Instructional Guides

Brepolis Medieval Bibliographies Online

Scope/Coverage

Technical Information

Searching     Advanced Search

Viewing Results

Downloading/Printing Results

Scope

Brepolis Medieval Bibliographies Online consists of two components. 1) International Medieval Bibliography: containing approximately 300,000 journal article, book chapter, and conference proceeding citations dating back to 1967. 2). Bibliographie de civilisation médiévale: consisting of books and book reviews dating back to 1957. All topics relating to the Middle Ages are included within the date range 300-1500 AD. Europe, the Middle East and North Africa are the database’s focus. It is updated quarterly.

Technical Information

The Brepolis Medieval Bibliographies Online  is available to authenticated CSULB faculty and staff off campus at this site: http://www.csulb.edu/library/eref/eref.html#I. For off campus access instructions see this link: http://www.csulb.edu/library/access.html. The database’s producers recommend its use within the Windows-family of operation systems with Internet Explorer and Netscape 4.0 or higher.For best results they suggest using Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 with Internet Explorer version 5.5 or higher. Article citations are best viewed with “IMB Font” which allows the display of transliterated language diacritics. The font download instructions are here.

Getting to the Database

Go to our Electronic Resources Page. Under the alphabetical list of databases, select International Medieval Bibliography – Online.

1. When page opens, at far left of page click on

2. Where it reads, International Medieval Bibliography-Online click on  

Simple “Full Text” Searches

You are now in a screen that reads Free Search. Go to the top search box that reads Full Text. (In this case Full Text means it will search all the citation information available in the database, but IMB-Online is not a full text database).

Enter in a concept. The and, or logical connectors are acceptable.

Use or to get all synonyms in one search.

mentally ill or mental illness or insanity or madness

Use and to get different concepts in one search.

Merovingian and religion and politics

For truncation, to find alternative word endings, use an asterisk *

Searching for relig* will find religion or religions or religious.

Viewing Results

Click on  at bottom of search menu.

Customizing the Look of Your Results

1. At the far left of the search screen click on Settings.

2. A menu box will appear that lets you select how your results will appear. In addition to the default settings already marked, consider selecting Other Index Terms and Further Information for additional important data.

3. At bottom select box, Save Settings.

4. Go back to altered results by selecting at far left, Search Screen.

5. Click on

Advanced Search Techniques

Limit by Language

Your results will be in many languages. You may want to modify this to get only English.

1. Go to the link on the left that reads Search Screen.

2. Go the box that reads Language of Work and fill in English.Then click on  . Your results will be in English only.

If you’d like to see other languages, go the far right of that box and select other languages under the blue tab that reads  You might want to do this since the database searches for names of languages in that language, such as Russkii for Russian or Deutsch for German.

Limit by Century

You may want to modify your results only for certain time periods.

1. Begin by clicking on the Search Screen link at the far left. You return to the Free Text search screen.

2. Look for the box toward the bottom of the search screen that reads Century.

3. enter 4-7.

4. Optionally, you can select the link at the far left that reads Indexes then select Index by Date. Then select a broad classification of eras such as Late Antiquity. This will limit your search to the centuries, 3-7.

Bear in mind that when you conduct a century search that 400 A.D. is the Fifth Century. Thus, if you want to focus on articles covering the era from 300-600 A.D. you’d enter this: 4-7.

Finding Subject Terms

Finding index terms for your searches is easy. Go to the link that reads   . You can then find an alphabetical list of all possible index terms beginning with the first word of the indexed phrase. Using will let you select any index term anywhere in the word order of a term.

Using Indexes

At the far left of the Search Screen is a link marked Indexes. Select the link to conduct broad category searches by Subject, Place, and Date.

Changing Screen Appearance

At the far left of the search menu are several links that control the appearance of the search.

Language toggles the screen’s appearance to French, German and English.

Coverage lists the journals indexed in IMB-Online. They may be selected for individual searches.

Printing

After you have conducted an search, at bottom of screen click on

Option 1. At the top of the page, you’ll see, To scroll through the selected documents, click HERE. You will then see a list of citations displayed onscreen. You can then use browser print functions to print or download. You must have less than 250 citation results to use this function, or you cannot proceed with the printing instructions below. If you have more than 250, narrow your search.

Option 2. Click on Export HTML for your results to be displayed onscreen for printing or downloading.

Exporting to and Excel File (this feature not enabled on library e-ref terminals)

To export your list to an excel file, after you Search and Show Hitlist go to the left of the screen and click on Export. Your citation list will be exported to an Excel File database format.

Help Screens

At the extreme lower right of the Free Search screen you will see an

Click on this to get a screen help. If you don’t see this image click on the link at the upper left of the screen that reads Search Screen and you should see it then.