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Brooks Library Research Guides: World Languages
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A series of guides for over 270 countries and territories. These include features, demographics, geography data, interactive world maps, satellite photos, scrollable city images, and links to resources about each country within the Intute database. You can even compare data between countries. You may go straight to the entry for a specific country via the dropdown menu, or you can search for satellite images and features by keyword.
This title now includes over 775 maps, with locator, physical and political maps for each country, over 120 island maps, state maps for North America, Canada, and Mexico, and more than 100 city maps. It is part of a suite of reference materials available through the subscription database Oxford Reference Online. The database is available in full from the CWU library's homepage under "Research" -- "Databases by Title".
For digital collections of original maps, see also the research guide section "Images Online & in Databases".
This site, operated by the Biography Channel, contains tens of thousands of biographies, some quite detailed. Biographical video and short biographical video clips are also available. There is also a page with examples of how to properly cite this site.
The free MDBG online Chinese-language learning site includes a powerful online Chinese-English dictionary that accepts English, pinyin (transliterated Roman), and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters (to search using Pinyin directly from the main search box enter the prefix “p:” before entering the Pinyin). Dictionary search results feature audio pronunciation, Pinyin, Simplified and Traditional Chinese versions, radicals, stroke order, and links to online flash cards that you can flip through to learn new characters. There are also advanced search options allowing the inclusion or exclusion of certain characters from search results, and also searching in Pinyin.
The character dictionary contains information about single Chinese characters. Each entry in the character dictionary consists of a Chinese character, radical / stroke count, English definition, Mandarin pinyin pronunciation, Yale & Jyutping Cantonese pronunciation, simplified / traditional variants and cangjie. The radical table contains both traditional and simplified radicals (some radicals appear multiple times due to different stroke count of variants). Included is a tool for translating a short text fragment from English to Chinese or the other way around. (Only Chinese characters are accepted for translations from Chinese to English, Mandarin pinyin is not supported – but individual pinyin words can be translated elsewhere on the site). In addition to translating the text, a word dictionary lookup is also performed to help you to verify if the translation is correct. (And a tool to convert the digital encoding of Chinese Characters.)
The practice section of MDBG has three features: Web Feeds, Character Quizzes, and Flash Cards. The Flash Cards feature allows the automatic creation of cards from a passage of text, or you can use the standard HSK word lists. The Character Quiz section of MDBG displays a list of words one at a time, first testing your pronunciation and then testing if you know the meaning of the word – if you have lists of words to learn for an exam then this is an essential tool. The Vocabulary Web Feed delivers Chinese vocabulary daily. A 'mobile device' version of this site is also available.
Housed within the CWU subscription to Oxford Reference Online, the site features concise bilingual dictionaries and related links to world wide web pages covering aspects of the countries whose languages are represented in the Oxford series. Featured languages include French, Spanish, German, Irish, Italian, Latin and Welsh.
Print Location: Ref P 29 C65 1985
Definitions range from a few sentences to one page for such subjects as Intonation, Glottochronology, and Phrasal Verb.
Print Location: Ref P 29 I58 1992
Covers in a couple paragraphs such topics as East Indo-Aryan Languages, Phonemic Systems, Bilingualism, Aramaic, and Cuneiform.
Oxford Reference Online, with over 2 million entries, many of which are illustrated, is a superb cross-searchable resource to use when you are at the 'looking for a clue' or 'needing verification' stages of your research. Oxford Reference provides quality, up-to-date reference content from its extensive series of well-respected books - and unlike Wikipedia you can cite Oxford Reference in a paper!
The Quick Reference materials include information on many Subjects, a series of informative Timelines, a wide variety of Quotations, as well as English Dictionaries, and Bilingual Dictionaries.
The Reference Library is divided into Subject Categories, drawn from the 308 volumes of the Oxford Reference Library. Those categories are:
at this link, and by contacting your friendly neighborhood Brooks Library Librarians.
Notes: The Search Box is in the upper right corner of each Oxford Reference page, with additional options on the left-side and in the center of the page before you scroll down. Most Oxford Reference results pages are scrollable lists of information, and scrolling is worth doing.
There is also an Advanced Search available.
To cite an entry click on the individual entry, the Citation Tool is now visible - it is the 'little pencil' to the right and above the entry that you wish to cite.
