DANC 100: Introduction to Dance History (Koper)

Welcome!

This guide is for students in Susan Koper's DANC 100.

For your final project on a dancer or choreographer, you must use library resources as you do your research, thereby ensuring you find credible, reliable sources.

I recommend that you use OneSearch, our library discovery tool, for your research.  It's efficient, and you will find it useful for your other classes, too.  Find it on our libraries' homepage.

But the Libraries also subscribe to a database of curated, high-quality dance videos called Dance Online: Dance in Video.  It's a reliable source of visual sources on your field.

This guide covers:

• Source requirements for your project
• Quotations marks for searching phrases
• A demonstration of using OneSearch to find scholarly articles and books
• Requesting a chapter of a book through Interlibrary Loan
• An introduction to using Dance Online: Dance in Video
• Resources for using MLA citation style

IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS as you're doing research:

• If you need quick, immediate help: Use the Chat or Call options on the Ask a Librarian page.
• If you have a little time or a more intricate question: Email me (Susan Taylor at setaylor@bsu.edu), describing your topic and what you're having trouble with.  I'll write you back as soon as I can.

There are really lots of ways you can get help, even though the physical library building is closed.  Just reach out!

Your instructor requires that you find at least three sources for your research, including:

• a book
• a scholarly article
• an online source

As you research your dancer or choreographer, it's helpful is to use quotation marks around phrases or names of two or more words.  This tells the database to search for those terms glued together. 

Some search examples below.  (Note that capitalization is not important):

• "merce cunningham"
• "martha graham dance company"

Because you're searching a large number of databases at the same time when you do a search in OneSearch, you will get a wide variety of results.  Some will be books (in our physical library), many will be articles (found through our article databases).

If I'm searching on the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, I could type my search into the OneSearch box like this:

I find many, many results.  Some are items I'd have to come to the library and checkout.  Since that's not a possibility, let's limit to full-text sources.

To limit your results to full-text sources:

Look on the left-hand side, under REFINE YOUR SEARCH, and click the "Full Text Online" link.  This will limit your results to those articles, books or book chapters which can be read in their entirety online.

To limit your results by content type:

For your project, you'll want to focus on books and scholarly articles.  I'd recommend looking at them one at a time.

Look on the left under CONTENT TYPE, and choose the format you're interested in.

To learn more about your results:

I can click on the "Preview" link to get more information about a particular title.  Often it will provide me with the abstract, which helps me get an idea of what the article is about.

To get to the full article or the full ebook:

Either click on the article title or the "Full Text Online" link.

• Sometimes it will take you directly to the article/ebook.
• Sometimes you maybe be brought to another OneSearch page (like this one), where you need to click on a link under "View Online."

Bear in mind that in order to find the sources that work best for your project, you'll likely have to read through a bunch of records.

To find more books:

When we checked the "Full-Text Online" option at the beginning of our search, we vastly reduced the number of books we'd find.

Because the library is still closed, you cannot check out books in print.  However, you CAN ask that we scan a chapter or two of a book we own.

To search our whole book collection, un-check the Full Text Online option, and check the Book/eBook option, as shown here -->

Now you'll have more records to look through.

When you find a book you like, follow the steps below to get scanned copies of some chapters of the book.  Please note the this takes time!

During this time when isolation or quarantine can limit our visits to Bracken Library, it's good to know that the library collection can still be accessed.

You can request scanned document delivery of book chapters through the use of Interlibrary Loan (ILL).  While you cannot request that we scan an entire book for you (due to copyright restrictions), you can request one or two chapters as long as the pages add up to less than 15% of the book's content.

Here's an example of how you might do that.  Imagine you'd found this book in OneSearch:

To find more out about the book title, click on the "Look Inside" link.  A pop-up window will open, showing the Table of Contents, as we see here:

At this point, note down which one or two chapters look the most useful.  Perhaps you'd have decided you want the first chapter, and Chapter 11 about modernism.  In order to request those, first close the pop-up window, and then:

Click on the book title, to bring up the full OneSearch record.

Click on the "Request the item with Interlibrary Loan" link towards the bottom of the record to place a request for a scan of a couple chapters from the book.

A window will open up, asking you to log in with your BSU username and password.

• If you're new to using Interlibrary Loan, you'll have to fill in a brief form with your contact information.

Then you'll see a form like this one below:

Much of the form is already filled out, with the identifying information about the book. 

You just need to fill out:

• the Chapter Title field -- with the one or two chapters you'd like scanned.  It's okay to just specify the chapter numbers.
• the Preferred By Date field -- with the date you'd prefer to have the scans by.  Bear in mind library staff have to physically scan the books. (i.e. It will take some time.)  As a general rule of thumb: add two days to today's date if you want it very soon.
• the Notes field -- note again the chapters you want.  Adding a "please" is optional, but nice.

Then scroll down and click the Submit Request button.    You will get an email when the scanned chapters are ready, with a link to the scans.

Special things to consider:

• Not all book records in OneSearch have a Look Inside link with the table of contents.  In that case, you can either:
  • See if you can find a table of contents for your book online by Googling the title, OR
  • Type "Please send me the Table of Contents" in the notes field of the Interlibrary Loan request, and a scan of the table of contents will be send to you so that you can choose the chapters you want.
• Remember that copyright restrictions make it impossible for us to scan the entire book and send it to you.  We are limited to scanning less than 15% of the book's pages.

Questions?  Use the Ask a Librarian page to get help!

Tips for using Dance Online: Dance in Video

To search by a topic or by a name, type your words into the search box in the upper-right hand corner, and hit Enter.

Then, if you'd like to place limits on your search, to be more specific about the sort of video you're interested in, click on "Filter your results" or the funnel icon.

For example, I may want to limit to videos including performance and some discussion of Martha Graham, as shown here:

When you click on a filter choice, your results will be adjusted.  You may place several filters; but do understand that you'll find fewer and fewer results as you place more filters.

To watch a certain video, click on the video's title, and a new window will open up and the video will start in full screen.

To see more about the video, use the links at the top of the screen.

Especially helpful is the "Cite" option, which allows you to easily get a sample citation for the video in MLA or APA format.