Woman reading. 1834. Illustrated book (pictures with verse). New York Public Library Digital Collections. Spencer Collection, Kyôka ekyôdai. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-d5ac-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
When choosing a research topic, it's helpful to start with a source that gives you a relatively broad overview of that area.
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Just entering some keywords in the top right search box will generally provide relevant results:
You can choose from a list of topics covered in Oxford Bibliographies by clicking on the Browse by Subject button near the top left:
You will notice that only Chinese Studies has its own area here. You would need to look for topic bibliographies relating to Japan and Korea within their broader, non-geographical categories, for example, Art History or Cinema and Media Studies.
The sources listed in Oxford Bibliographies come with a link to help you find them. Under the name and description of a source, it will say [+] Find this resource. When you click on that, a Find it button appears. Clicking that will take you to Tripod, the system which holds records for the library's books, journals, articles, media, and most everything else.
Click on Accessing resources on the left side of the guide for more information about how to get to books, articles, and other items. Sometimes this can be complicated.
To find certain topics in Oxford Bibliographies, especially those related to Japan or Korea, you may need to search a bit more creatively, or more specifically.
If you are interested in a topic within Japanese art, you will have difficulty finding a general entry just titled "Japanese art." But if what got you interested in the topic was an image of the Buddha in Japan, you can try using the Advanced Search tool to find a bibliography closer to that more particular topic.
To get there, first click on the Advanced Search link just above the simple search box in the top right corner. Skim down the search options page until you see the Show Results From area. Think about where a relevant entry might be among these subjects. Two good options might be Art History and Buddhism, but let's just select Art History first:
Now that you are searching only within Art History, think about which words you should give the search engine to look for inside there. Do you need to put in art? Probably not. But you do need words that limit your results to Japan and the Buddha, so put those into the text boxes toward the top of the page and click Search at the bottom.
A more advanced trick you may use here is to get the search engine to search for two related words. For this search, you might want to put in Japan OR Japanese on one line, and Buddha OR Buddhism OR Buddhist on another, and link those two sets of words together with an AND:
There is another more convenient way to search for variations on words like Japan and Buddhism. Most search engines, including the other library databases you will use, allow you to use an asterisk * to search for these all at once. Instead of writing out buddha OR buddhism OR buddhist, we can just type in the part of the word they share with the asterisk after:
Searching with the asterisk * is particularly useful when there are many variations on a word that might come up in our searches, including ones we didn't think of.
With the asterisks placed where they are in our two search words, we might also see results with the terms Japanification, Japanization, Buddhification, Buddhic, Buddhistic, and so on.
You can quickly see what is included and discussed in a particular Oxford Bibliography by looking at the linked headings in the left side menu (bracketed in the screenshot).
The first thing you will see opening an Oxford Bibliography is its Introduction. This orients you by way of a relatively brief, encyclopedia entry-like overview of the topic, providing a general context for the specific information you will find below. Oftentimes this will consist in a pertinent general history or very brief discussion of important issues or problems (including, for example, discussion of the history of the scholarly research about that topic, which is sometimes very important for understanding current developments) you should be familiar with before going further in learning about the topic.
As bibliographies, the bulk of most or all entries in this database will be an annotated list of recommended resources. In the example bibliography on Korean cinema above, the very next section is a list of Reference Sources. While most Oxford Bibliographies will tend to direct you to scholarly resources you would access primarily through your college's library, there are special cases where it is most helpful to feature things that are not strictly scholarly. In this example, the reference items are mostly websites such as the Korean counterpart to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). These are effectively like "dictionaries" in many ways for Korean cinema, since you might refer to them to get general descriptions or facts about certain actors, directors, or films.
Notice that this particular bibliography also gives you general contextual information about the reference sources it will cite. In this relatively special case, the bibliography is pointing us toward websites and databases which are not strictly scholarly. This is a good example of the importance of reading the introduction, as it explains why this is.
Eventually, the bibliography will move on to provide introductions for and sources related to various important topics within the larger topic or subject area. Being about Korean cinema, this bibliography has sections devoted to specific movements, periods, trends, directors, and so on, moving in the same general pattern.