Cattrax is the online catalog that describes nearly all the materials held by the Brooks Library: books, government documents, maps, microforms, journals, and other items. Below is everything you might want to know about how to use Cattrax - but all you need to know to start searching is summarized in the numbered items and note directly below:
Using Cattrax to find an item in the Brooks Library:
1. Enter a search term – a word, a phrase, whatever – in the search box.
2. Use the drop-down menu to select whether you wish to do a keyword/word search, a title search, a subject search, an author search, or one of the other options. Click 'Search'.
3. Results that are 'relevant' to the search term that you used will be retrieved. Examine the results. Repeat steps 1 through 3 as needed.
*** Note: Information is often described in several different ways; you may need to try a variety of terms before you find ones that provide you with the information you are looking for. And spelling counts.***
More Information about Cattrax:
You can sort the results by 'relevance', date or by title, by clicking on those words below the Search Box.
Click on a title to see a detailed bibliographic record about that title. The ‘bib record’ will contain a variety of additional information about the book: the author, location, call number, often a summary, status, subject terms, etc. Any and all of that information can be important clues.
The ‘bib record’ will also have a link to a location map, two ways to send the information to your mobile phone, a citation tool, and will often have book cover images.
You can also save the ‘bib record’ to either ‘My Lists’ (requires you to use your ‘Library Log-in’) or you can ‘Save to Bag’ and remember to email, save, or print the resulting list of titles before you finish your session with Cattrax.
Once you have saved the useful results of your first search you can perform more searches – perhaps starting by opening the author link, the subject terms (towards the bottom of the ‘bib record’), or the 'Call #', in a new browser tab, or using the search box to start a totally new search using what you have learned so far from your search.
(Note: the books are in Call Number order on the shelves and clicking on the "Call #" will display a list of books in something like 'shelf order', which can help you find some good ideas for searching Cattrax. It is also a good idea to look on the shelves, discovery happens in many ways.)
When you finish your session with Cattrax remember to email, save, or print the ‘Save to Bag’ list of items that you found.
Additional Cattrax Information:
- Note: the “Request” service located in the upper left of a 'bib record' page is only available for Center Campus Students. This is because the Center Campus Students would need to use more than the stairs or the elevator to get the book from the Brooks Library. (If you are a Main Campus student wishing to check out a book in a Center Library please consult the Circulation Desk.)
- The ‘Modify Search’ link at the top of any Cattrax page is almost the same as the ‘Advanced Search’ option. The ‘Modify Search’ option is very useful for narrowing down your list of results. The "Limit/Sort Search" option is a way to narrow your Subject, Author, or Title search results.
- If you have the citation for an article you can select Journal/Serial Title to find out what kind of access (print/digital, which issues/years) we have to a particular journal. We often have access to a journal through more than one database. If you do not succeed in locating the journal or article that you need please consult one of our charming Brooks Library Librarians, or submit a request to our very resourceful Interlibrary Loan Department.
- If your professor said that something you needed to read was 'on Reserve' (the professor may have said 'in the library' or something else roughly equivalent) you can check our Reserved List by searching in Cattrax by course name or by the professor's name.
- Last, but certainly not least, if what you are looking for is not available in Cattrax try repeating your searches in Summit. Summit enables you to search the catalogs of 37 academic libraries in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and request materials owned by those libraries; a courier service provides near-daily delivery of library materials here to Central Washington University.
- Summit Notes: There is usually a three to five day interval between your making a request and receiving the book, DVD, or other item. Summit is part of Worldcat. Each result will have a notation "Libraries that own this item:". Items owned by a Summit member library can be requested by clicking the purple 'Request Summit Item' button. Items owned by a Worldcat Library will need to be requested through Interlibrary Loan.
The book collection is shelved on the 3rd (A-J) and 4th (K-Z) floors of the main campus library and shelved by Library of Congress subject classification. The Government Documents, Maps, and Microforms are on the 3rd floor. The Music Library is on the 4th floor. Our physical journal, magazine, and serials collection is on the 2nd floor. DVDs, video tapes and films are on the 1st floor. Children's Books are on the 4th floor. Cattrax also contains links to a variety of e-books, and links to digital materials located elsewhere.
Summit is the unified library catalog of 37 universities, colleges, and community colleges in the Pacific Northwest. Through Summit you have access to over 9.2 million distinct books, CD’s, DVD’s, and more (that the Summit unified collection is over 28.7 million items virtually assures you of access to a copy of what you want or need). The unified catalog enables you to find with a single search books and other items at any of the 37 member libraries.
(Note: It generally takes between three and five days for a physical item to be sent from one Summit Library to another so please plan ahead.)
