This page is divided into four sections:
The Library of Congress has designated the letter "P" to indicate books about language and literature. Some potentially useful, more specific categories include:
Remember -- Wardman Library's catalog comprises records of books and DVDs held at Wardman Library.
If you know the title or author of the book (or DVD) you're seeking, searching within the catalog is a simple matter -- simply type one or more of these terms in the catalog's search field, where the default search is "Keyword" or use the dropdown menu to select a different search category (in this case, "Title" or "Author").
Finding relevant books (or DVDs) for a topic about which the researcher knows little is slightly more complicated than simply determining whether Wardman Library has a specific item, but following these steps is a good start:
Once you've found one or two books that look promising for your research, an additional way to find similar works is to click on the book's call number, which will place the book in an ascending list of the books around it -- the books with call numbers closest to your book will take up similar subjects.
Researchers should also remember to browse around a book in the stacks. As books are arranged by subject according to LC subject classifications, the books physically closest to a book in which you are interested may be germane to your topic.
Don't panic. If you need a Wardman Library book that has been checked out, or if you can't find books that are relevant to your research interest in the Wardman Library catalog, you should use the LINK+ catalog.
LINK+ is a consortium of over forty public and academic libraries in California and Nevada; the LINK+ catalog is essentially a "super catalog" whose contents comprise the records from the catalogs of all of these libraries. Via LINK+, Whittier College students and faculty can request an item not available in Wardman Library electronically and it will be delivered within two to four days. The service is free, easy, and extremely convenient. The loan period is twenty-one days with one renewal.
The Library of American Civilization (LAC) is a collection of 4,500 books, pamphlets, and periodicals, most of which are out-of-print, that take up "aspects of American life and literature from their beginnings to the outbreak of World War I." Catalogers at the Arnold Bernhard Library at Quinnipac University have linked records from the LAC (which was once available only on a format called "ultrafiche") to the now-digitized versions of these texts. To search, enter your search term in the window at the top of the screen after the jump; to view one of the titles in the LAC, click on the "View this e-book" link associated with each record:
Library of American Civilization (LAC) e-books via the Arnold Bernhard Library
Google Book Search (below), the HathiTrust Digital Library, and the Internet Archive include more than ten million freely accessible e-books, with full-text searching capabilities. Full-text searching means researchers can discover books using key words and phrases within the text, instead of having to rely on titles, authors, or subject terms as in library catalogs.
Many of the books in Google Book Search and the Internet Archive (and especially those with older copyrights) are available online in their entirety; others are partially readable online, but in many cases, relevant pages will be viewable.