Need sources for your literature review? Struggling to find sources for your assignment, research proposal or thesis?
The Library can assist with a literature search, which is a systematic and comprehensive search for published, academic material on your specific subject/topic. How do you request one? Simply go to Request a literature search .
If you are experiencing problems accessing the form, please use this link.
Current awareness is the term used to describe staying informed by keeping up to date with the latest publications, research and news in your field.
The perspective of current awareness is the present and the forthcoming, as opposed to the retrospective.
Current awareness ranges from looking for information on specific topics on a regular basis (and this usually involves the assistance of your Personal Librarian to help you set up a search profile matched to your research interests) to embracing a wider, more general, and cross-disciplinary view that brings an element of serendipity into your search for the latest information.
Informally, researchers remain alert in all contexts for useful information and insights that will inform their daily practice, their research, and spark off innovative and creative ideas for new avenues of research.
The website of the month is:
The site offers current news, publications, and statistics and data on gender matters useful to researchers among other links to information.
Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive
"Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive represents the world’s largest digital archive on the history of slavery.” Gale Primary Sources (Publisher)
The year is marked with many special days, weeks, and months dedicated and devoted to raising awareness about important issues.
This monthly post, compiled by the Information Search Librarians Team, will note special dates and themes, and draw your attention to possibly interesting cross-disciplinary topical references intended to inform and to inspire ideas for research.
August: Women's Month (South Africa)
9 Aug: Women's Day (South Africa)
9 Aug: International Day of the World's Indigenous People
12 Aug: International Youth Day
23 Aug: International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition [UNESCO] (UNESCO 29 C/Resolution 40)
31 Aug: African Traditional Medicine Day
If you are looking for forthcoming conferences, the following websites are helpful:
RIDOUT, Alice (ed) (2010) Contemporary women writers look back: from irony to nostalgia. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Pretoria Open Collection 809.89287 RIDO AVAILABLE
"Long before John Barth announced in his famous 1967 essay that late twentieth-century fiction was 'The Literature of Exhaustion,' authors have been retelling and recycling stories. Barth was, however, right to identify in postmodern fiction a particular self-consciousness about its belatedness at the end of a long literary tradition. This book traces the move in contemporary women's writing from the self-conscious, ironic parodies of postmodernism to the nostalgic and historical turn of the twenty-first century. It analyses how contemporary women writers deal with their literary inheritances, offering an illuminating and provocative study of contemporary women writers' re-writings of previous texts and stories. Through close readings of novels by key contemporary women writers including Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Emma Tennant and Helen Fielding, and of the ITV adaptation, Lost in Austen, Alice Ridout examines the politics of parody and nostalgia, exploring the limitations and possibilities of both in the contexts of feminism and postcolonialism." -- Publisher description.