In addition to Books, CD’s, DVD’s the Summit Catalog is also one of the many ways that you can locate useful journal articles. In order to find an article through Summit, type a keyword, a subject, or an article title in the Search Box near the top of the Summit page (an ‘Advanced Search’ is also available). Select the “Full text articles” box (next to the Search Box or on the left side of the page). The Results List will be initially sorted by ‘Library & Relevance’, but you can also sort by Author, Title, and Date. Click the title link of the article or the “View Now” or “View Full Text” link to see more of the article and then download a pdf of it. (You can also click “Find It @ Your Library”, select ‘Central Washington University’ and find out what access we have to that article here.)
If the article, book, DVD, CD, etc. that you wish or need to acquire appears to not be available through Summit please consult one of our talented Help Desk Librarians. It is quite possible that we have access to the article through one of our other databases, or that the book, article, etc., can be gotten through Interlibrary Loan.
WorldCat is an essential service run by the imaginatively named Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). OCLC is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs.
WorldCat aspires to be a library catalog for the entire world; it contains all the records cataloged by the more than 72,000 OCLC member libraries around the world. WorldCat offers millions of bibliographic records and includes records in 400 languages.
The more than 179 million records cataloged by OCLC member libraries include books, manuscripts, websites and internet resources, maps, computer programs, musical scores, films, slides, videotapes, DVDs, newspapers, journals and magazines, sound recordings, articles, chapters, and papers. The dates covered in WorldCat range from before 1000 BCE to literally earlier today.
The Basic Search is useful when you know precisely what you are looking for. The Advanced Search is the default search and works well for most everyone. There is also an Expert Search available in which you can write your own Boolean Search Expressions.
Assistance is available from WorldCat at this link, and from Brooks Librarians at this link.
The Brooks Library has permanent access to 3037 digital books from the EBSCO eBook Collection. EBSCO eBooks are digital full-text versions of books in the areas of:
You can copy and paste from these ebooks, you can access them from off-campus, and you can save portions of them as a pdf.
The World News (WN) Network was founded with the goal of being the most comprehensive, one-stop news resource on the Internet. Currently World News has over 130 million pages indexed covering news about, among many other topics, Film, Sport, Entertainment, Science, Business, Health and every Region on Earth.
World News Network presents news from more than 1000 reputable sources including mainstream providers (BBC, CNN, Reuters, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, etcetera) and more regional and local sources (The Independent, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Times of India, etcetera). This aggregation from other sites provides a wide variety of perspectives and different interpretations of breaking news events.
Information is available in two ways through the WN site. News links that open in a new tab go directly to the headlined article on its original site. Links that open in the same tab provide you with a link to the article on its original site, there are also links to the left and elsewhere on the page to information that helps you put the news article in context, as well as links to other version of the story or to related stories.
Finding Scholarly Journal Articles
A scholarly, multi-disciplinary database containing more than 5,300 full-text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed, scholarly journals, and with indexing and abstracting for more than 9,300 journals. Academic Search Complete is an EBSCO database, and like most EBSCO databases it includes a "Choose Databases" link near the top of the page that enables you to search multiple EBSCO databases at the same time (an EBSCO multi-disciplinary database that is good to search at the same time as ASC is "MasterFILE Premier").
If the article whose title and abstract you found is not available in the Academic Search Complete database try clicking on "Search for Full Text". If that option does not provide you with the full-text of the article please consult a librarian or submit an Interlibrary Loan Request. Many articles are readily available in another database or through Interlibrary Loan and we are here to help you get the information you need!
eHRAF World Cultures – the digital version of the Human Relations Area Files – is a cross-cultural database that contains more than 350,000 pages of descriptive information on cultures, diversity and ethnic groups of the world. The annually-growing eHRAF database is unique in that the information is organized by cultures and ethnic groups and the full-text sources are subject-indexed at the paragraph level. The diversity of information includes full-text books, journal articles, and dissertations.
This database supports CWU curricula across a variety of disciplines -- anthropology, social studies, history, sociology, geography, language, multicultural studies, political science, human development, arts, and medicine - if you are in one of these programs this database will be your friend!
Please ask the Reference Help Desk, 1st Floor Brooks Library or (509) 963-1021 for aid in searching this resource, and / or try the tutorial materials available from the homepage of eHRAF (look under "Using HRAF" on the left) or at this link.
Project MUSE contains scholarly journals from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies. Currently MUSE includes: 274,848 articles and 479,457 chapters by 199 publishers, and probably has some useful information about your topic.
