts, and which have been transcribed into text. The manuscripts themselves are mostly not searchable (except for a few series which have been transcribed). The calendars are searchable, and each calendar entry links to its manuscript, making the research process significantly easier than pre-digitisation.
How to search
You can search or browse the State Papers in various ways. We’d recommend selecting Advanced Search to access all the options for focusing your search. Note useful options such as fuzzy search, which enables you to search for spelling variants, plus the option to limit your search to records with a manuscript, and/or a transcript of the manuscript.
Advanced search screen
The Browse function may be useful if you wish to work through a particular series of State Papers: you can either browse the calendars or manuscripts.
There are various options for saving, downloading and exporting results.
Help and guidance
Help options
If you are using the State Papersfor the first time, we’d recommend reading the relevant About State Papers Online section to get an overview of what each collection contains.
You will also find very helpful contextual information in the Research Tools section.
Reference includes glossaries, explanations of dates, weights and measures etc;
Links gives links to useful guidance such as paleography courses.
Essays gives more detailed insights into each collection, written by experts.
Key documents picks out important highlights from the collections.
You can also click Help in the top right of the screen for in-depth help with searching and exporting.
Did you know the Library offers access to over half a million ebooks across a variety of subjects? This includes titles featured on your reading lists, or that have been recommended by staff and students. Ebooks are very useful resources as they’re available 24/7 wherever you are; simply navigate to them through Library Search. If you’re off campus, you’ll need your University ID and password to log in.
One of our newest collections is Packt Publishing ebooks. This package provides access to over 700 full-text ebooks on computing subjects. The 4 collections included are:
Data
Cloud
Programming
Web Development
You can find individual titles in Library Search by entering the title or your keywords, or access the collection here. If you’re browsing the publisher’s platform, choose Show All Titles or enter your search terms.
Once you have your results, you can use the filters on the left-hand side of the page to narrow your search.
When you’ve found a title, you can read it online, add it to your saved list, search within the text or download a PDF to read later.
You can access the content in various ways: for example, you can browse by the broad subject areas, to view individual books, and/or the articles within those books.
Once in a subject area, you can then refine your search to more specific sub-disciplines.
You can also search in various ways, e.g. by author or keyword.
They can be both a great starting point for information as well as providing more in-depth details and content too.
We have bought several new e-book collections from Bloomsbury and Manchester University Press, complementing and updating our existing collections from these two publishers.
From Bloomsbury, we have bought new collections in:
All the titles are individually catalogued on Library Search, or if you prefer, you can browse them from the publishers’ platforms via the links above. NB If you are browsing any of the Bloomsbury subject collections, under Access, tick Purchased/Open Access.
The Library now has access to over 59,000 extra ebooks via JSTOR. These books are from nearly a hundred different publishers in 25 countries mainly in Europe, Africa and the USA, and were all published in 2018 or earlier. We also have access to 6,500 Open Access titles.
The content is wide-ranging, encompassing many subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, as well as some natural sciences.
Our access to all the books is for an initial twelve month period, after which we will buy permanent access to certain titles; usually those which have been most heavily used.
Finding JSTOR books
JSTOR search limit
All the books are individually catalogued on Library Search, or you can find them when you search JSTOR (you can limit your search results to find books only).
You can also view a full title list in the Evidence-Based Acquisition section here.
If you would like to find out more about JSTOR’s other collections, and how to get the best out of this resource, please see our blog post.
