Resources for Spanish TAs

Introduce your students, or yourself, to pertinent sources at the University of Arkansas Libraries and elsewhere.

Need Something?

If our collection lacks something critical and obtaining via Interlibrary Loan is unsatisfactory in the long term, contact me and I can attempt to purchase it. You still may wish to place the ILL request—even if money is available, it takes time to purchase and process a text.

Finding Books

Books remain important to literature and related disciplines.

OneSearch contains records of items owned at the University of Arkansas Libraries, the Law Library, and Crystal Bridges Museum Library. Online tips are available for searching the Catalog. Searching by subject heading allows considerable precision. Here is an example of a search statement for books on (not of) poetry in Argentina:

argentine poetry

WorldCat enables you to search for items beyond Fayetteville. If you find a citation in WorldCat or encounter one in a printed list of references, please check OneSearch to see if it is locally available.

If we don't own the book or have access to an online version, you most likely can obtain it via the Libraries' Interlibrary Loan (ILL) software, ILLiad.

Note on Controlled Vocabulary

Most searchers rely exclusively on keywords to retrieve records in online catalogs. If you wish to retrieve more precise results, try searching by controlled vocabulary for your topic, often referred to as "subject headings" or "descriptors." And you can best search by author by typing the last name before the first name.

Special notes for using controlled vocabulary in this subject:

1) Spanish surnames can be tricky. Urrea, Luis Alberto will get the best results as a subject or author, and perhaps more than Luis Alberto Urrea as a keyword search.

2) The Library of Congress Subject Heading "Spanish American Literature" encompasses the literature of Spanish-speaking Latin America and generally excludes the works of authors in the Unites States (e.g., Chicano literature). For the latter, try "Hispanic American Literature." The controlled vocabulary for databases may vary and diverge from that used in catalogs. "Spanish Literature" refers to the literature of Spain.

3) The subheadings CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION (after a person's name) and HISTORY AND CRITICISM (after a category of literature) can be very helpful in retrieving records of works of literary criticism from OneSearch and WorldCat. One does not need to enter the hyphens and dashes. Examples:

Paz, Ocatvio—1914-1998—Criticism and Interpretation

Hisapnic American Literature—Spanish—History and Criticism

Spanish Poetry—Classical Period, 1500-1700—History and Criticism