Why this guide?
The basic principle underlying the organization of any library is to describe the documents it contains so that they may be located. All libraries create sets of records which describe the documents in their collections. Catalogs are sets of records to documents that share a location. Indexes are sets of records to documents that share some other attribute (generally subject matter). Here you will find the most comprehensive and significant article indexing (and corpus) databases for international Italian Studies scholarship.
Library Catalogs
- WorldCat This link opens in a new windowOCLC catalog of millions of records for books, journal titles and materials in other formats from approximately 12,000 libraries worldwide.
[Coverage: 1000 A.D.-present] - Catalogo del Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale This link opens in a new windowThe SBN contains nearly 20 million bibliographic records held across Italian libraries.
- Archivio Collettivo Nazionale dei Periodici (ACNP) This link opens in a new windowThe catalogue originated from the National Union Archive of Periodicals (ACNP) and was born in the 70’s under the initiative of the ISDRDS-CNR. It contains the bibliographic descriptions of periodicals/serials owned by the Italian libraries all over the country and covers all subject areas.
- Karlsruhe Virtueller Katalog (KVK) This link opens in a new windowDer KVK ist eine Meta-Suchmaschine zum Nachweis von mehreren hundert Millionen Büchern, Zeitschriften und anderen Medien in Bibliotheks- und Buchhandelskatalogen weltweit. The Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog is a meta-search engine for locating hundreds of millions of books, periodicals, and other media in library and book trade catalogues throughout the world.
- Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) Project This link opens in a new windowA collective database of all books published in Europe between the invention of printing and the end of the sixteenth century (1450-1700).
- HathiTrust This link opens in a new windowA repository of scanned books contributed from academic institutions across the United States, including UC campuses, and those digitized by Google and the Internet Archive. Books still in copyright are scanned and searchable, but the full text scans will not become available online until their copyright expires. Although there is significant overlap with Google books, this site has a much more effective and sophisticated search interface. For additional details, see the HathiTrust Help Page.
Subject Indexes and Directories
- Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) This link opens in a new windowBASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic open access web resources. BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
- Gale Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window
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Full-text biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from every age and literary discipline. Combines core literary resources such as Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism Select, and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. - MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new windowThe Modern Language Association International Bibliography (MLAIB) covers international scholarly materials on all languages, literatures, linguistics, and folklore from around the world. It includes citations to items from journals, series, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies. MLAIB does not index book reviews.
[Coverage: 1926-present] - L'Année Philologique: Bibliography of the Classical World This link opens in a new windowThis is the major bibliographic index for Classical studies, including art, history, philosophy, literature and more. Use the hard copy edition of the Annee Philologique to search for material published before 1949. It is located at Shields Library Humanities/Social Sciences Reference Z7016.A1 A5
[Coverage: 1949-current] - International Medieval Bibliography (IMB) This link opens in a new windowProvides the most comprehensive, current bibliography of international scholarly literature in Medieval Studies available.
[Coverage: 1967-present; updated quarterly]
Full-Text Archives and Corpora
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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Archive of scholarly journals and ebooks in over 50 disciplines spanning the arts, humanities, social sciences and the sciences. For journals, coverage begins with volume one of each title and continues to within 3 to 5 years of the most current issue, with some up-to-date dependent on the title. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization established with the assistance of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
- Internet Culturale"Il portale Internet Culturale. Cataloghi e collezioni digitali delle biblioteche italiane, affidato alle cure e diretto dall’Istituto centrale per il catalogo unico delle biblioteche italiane ICCU, nasce nelle intenzioni, per creare un accesso unico e integrato al patrimonio delle biblioteche italiane attraverso i Cataloghi e attraverso le Collezioni digitali delle biblioteche."
- TorrossaOpenA Casalini product, TorrossaOpen is an open-access index/catalog to a wide-ranging panorama of research level publications, primarily from Italy and Spain.
- Europeana: Europe's Digital Library This link opens in a new windowDirect access to several million digital objects: film, photos, paintings, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers, and archival papers. Selected from previously digitized resources available in Europe's museums, libraries, archives, and audio-visual collections. French and German cultural institutions are particularly well represented.