The Brooks Library has a partial subscription to Project MUSE, thus some items are available to you in Project MUSE and some items are only available elsewhere. You can do a Journal Title Search, a Book Title Search, a Summit Search, a Google Scholar Search, or contact the Reference Desk to access a fulltext copy of any citations that might be unavailable in Project MUSE.
Project MUSE can be searched by Keyword (options for narrowing your search will be to the left of your results), browsed by Research Area, by All Title, by Publisher, by Book Title, and by Journal Title. An option for displaying "Only content I have full access to" is usually available, but since we often have access to that content through another database, Summit, or Interlibrary Loan, you should probably search Project MUSE both ways.
Summit is the unified library catalog of 37 universities, colleges, and community colleges in the Pacific Northwest. Through Summit you have access to over 9.2 million distinct books, CD’s, DVD’s, and more (that the Summit unified collection is over 28.7 million items virtually assures you of access to a copy of what you want or need). The unified catalog enables you to find with a single search books and other items at any of the 37 member libraries.
(Note: It generally takes between three and five days for a physical item to be sent from one Summit Library to another so please plan ahead.)
In addition to Books, CD’s, DVD’s the Summit Catalog is also one of the many ways that you can locate useful journal articles. In order to find an article through Summit, type a keyword, a subject, or an article title in the Search Box near the top of the Summit page (an ‘Advanced Search’ is also available). Select the “Full text articles” box (next to the Search Box or on the left side of the page). The Results List will be initially sorted by ‘Library & Relevance’, but you can also sort by Author, Title, and Date. Click the title link of the article or the “View Now” or “View Full Text” link to see more of the article and then download a pdf of it. (You can also click “Find It @ Your Library”, select ‘Central Washington University’ and find out what access we have to that article here.)
If the article, book, DVD, CD, etc. that you wish or need to acquire appears to not be available through Summit please consult one of our talented Help Desk Librarians. It is quite possible that we have access to the article through one of our other databases, or that the book, article, etc., can be gotten through Interlibrary Loan.
The Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC) provides this index of more than 27,000,000 of the articles published since 1990. The articles are from over 16,000 journals, covering nearly all fields of knowledge. The items indexed include every article, news story, letter, or other item listed on the table of contents page of the journal. This database also provides, for most items, a list of libraries that have the journal title – information that makes finding the article in the Brooks Library Collection, or through Interlibrary Loan, much easier.
Please ask the Reference Help Desk, on the 1st Floor of the Brooks Library, or at (509) 963-1021, for any assistance you might wish in searching this index or searching for citations found in the index.
As of 10/19/2012 this on-line version of the Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS) contains 787,165 records on all subjects (especially in the humanities and social sciences) pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia, published worldwide from 1971 to the present. New records are added frequently. This online BAS includes the full data of all of the printed volumes of the BAS as well as entries compiled since 1997. The most important 100+ periodicals in Asian Studies, as identified by the BAS staff, are indexed as immediately as possible, but the total number of indexed journals is many times that amount; full information about the years of coverage of each and every journal is provided through the Journal Title Browse function. In addition, various special projects have contributed substantial numbers of additional records to the database (among them journals on Southeast Asia dating as far back as 1779).
This is an index only. To locate resources from this index, search the CWU Library Catalog and Summit for the book or journal title. Please ask the Reference Help Desk, 1st Floor Brooks Library or (509) 963-1021 for aid in searching this index or searching for citations found in the index.
Contains complete bibliographic citations to articles, book reviews, documents, original literary works, and other materials appearing in more than 400 key social science and humanities journals published throughout the world about Central and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean basin, the United States-Mexico border region, and Hispanics in the United States since 1970. HAPI citations are in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and other languages.
The PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) International database covers a wide range of current and past public policy issues, emphasizing factual and statistical information. Business topics are covered, with emphasis on economic factors, industry surveys, business-societal interactions and similar issues, rather than details of business operations.
The PAIS International database is continually updated with information about over half a million journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, grey literature, research reports, conference papers, web content, and more from over 120 countries throughout the world. (Newspapers and newsletters are not usually indexed.) A useful 'Advanced Search' is available, as well as a way to search for Figures & Tables.
PAIS is an index, it does not contain the full text of articles – but you do not care about that until you find a citation for an article you would like to read. When you find citations for possibly useful articles you can search for the full text by doing a Journal Title Search. You can also search for a full text copy through Google Scholar. As always more assistance in acquiring the full text of an article is available at the Reference Desk.
