EALC 200: Approaches to the Study of East Asian Cultures (BMC/HC) Fall 2024

Identifying and using subject terms

Most books in the the Trico libraries (and beyond) are categorized by their major subject matter. These categories are called subject terms.

The Library of Congress has an official system for categorizing, which means we will often need to find out the specific words they use. This is often not obvious. One way the Oxford Bibliographies can help you is by providing examples of books within one of the categories, which you can then use to find more.

Let's use one of the books from the Oxford Bibliography on "Meiji Painting" as an example.

First, we will need to search for the book in Tripod. Copy and paste the name into the search bar. You can also surround it with quotes. 
Important: note that the version of the book's information you see if you click on the "Find it" button will not show the subject headings!

See if the Trico owns the book. For this, it's not necessary for it to be in Lutnick. It may help to use the Material type > Books filter after you run the search.

If you find the book, click on the title to open the Tripod record for it.

Scroll down and find the Details area. You will see a line titled Subject.

What you see here are the subject terms. Some books have several or even many subject terms, but this book only has one: Art, Japanese -- Meiji period, 1868-1912.

If you click on the subject term phrase, it will automatically use it to run a search for you. Filter the results to get only books.

This gives us 22 search results, so an additional 21 books which focus in some important way on the same or similar topic:

Finding reference sources with Tripod

Tripod      is often the easiest place to begin looking for books, reference or otherwise. (There are also some databases that are useful for this, however.)

Let's say you are looking for a guide to common symbols and themes in Japanese art. You can start by typing "Japanese art symbols" into the first search box you see in Tripod. This is a simple search.

But keep in mind that simple search is often imprecise and often returns far more results than you could reasonably sift through.

Getting better results: filters

After you click on Advanced Search to the right of the search box we used before, you will see a search page with more options to specify what kinds of results we want to see.

• Set the Material Type to Books.
• Set the Start Date to 2000. (Leaving the end date blank allows the most recent results to appear.)

This leads us to what looks like it may be a helpful book, Symbols of Japan: thematic motifs in art and design.

In the next tab, we will look at a case in which you need to make results even more specific, and will give an example of how to use rows and multiple related terms in your search. 

Focusing results with rows, operators, and synonyms

Even though the item we just found does not have these words in the title, many reference books have words like guide, introduction, encyclopedia, handbook, companion, dictionary, or index in theirs. One strategy we might use to look for reference books is to look only for things which have those in the title, as in this example.

Tripod, like many databases, allows us to specify exactly how the words we search for relate to the things we want to see.

• Here we are telling it to show us only items that have these words in the title.
• By putting these words together on a single row and joining them together with OR, we've told Tripod to search for items that have at least one of these words in the title.

We can also tell Tripod to search for different things in different rows.

• In this example, we also searched for these words in the title, but it is also sometimes useful to search in the subject words.
• Note that we used the asterisk * operator with one of the words, which will get Buddhism, Buddhist, and maybe other variations.

In the last row, we told Tripod to look for some words that are either synonyms or at least similar in meaning.

• This is an extremely useful skill for searching in general. If one word does not get you many good results, try to think of another related term, or several related ones as in this example. As you read more about your topic, you will pick up more related terms. 

Specific considerations when searching for East Asian resources

Many databases unfortunately do not (or at least do not yet) support searching with non-Roman scripts. We therefore usually have to search using the romanized form of a word, but because these databases generally do not automatically register the equivalence of different spellings, we may have to tell the search engine to look for multiple forms of what is ultimately the same word. Depending on your topic, it may be helpful to include these multiple forms (or at least some of them).

Here is one example of how your search might be impacted by discrepant romanization. Perhaps you are looking for resources related to the author of the Chinese classic Records of the Grand Historian. Depending on whether you use the pinyin or Wade-Giles systems for romanization, 司馬遷 (Simplified: 司马迁) is Sima Qian (pinyin) or Ssu-ma Ch'ien (Wade-Giles). The Chinese name of The Records of the Grand Historian is Tai shi gong shu or T'ai shih kung shu, also known as the 史記 (史记) Shi ji or Shih chi.

If you were to search only for Sima Qian's name, for example, resources that could be helpful for your research may not appear. One example might be this chapter from the book Ancient China and Its Enemies:

Using Tripod for book reviews

Tripod makes it easy to find reviews of scholarly books. Because it is a master database for Tri-College resources, you will generally be able to find a larger array of reviews than searching in more specific library databases. 

It is good to know about several related strategies you can use to locate reviews, but they begin the same way. First do a simple search with the title of the book or a portion of the title surrounded by quotation marks. For example, use "way of the barbarians"

For this search, you will not see a tremendous number of results, but others may be different. Here you may simply look at the material type classification above the search results. (Usually a book review will have the name of the book being reviewed in its title, but sometimes this is not the case, as when multiple books are being reviewed together.) Some of these will specifically be labeled reviews, but others will be classified as articles. Most of what you see here will be book reviews, with the exception of the actual book itself.

In other cases, it will be helpful to apply search filters. Click on the Material type drop down menu on the left side of the results page and select either Articles or Reviews. The classifications picked up in Tripod are often not completely exact, so even though you are only looking for book reviews, some of these may be classified as articles. This is why it is useful to search in multiple ways.