The MLA International Bibliography is the best index to use to find bibliographic citations on literature, language, linguistics and folklore. MLA provides access not only to articles in over 3000 periodicals and series, but also to books, working papers, proceedings, bibliographies, and other formats. T

he CD-ROM covers periodicals published from 1981 – 2003. Another CD-ROM covering 1963 - 1980 is available. The MLA Index is available on the “Red PC” in the Reference Area on the 2nd Level of Grace Library. You can not access the MLA Index from the Library’s Homepage.

Accessing MLA

1. From the desktop point to the “MLA Index” icon and double click on it.

2. Select the CD-ROM you wish to search by clicking on the title, then clicking on the “Add” button and then clicking on the “OK” button.

3. At the introductory MLA screen, click on the “OK” button.

The Main Screen

You will now be at the Main Screen from which searches are initiated. This screen is divided into three parts:

• At the top, a thin box labeled SEARCH. Here you will type your searches.
• In the center, a thicker window labeled SEARCH HISTORY. Here a record of your searches is kept.
• At the bottom, a still thicker window. Here is where the records found in your search are displayed.

Keyword Searching

The easiest way to search MLA on CD-ROM is to use keywords. To search this way simply type in the Search window whatever words you want to find in citations, then either point to the “Search” button and click to run the search or press Enter. Citations which contain those keywords somewhere within the citations will be displayed in the bottom window on the screen. Your keywords will be underlined and in red.

Some examples of ways to search for specific kinds of information follow:

1. If you want to find citations for works on a particular author, type that person's name and press Enter or point to the “Search” button and click on it. You may type last name first or first name last. You need not capitalize or put a comma between last and first names.

example:
kate chopin
chopin kate

2. If you want citations for materials on a particular work by an author, type the title of the work and press Enter, or point to the “Search” button and click on it.

example:
great gatsby
wife of bath's tale
scarlet letter

3. Or you can type the author's last name and join it to the title with the operator "and" to make sure your results are relevant to your interests.

example:
conrad and secret sharer

4. If you are searching for citations on a particular character from literature, you can type the character's name and press Enter, or point to the “Search” button and click on it.

example:
hester prynne
bond james

You can add an author's name to make sure the retrieved citations are relevant to your interests.

example:
chaucer and knight
constance and chaucer
marlow and conrad

5. If you want citations for materials on how a certain theme is handled by a certain author, you can type the author's name and the theme and press Enter, or point to the “Search” button and click on it.

example:
shakespeare and revenge
hawthorne and adultery

If you want citations for materials on how a theme is treated in a certain work, type the title of the work and the theme.

example:
wife of bath's tale and marriage
ivanhoe and chivalry

Combining Search Terms with Operators

You can combine search terms in a number of ways to achieve a more precise search result. You combine terms using words called "operators." The most commonly used operators are "and," "or," and "not."

and: As in the examples above, any two words can be combined by using the operator "and." Joining words with "and" will only bring up citations that contain both the search terms. For example, if you searched for "emerson and thoreau," the citations resulting from your search would all contain both those names.

or: Joining two words with the operator "or" will bring up records containing either one or both of the terms entered. Searching for "keats or shelley" will bring up all records containing "keats," all records containing "shelley," and all containing both names. This operator is useful when doing a search containing synonyms, such as the search "marriage or wedlock." Using the "or" operator will increase your search results.

not: Using the "not" operator permits you to exclude records containing a certain term. For example, if you wanted article citations on Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man, but do not want to see things on H.G. Well's novel of the same title, you could enter "invisible man not wells." The results would not contain any citations with the word "wells" in them.

