May 10 - Wednesday 1:00 - 4:30 PM
May 24 - Wednesday 1:00 - 4:30 PM
Facilitators
Ellen Caldwell, Professor of Art History
ellen.caldwell@mtsac.edu
Eva Rios-Alvarado, Librarian
eriosalvarado@mtsac.edu
Esteban Aguilar, Librarian
eaguilar100@mtsac.edu
Michael Emery, Librarian
memery2@mtsac.edu
Wikipedia Links
Wikipedia's Create an Account Page
Art+Feminism Links
While search the internet using a search engine like Google and DuckDuckGo can be a great place to look for information, the Mt. SAC Library gives you access to resources that will be seen as more reliable on Wikipedia: journals and scholarly articles, newspapers, and books that might not be available via Google.
As a Mt. SAC student, you have access to these resources even from off campus using your portal username and password.
Also, check out the advanced search tips below to get some ideas on how to better focus your search.
If you have questions: please visit us in the Library during the Libraries open hours, schedule a research appointment either in person or online, and always remember Mt. SAC Library is available online 24/7.
Journal Articles
Articles from journals and magazines are also a great resource. Often a great place to start are the general/multi-topic databases which search journals and magazines on a variety of topics. Specific databases to try are:
The Mt. SAC Library also has several art databases that are great for art, but might not cover the particular artists that are the focus of Art+Feminism. Some specific databases you might want to try include:
Newspapers
Newspapers can be a great resource. In particular, newspapers often have articles often contain information on artists in local arts sections.
Also try:
Books
Books are credible resources, but finding information about artists in marginalized communities in a book can be a challenge.
You can start with searching for books on the library home page.
If you want to focus on eBooks you can also directly search two of the library book databases:
Exact Phrase Searching
If you are having a hard time finding your person (or topic) because too many articles that are not related are coming up, you can try enclosing the name of the person you are searching for in quotes: "artist name." This exact phrase search will then only bring back results that have that exact set of letters in that order.
In other words, putting a person's name in quotes only finds results where the first and last name are together, instead of results where the first name shows up one place and the last name shows up in a different part of the article. However, if your artist goes by alternative names (or alternative spellings of a name) you might have to search a couple different ways.
Using exact phrase searching like this can also be useful when you are searching Google and other search engines.
"Not this" searching
Internet Searching
If you are getting lots of results you don't want or can't use, you can try telling the search engine you don't want to include certain results. On Google you can try to limit your search using a minus sign "-" with no space in front of the thing you don't want.
For example, if you want pictures of trees on Googles image search and don't want any pictures of oak trees, you could search: tree -oak
This would, in theory give you pictures of trees, but not oak trees.
This is only as good as the descriptions (if someone says an oak tree is a elm tree, it's still going to show up), and also, Google doesn't share the "not" with it's advertisers, so you'll see ads for oak trees.
Library Searching
Most library databases will expect you to use the word "not" (with a space).
In a library database, you could search Margaret Atwood NOT handmaid if you were interested in Atwood, but not articles on The Handmaid's Tale. The difficulty here is that an article that mentions she wrote The Handmaid's Tale but isn't about it, might also get excluded from search results.
The "not" or "-" feature is a useful tool, but a blunt one.
Other tools:
If you are not able to find the information you need: