For students in Linguistics 319 (Comparative and Historical Linguistics) who are searching for books and articles on a specific language family for your annotated bibliography, here are some tips for finding resources.
The handbooks on different language families in the Reference section of Koerner Library (2nd floor) are a good starting point. We have handbooks on these language families:
To find books on your language family, use the UBC Library catalogue. Try a Subject Heading search for your language family name. Remember to select the option “Subject Heading” instead of the default “keyword”.
You will then see list of Subject headings, along with the number of books we have on that subject (to the left of the Heading). Click a Subject heading to see a list of books and location.
Clicking on “Uralic Languages”, the first link, will turn up 7 books, including:
To find journal articles, you’ll need to take a slightly different approach. We don’t list the contents of each single journal in the library catalogue. The catalogue only lists the titles of the journals, not the contents of each individual issue. To find articles on your topic, you’ll need to use an article index. Then you can check the library catalogue to see if we subscribe to that journal.
The best source for Linguistics articles is an index called Linguistic and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA). This index, along with over 600 others on various topics, can be found in the A-Z list of indexes and databases.
Once you’ve entered the LLBA index, do a search for your language family. The index will return a list of citations that contain your search terms. To find a copy of the article at UBC Library, click the UBCeLink icon and it will search the catalogue for a copy of the journal.
