National Women’s History Month

Celebrate National Women’s History Month by visiting the Literary Reference Center to research your favorite women historians, thinkers, poets, and writers.  Literary Reference Center is an intuitively designed research database with hundreds of reference works, periodicals, and scholarly journals as well as thousands of literary works and information on authors. More than just articles, Literacy Reference Center delivers the following:

  • Literary Criticism

  • Masterplots

  • Reviews

  • Interviews

  • Reference Books

  • Poems and Stories

You’ll be able to quickly sort its impressive breadth of content, as its search results are organized under tabs by resource type (e.g., Biographies, Reviews, Poems/Stories) and can be sorted by Relevance, Title, Date, Source, or Author. You’ll be amazed at just how easy it is to find information! For this month’s search hint, we’ll explore the life and contributions of bell hooks—who spells her name without capitals—a prolific feminist writer and one of America’s leading intellectual figures.

    • Click “Online Databases” on the left navigation menu of our home page.

    • Click “Enter” (remote users will be asked to enter library card number).

    • From the Statewide Databases list, click “EBSCO“; select Literary Reference Center.

    • On the Literary Reference Center home page, type the search term “hooks, bell” then click search.

    • Notice that results are organized under tabs, with the default tab “All Results” showing a total of 79.

    • Click the “Biographies” tab to display biographical essays about bell hooks; note that results include an author biography, while others are book reviews, a book analysis or perhaps even in the form of an interview.

    • If you are strictly interested in reading interviews with bell hooks; click the “Interviews” tab.  Click either HTML Full Text or PDF to read.

    • HINT:  Curious about the visual search function?  Visual Search allows you to search efficiently across broad subjects, and then returns a visual map of results, organized by topic.  Click Visual Search, then click Take Our Tour on the visual search page to learn the basics of how its done!

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