In person (analogue): The Library Catalog & Its Stacks
If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for (title and/or author), there are several ways you can use the catalog to find books related to your subject. Here are three that you should find useful:
Use a loose keyword search. This is the default search option when you go to the catalog page. A search for “silent French cinema” yields several results, several of which are of interest.
After finding one book of interest, browse the subject headings. Look at the entry for Richard Abel’s The ciné goes to town : French cinema, 1896-1914. If you scroll down past locations, you’ll see a “Subject” section. Click on any of these subjects, and you’ll get taken to a list of nearby subjects. Click around, and you’ll turn up books your keyword search didn’t find. In other words, you’ll get several other books under the subject headings “Motion Pictures — France — History.”
Note that these subject headings have a particular format; instead of “film” or “cinema” or “movies,” the important term is “motion pictures.” To this, you can add nations (e.g. “France”) or more narrow subjects (e.g. “industry,” “censorship,” “political aspects,” “audiences,” etc.). Once you get the hang of this, you can perform your own subject-heading search, but…
Subject headings are a specialized language, a set of terms devised by librarians. They are complicated. If you’d like a helpful list of Subject Headings for film history, consult a Research Guide prepared by a professional librarian. Yale‘s library provides a very helpful list of subject headings (click to access topical pages on things like Animation or Social Aspects), which you can copy & paste to the SBU Catalog search. Along similar lines, UC Berkeley has a helpful collection of Bibliographies on various subjects.
You can also wander the stacks. Once you know how the Call Numbers work, you can get to the shelves that are relevant to your subject. The University of Canterbury provides a very helpful guide to the PN1990s (film-related) shelves.
Online (digital): Stony Brook Library Library of Congress
In person (analogue): The Library Catalog & Its Stacks
If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for (title and/or author), there are several ways you can use the catalog to find books related to your subject. Here are three that you should find useful:Use a loose keyword search. This is the default search option when you go to the catalog page. A search for “silent French cinema” yields several results, several of which are of interest.
After finding one book of interest, browse the subject headings. Look at the entry for Richard Abel’s The ciné goes to town : French cinema, 1896-1914. If you scroll down past locations, you’ll see a “Subject” section. Click on any of these subjects, and you’ll get taken to a list of nearby subjects. Click around, and you’ll turn up books your keyword search didn’t find. In other words, you’ll get several other books under the subject headings “Motion Pictures — France — History.”
Note that these subject headings have a particular format; instead of “film” or “cinema” or “movies,” the important term is “motion pictures.” To this, you can add nations (e.g. “France”) or more narrow subjects (e.g. “industry,” “censorship,” “political aspects,” “audiences,” etc.). Once you get the hang of this, you can perform your own subject-heading search, but…
Subject headings are a specialized language, a set of terms devised by librarians. They are complicated. If you’d like a helpful list of Subject Headings for film history, consult a Research Guide prepared by a professional librarian. Yale‘s library provides a very helpful list of subject headings (click to access topical pages on things like Animation or Social Aspects), which you can copy & paste to the SBU Catalog search. Along similar lines, UC Berkeley has a helpful collection of Bibliographies on various subjects.
You can also wander the stacks. Once you know how the Call Numbers work, you can get to the shelves that are relevant to your subject. The University of Canterbury provides a very helpful guide to the PN1990s (film-related) shelves.