Truncation

1. You can find citations containing both the singular and plural of a term by using the asterisk (*). For example, you could search for "boy" and "boys" in one search using this truncation symbol. See below.

example: boy*

2. You would also use this symbol to find all records containing words stemming from a certain root. To find all article citations containing the terms "teen," "teens," "teenage," "teenager, and "teenagers," you could truncate as in the example below.

example: teen*

3. You can use an embedded asterisk (*) to retrieve the singular and plural of words like "woman/women," or to retrieve spelling variations such as "color/colour." See below for examples.

example:
wom*n
col*r

Combining Searches

Combining searches allows you to combine the results of one search with another term, or even another set of search results, without having to retype a longer, more complex search statement.

1. If, for example, you wanted to find all citations on Shakespeare's Hamlet you could type:
   
   shakespeare and hamlet
   
   This search would give you an extremely large result. In the Search History window you would see this search has been assigned a number in the extreme left side of the window in the No. column.
   
   
2. Now, say, you want only the citations from this set of results on theatrical productions of Hamlet. You would type the number of the search "shakespeare and hamlet" and add the words "theatrical production" to that number with the operator "and."
   
   example: #3 and theatrical production
   
   This would give you only citations for materials on theatrical productions of Hamlet.
   
   
3. You could further narrow your search in the same way. For example, if you wanted only citations on the treatment of soliloquies in theatrical productions of Hamlet, you would type the number of the last search (which combined "shakespeare and hamlet" with "theatrical production"), joining to it the word "soliloquies" with the operator "and."
   
   example: #6 and soliloquies
   
   This would give you the citations on the very specific subject for which you were looking.

Displaying Results

1. Your search results will be displayed in the thicker box at the bottom of the Search screen. The records that will be displayed are Short Citations. The important parts of the Short Citation are the TI (article or book title), AU (author), and SO (source, the title of the periodical or book in which the article appears as well as other important bibliographic information necessary for finding the article). Your search terms will be shown in each record underlined and in red.
2. You can scroll through the records by clicking on the arrow buttons to the right of the Retrieved Records box. The double arrow button allows you to go up or down the list one record at a time. The single arrow buttons allow you to move up or down within a record one line at a time.
3. You can more easily see your search results by clicking the “Full Screen” button at the lower right hand corner of the screen. To see more information about an article, click on the “All Fields” button at the bottom center of the screen. Additional fields, including descriptors (DE, also known as subject headings) will be displayed.

Displaying Periodicals owned by Grace Library

1. To see only the citations for periodicals owned by Grace Library, click on the “Records” menu at the top of the screen. Click on the “Show Held Titles Only” option. This will cause the software to search through your result list and display only those periodicals owned by Grace Library. Each of these records will have an LHM (Library Holdings Message) saying “Grace Library owns this periodical.”
   
   example:
   TITLE: Modernism and Vietnam: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now
   AUTHOR(S): Norris, -Margot
   SOURCE (BIBLOGRAPHIC CITATION): MFS: Modern-Fiction-Studies, West Lafayette, IN ( MFS). 1998 Fall, 44:3, 730-66
   Library Holdings Message: Grace Library owns this journal, Vol. 1, 1955 -
   
   
2. The LHM field will also indicate the date Grace Library began receiving a periodical and if we have stopped receiving it. Always double check the dates that Grace Library owns to make sure the library owns the exact date of the periodical that you want.

Printing Records

1. To print all of the retrieved records, click on the “Print” button near the upper left hand corner of the Main Screen, then click on the “Print” button in the window that is displayed.
2. To print selected records, they must first be marked for printing. Do this at the Main Screen by pointing to the book icon to the upper left of a citation in the search results box and then clicking. You will see a purple check mark in the box once it is marked and a purple line in the left margin of the record. Repeat this operation with as many records as you wish to print. Now click on the “Print” button and click again on Print.
3. When you have finished, to clear all marked records, click on the “Yes” button in the dialog box that has been displayed.

Logging Off

1. Click on the “File” button in the upper left-hand corner of the screen A pull-down menu will be displayed.

2. Point to Exit and click. A box will appear headed "Exit WinSPIRS."

3. Point to the “Exit” button and click. You should now be logged off.

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