Note: The PAIS database is provided to us by Proquest. In the upper left corner of the PAIS search page there is a link that will say “Searching:1 database”. If you click that link you will see a list of the 9 databases that you can select and search through this interface. In addition to PAIS you can also search:
- ERIC (1966 - current),
- PAIS International (1972 - current),
- Physical Education Index (1970 - current),
- PILOTS: Published International Literature On Traumatic Stress (1871 - current),
- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I (1639 - current),
- ProQuest Newsstand (1984 - current),
- Social Services Abstracts (1979 - current),
- Sociological Abstracts (1952 - current), and
- The Wall Street Journal (1984 - current).
(Three of these databases are fulltext. The Proquest Sitemap page can provide you with information about some useful options.)
USA.gov is the U.S. government web portal to all federal, state, tribal, and local government web resources and services. USA.gov is intended to help people navigate government information, procedures, and policies.
Through USA.gov you can apply for benefits online (including grants), contact a government agency or department, or use the most comprehensive search of government websites. You can also search for Government Publications, for information specifically relevant to you, and for contact information for government employees and officials.
"Many issues also have an introductory survey article written as a personal statement by a linguist about some current trend in the field. Some of the topics covered in the first three volumes have been "Whither Linguistic Theory?" "Computerized Text Processing in Linguistic and Literary Research," and ''Linguistic Historiography." Coverage is somewhat limited, indexing approximately 300 journals, compared to more comprehensive indexes such as LLBA or MLA (see entries 85 and 88), but it does pick up some material not covered by other abstracting services and the time lag is only about a year. As Linguistics Abstracts Online, or LABS, this database is available on the Web (Blackwell Publishers). 85. Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts."
Book Index with Reviews™ (BIR) is a comprehensive database that provides information on over 5 million book titles. BIR also contains almost 800,000 full-text searchable book reviews from some of the most trusted reviewers: Library Journal, School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and the New York Times Book Review.
Fiction and non-fiction book titles are included in the database, in all genres, to help you find books to read for fun, for information, or for research. BIR’s subject headings/genres and flexible search engine can help you find out about popular titles that are currently available, along with those that will soon be published or released.
A desk reference tool containing Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, The World Almanac and Book of Facts, The World Almanac for Kids, The World Almanac of the U.S.A., and The World Almanac of U.S. Politics.
A Basic Search, Advanced Search and a Boolean Expert Search are available.
The World Factbook is published annually by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the web version is updated weekly.
The World Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities. The available information includes: political and physical maps of the major world regions, other maps, and the Flags of the World. This is a handy reference work for basic and reliable statistical data on the countries of the world. The appendices and the The World Factbook Users Guide can lead you to additional interesting data on the website.
Also potentially of interest to you: The CIA publishes and updates the online directory of Chiefs of State and Cabinet Members of Foreign Governments monthly. This directory is a reference aid and includes as many governments of the world as is considered practical, some of them not officially recognized by the United States.
Interesting and sometimes educational websites are featured on this annotated, topical gateway of websites. Each website is recommended and annotated by a librarian working for the Librarians Internet Index as a quality resource. You can also quickly group resources by domain type, so it is easy to see which sites are commercial, from organizations, and from the government.
Collection of research materials for "the geographical areas [and cultures] of the Caribbean, Latin America, and Iberia ... and peoples throughout the world historically influenced by Luso-Hispanic heritage, including Latinos in the U.S., and peoples of Portuguese or Spanish heritage in Africa, Asia, and Oceania." Features exhibits and photo collections, genealogy resources, bibliographies and finding aids, and more. Some material available in Spanish and Portuguese. From the Library of Congress.
COS Funding Opportunities has been replaced by COS PIVOT.
This database provides access to funding opportunities as well as scholar profiles, with the ability to add your own scholar profile and to view the profiles of various research organizations. PIVOT allows you to also prioritize and save your searches to receive weekly alerts.
You must register your own account and log in thereafter in order to use PIVOT. Registration and log in is in the upper righthand corner of screen.
Previous CWU users of COS Funding Opportunities may log in with their existing username and password, as the accounts have been transferred over into PIVOT.
NOTE: For some opportunities, sponsors accept only a limited number of proposals or applications from an institution, or require an institution to rank or prioritize applications before submission. Please contact the Office of Graduate Studies and Research before applying if an opportunity is marked "Internal Coordination Required".
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Tel: (509) 963-1543
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- For Foreign Languages see -- Language and languages
- For Foreign Languages see also -- Languages, Modern
- Languages, Modern -- Dictionaries
- Languages, Modern -- Study and teaching
- French language
- Spanish language
- Russian language
- German language
- japanese language
- Chinese language
