Library Resources for Spanish, Ibero-American, Linguistics & Related Studies

Many thanks to Rachel Schneiderman, Humanities Librarian for Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, Linguistics, Latin American Studies and Latina/o Studies at Penn State University Libraries for this helpful information on linguistics research.

Are you in a Penn State World Campus course on linguistics or Ibero-American Civilization? Are you studying sociology, world music, anthropology, women’s studies or another class that explores cultures in which Spanish, Italian or Portuguese are spoken? Perhaps one of the above suggests a research topic in a subject by another name.

If any of the above apply, then I’m your library subject specialist. Welcome!

Penn State Libraries have many useful online resources through our home page. I am here to help undergrad and grad students find what they need for their assignments and can help you build a bibliography that fully supports your theme or question.

A good place to start is the top of the home page under Research. Click Research Guides and, once you view the list, click Spanish, Linguistics or Latina/o, Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LiLACS). Within those guides, millions of articles are available through databases whose navigation is easy with a bit of practice. I can guide you through the steps to save you time.

Let’s say you’re in Ibero-American studies and you clicked on the LiLACS Research Guide. Near the bottom is a link to the Modern Language Association. Click the Search link. Once on the MLA database, you might question how colonial Spain affected an aspect of culture in the Andes region. Unless your assignment specifies, you may or may not know which aspect but start somewhere and refine. Choose your dates of article publication and experiment with keywords as shown. Because in this instance the words “Andes” and “colonial” are the same in Spanish and English, select English if you want articles only in English, otherwise leave Language of Publication blank.

Now hit “Enter” and, in this case, one page of article links or citations will appear. If you want more titles from which to choose, one way is to start the date range earlier. Search terms are adjustable and MLA provides lists of keywords, authors, subjects and other variables. If PSU Libraries do not have certain articles online, you can quickly request that they be sent to your email address through the interlibrary loan process.

There are so many other tools I can share and your projects will require advance planning, so don’t hesitate to email me for assistance at rus21@psu.edu