Spanish Subject Guide
Humanities Liaison Librarian
- Steve Lawson
- Tutt Library Room 173
- (in the Learning Commons,
off the Map Room) - (719) 389-6857
- Email me or Chat with me now
Dictionaries and Grammar
You will find many Spanish-English dictionaries in the call numbers that begin PC4640. Newer, more comprehensive dictionaries are kept in the non-circulating reference collection on the first floor, but there are some dictionaries available in the circulating collection in the north basement as well. You will also find books on the Spanish language and grammar nearby in the PC4000s.
Finding Books
Browsing
See above for finding dictionaries and other books about the Spanish language.
You will find Spanish-language literature in the PQ6000 – PQ8999 range. This includes literature from all Spanish-speaking countries and translations of those works as well. So you will find, for example, Cien años de soledad on the shelf next to One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Searching
An advanced keyword search of the TIGER catalog will allow you to limit your results to Spanish-language materials with the “language” drop-down menu.
Reminder: When searching for materials in Spanish, the title and table of contents (if present) are likely to be in Spanish, but the subject headings and other descriptive information will be in English. See the TIGER record for Hacia un saber sobre el alma for an example.
Finding News
You can use LEXIS-NEXIS Academic Universe to find Spanish-language news by clicking “News” in the menu bar near the top of the home page, then choosing “Spanish Language News, Combined” from the “Sources” drop-down menu. Remember to use Spanish words in your search, and double-check the “date” menu as well, as the default search is for recent news.
Try the MIT Libraries’ page of links to Spanish-language news and magazines for free news sites on the web.
Finding Articles
When searching for articles, the database you choose will depend on your specific area of study. For literary studies, MLA International Bibliography will be the best database most of the time, while the Chicano Database is very useful, but only for Chicano studies.
If your research is more about culture or politics, you will want to try Social Sciences Abstracts or see the research guides for Political Science, Sociology, or other subjects.
Again, remember to search English and Spanish terms. If you are searching only for articles in Spanish, use the “advanced search” screens and look for a “language” option where you can choose “Spanish.”
Full list of databases for Spanish language and literature
- Chicano Database
- Coverage: 1960s - current
- Interdisciplinary database, indexing all types of materials for Chicano studies (journal articles, books, chapters, and newspaper articles).
- Contemporary Authors
- Coverage: current
- A bio-bibliographical guide to current writers in Nonfictions, etc. Complete biographical and references for more than 90,000 authors in the U.S.
- Historical Abstracts
- Coverage: 1967 - current
- Covers world history.
- Humanities International Complete
- Coverage: 1929 - current
- A comprehensive humanities database, with almost 500 full text titles and indexing and abstracting for more than 1,700 titles. Subject areas include (but are not limited to) literature, philosophy, the arts, history, culture-oriented and multi-disciplinary humanities titles with some coverage going back as far as 1929. This database replaces Humanities Abstracts.
- Latin American Newspapers
- Coverage: 1805 - 1922
- More than 35 fully searchable newspapers published in the 19th and early 20th centuries from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela and elsewhere.
- Literary Index
- Coverage: current
- Master index to every literary series published by Gale Research Inc. Combines and cross-references author names, including pseudonyms and variant names, and titles into one source.
- MLA International Bibliography
- Coverage: 1963 - current
- Literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore from over journals and series published worldwide.
- Oxford Language Dictionaries Online
- Bilingual online dictionaries for Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. Also features audio pronunciation guides, grammatical notes, and much more.
Online journal archives
Unlike the subject-specific article databases, these online journal archives don’t concentrate on any one academic subject. Instead, they take leading journals from many fields, or all the journals from one publisher, and provide extensive archives of the full text of those journals online, usually in the form of PDF files.
Blackwell Journals- Coverage: varies; usually late 1990's to current
- Searchable collection of full text periodicals. Scholarly sources.
- JSTOR
- Coverage: late 1800's - most recent 0-5 years
- Archival access to many scholarly periodicals. Some titles include current issues while others have a moving wall imposed on them.
- Oxford University Press Journals
- Coverage: varies; usually late 1990's - current
- A searchable collection of full text periodicals. Scholarly sources.
Periodicals Archive Online- Coverage: 1665-2000
- Online periodical archive containing the digitized backfiles of periodicals in the humanities and social sciences.
- Project Muse
- Coverage: varies
- Project Muse Standard Collection of core scholarly titles from John Hopkins University. Offers current and back issues. Please note: we do not subscribe to the Premium Collection. We have access to most, but not all, Project Muse titles.