Library Subject Guides
Books are a great place to start your research. They contain useful summaries about what's happening in your field and can help you to establish the key theories and background of your research. As well as books specifically covering your subject, the Library also holds lots of titles to help you develop your study skills.
Books contain references to other resources that you can explore for more in-depth information when you have understood the basics.
Journals, sometimes called periodicals, are collections of articles published regularly. Articles contain the most-up-to-date research content and often go into more depth than books. They are a fantastic source of criticism and discussion of research.
Use YorSearch, the Library catalogue. Some books will be available as e-books that you can access online from anywhere; look for the View It link in YorSearch..
If you know the name of the journal you need, you can search for it in YorSearch. Most journals can be accessed online by logging in with your University username and password; look for the View It link. Some will also be available in print in the Library.
Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC)
An open consortium of universities, companies and government research laboratories that create, collects and distribute speech and text databases, lexicons, and other resources for research and development purposes. The University of Pennsylvania is the LDC's host institution.
The university has access to corpora from the LDC on DVD/CD or via web downloads. The corpora on DVD/CD are held in the Departments of Computer Science and Language and Linguistic Science. To access the web downloads:
For undergraduates please contact your academic tutor.
For research and taught postgraduates and academic staff: fill in the self-registration form on the LDC website (https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/
Before you use any of the corpora, please make sure that you have read all relevant licensing agreements: http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Membership/Agreements/.
Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse
A collection of Middle English texts was assembled from works contributed by University of Michigan faculty and from texts provided by the Oxford Text Archive, as well as works created specifically for the Corpus by the HTI.
Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME)
A database of books and manuscripts from 1480 to 1702 which document the English language. LEME has an index of over 1,200 lexicons, with 157 of these fully searchable, and contains over half a million entries composed by contemporary speakers of early modern English describing the meaning of words and giving their equivalents in a variety of languages. Included are monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopaedias, glossaries, spelling lists, and other lexically valuable linguistic treatises, encyclopaedic and topical works
Dictionary of Old English Corpus
A complete record of surviving Old English, except for some variant manuscripts of individual texts.
The Library has films in several foreign languages and these are housed in the AV room on the ground floor of the Library Harry Fairhurst building. The AV collection has DVDs, blu rays and VHS formats, as well as CDs and cassettes, but the vast majority of films here are currently in DVD format. You will also find a DVD viewing room that small groups can use (bookable via the Library room booking pages).
To browse films in a particular language there are two options:
1. Search online on YorSearch (the Library catalogue)
2. Browse the shelves
Note: you will not be able to see all the films the Library has by browsing the shelves. Many of the films are out on loan at any one time. Browse the catalogue instead (see above) and you can identify all the titles the Library have and put a reservation on those out on loan so that the people currently using them will get an alert to bring them back for you.
However, if you do want to browse to see what is still on the shelves, go to the AV room on the ground floor of the Library's Harry Fairhurst building, find the DVDs (these start at the farthest end of the room) then locate the classmark LP 4.3098. The classmarks will have extra numbers on the end but all non-English language films begin with LP 4.3098.
Some of these are subscription services (use your UoY username and password) and some are freely available websites.
| Conferences are a place where experts in specialist areas will present on topical issues or first give details of new work before they ever publish a paper on the topic. The papers presented at conferences can be a useful source of information, and helpful when trying to find out who the current experts are in a particular area.
Many papers are freely available on the web whereas others are not made available in this way. If you are new to an area is not always easy to work out which conferences to look for. |
The following sites give information about conferences and allow you to book onto them but via these links you can often also get papers from previous years' conferences.
See also 'Other sources of conference proccedings' below.
Databases such as the LLBA and the other Proquest databases all include some conference proceedings and you can limit your searching to conference proceedings only.
The British Library alerting service, Zetoc, also provides access to some conference papers.
To start a more detailed search for articles and other research evidence, you'll need to use online databases. These are collections of resources that allow you to search for articles from hundreds of different journals at the same time.
Information about theses is available on the main Library website.
All University PhD and MPhil theses are available via YorSearch. Masters theses for some subjects are held in the Library for 6 years.
All York research students registered in or after October 2009 are required to upload their theses into White Rose eTheses Online , a shared online respository for doctoral level theses from the Universities of York, Sheffield and Leeds.
You can also access theses from outside the University: