MLA International Bibliography
Fact Sheet
Subject Scope:
·
Literature – from anywhere in the
world, in any language, whether natural or invented (EXCEPTION: works that deal exclusively with classical
Greek and Latin literatures.)
·
Folklore – literature, music, art,
rituals, and belief systems
·
Linguistics – History and theory,
comparative linguistics, semantics, stylistics, syntax, translation
·
Dramatic Arts – film, radio, television,
theater
·
Literary theory and
criticism, including rhetoric
·
Language pedagogy (post-secondary level) –
writing, composition, second language
·
History of printing and
publishing
·
Other subjects, if
connected to any of the above: aesthetics, human behavior,
communication, and information processes
Scholarly Sources Indexed, as they relate to the subject scope:
Print and electronic journal articles
Book series
Books
Articles in books
Dictionaries and encyclopedias
Catalogs
Handbooks
Bibliographies
Indexes
Conference papers and
proceedings
Doctoral dissertations
NOT INDEXED:
Summaries
Literary
works & translations (unless accompanied by a new critical or
bibliographic apparatus or
based on a newly established authoritative text)
Reviews of
literary and scholarly works
Letters to the
editor
Obituary notices
Anthologies for
teaching, syllabi, how-to guides, curriculum guides
Textbooks
Master’s and
senior theses
Languages of indexed sources: most
journals are from the English-speaking world, but publications in over 70 other
languages are also included.
Dates of Coverage:
Indexes materials published from 1926 to the present
Organization—Facets and Contextual Indexing
At first glance, the MLA
International Bibliography looks like any other database you may have
used. However, this bibliography is
structured and maintained differently from any other index. Most indexing and classification schemes used
in the West are based on the notion of hierarchy,
which posits that all knowledge is a unified whole which can then be
progressively subdivided according to systematic and predictable rules. Library of Congress Subject Headings, used in
the catalogs of most college and university libraries, is an example of a
typical hierarchical scheme. Here is the
Library of Congress classification of the book The Secret Life of Puppets, written by scholar Victoria Nelson and
published in 1999:
Science fiction
– History and criticism
Science fiction
– Religious aspects
Puppets in
literature
Yet
hierarchical classification has several weaknesses, especially in regards to
literary research. For example, it
cannot capture relationships between ideas that may be located in separate
divisions of knowledge, and it requires a stable bird’s eye view of a field
when the discipline, in fact, is not static, but quite dynamic. For these reasons, the Modern Language
Association abandoned hierarchical classification in favor of faceted analysis. Faceted analysis assigns attributes
that are independent of one another.
This allows the easy addition of new attributes and offers flexibility
in describing a specific publication.
Here is the MLA faceted classification for The Secret Life of Puppets:
American literature; and
European literature; 1800-1999; fiction; and film; treatment of the
supernatural; soul; relationship to Platonism; Dramatic arts; film; film
genres; science fiction film; and horror film
As you can see, the
MLA classification of this book offers a more complete representation of the
actual content of this book, plus it affords multiple entry points for the
searcher.
Prior to 1981: Semi-faceted indexing was used, but it was
limited to just two or three attributes per publication (this was the
pre-computer era, when space limitations for paper volumes had to be
considered). MLA is now going back and supplementing the indexing for articles
in key journals
Post-1981: A faceted classification scheme is used, now with few
limitations on the number of attributes that can be used for one publication.
Contextual indexing is also used to facilitate the addition of new attributes
to the MLA indexing repertoire.
Types
of facets [examples]:
Required (as applicable):
National literature [American literature]
Time period, in century
increments [1800-1899]
Primary subject
author(s), up to four [Hawthorne,
Nathaniel]
Genre [novel]
Title(s)
of literary works, with year of original publication [The Scarlet Letter, 1850]
Additional descriptors, as
relevant:
Stylistic
or structural features [narrative
technique]
Characters [Dimmesdale,
Arthur (character)]
Themes
[treatment of penitence]
Sources
[sources in Batchellor,
Mary (fl. 1651)]
Influences
[influence on Faulkner, William
(1897-1962)]
Theories
[application of theories of Peirce,
Charles Sanders (1839-1914)]
Movements or trends [realism]
Search Tips:
1. Always use the MLA Advanced Search option. The Basic Search option is of limited
use.
2. Try to use at least one or two of the required facets in your search.
3. Use truncation
whenever possible. The use of
contextual indexing means that there may be multiple terms for the same basic
attribute. Examples:
Wom*n*
will pick up woman, women, woman’s,
women’s
Short stor* will pick up short
story, short stories
4. Make effective use of Boolean operators. When the
attributes are in the same category, such as subject author name, use the same
line: Hawthorne AND Melville. When the attributes are in different
categories, use different lines.
5. You can try to search by the title of an
individual short story or poem. However,
if you get few or no results, try searching by the title of the larger work
that contains the short story or poem.
For example, for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Goodman
Brown,” you could also search for Twice-Told
Tales, since this is the collection that contains that story.
6. MLA includes up to four writers and up to
four literary works per writer in a single entry. If the article or book discusses more than
four writers or more than four works, the indexing will not name them
separately. For example, the MLA entry
for Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender
(ed. Kate Chedgzoy, New York: Palgrave, 2001) does
not include specific plays, although the book does, in fact, contain in-depth
discussions of King Lear, Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Henry V.
If your topic is “feminism and Hamlet,” you would need to do a search of
Shakespeare and feminism, without including Hamlet,
in order to retrieve this book in your results.
7. For works in non-English languages, include
in your search both the original title and the most commonly used English
translation title
8. Remember that the results are ordered not by
relevance, but by chronology (most recently published first). You’ll need to read through the entire
results list. If the list is too
lengthy, try to narrow the search by adding another facet.
9. MLA mostly supplies citations, not full
text.
For
books, essays in books, conference proceedings: follow this path:
SIMONð
For journal articles, follow this
path:
Journal LocatorðILLIAD.
9. When you are having trouble locating the kind
of materials that you need, contact the Humanities Liaison Librarian for help:
Peggy Burge
Collins Library, 117
(253) 879-3512
Last
updated: September 2007