Use Subject Headings you know (these must be exact!)
If subject is a name, generally last name first. But see Medieval Names box below at center page for dealing with historical names.
Here are some media materials relating to Dante's Inferno (sometimes a little tenuously).
LINUS is the catalog for all the Library's book and media collections. Use Title or Author searches to find books, E-books, videos, and other materials that you know exist. Use Keyword or Subject searches (see boxes on the left) to look for books and other materials on a general or specific topic.
Medieval names sometimes create a challenge. You may run into variations on a name between texts, as, besides the official Latin document name, a person would have a name in the local language or dialect. So bibliographic listings, and the way the name is entered in a library catalog or a periodical index, as well as in the indexing for Google and other search engines may vary. Here are some things to keep in mind:
1. Medieval names often don't include a family or "last name". Many people were given the names of popular saints. Some Roman naming customs survived in specific, often noble, families, but most people did not have them.
2. Medieval people are very often identified by where they come from or with the name of a place with which they are associated, e.g. Thomas Aquinas/Thomas of Aquino, or Duns Scotus/Duns of Scotland.
3. Like in ancient Rome, some important medieval figures got honorific titles, e.g. Albertus Magnus/Albert the Great or official titles (from their office!) like Some got both, like Pope Gregory I or Pope Leo I, also known as Pope Gregory the Great and Pope Leo the Great, and later Saint Gregory the Great, etc.
The Library of Congress System used for LINUS' author names and subject headings are fairly exact in their naming conventions. They often include titles, honorifics and place names, as well as years or approximations of years of birth and death. The system used to prefer the original name in the original language for medieval names, but now goes with the most popular name in current English/American usage. thus the entry for Dante is Dante Alighieri 1265 1321, not Alighieri, Dante ..., which would make it difficult for those not knowing his family name.
This can be complicated. The original subject heading, Giraldus Cambrensis, became Gerald of Wales for a while, but now has returned to being Giraldus, Cambrensis, 1146?-1223? as this is how most scholars know him. However, the older heading Aurelius Augustinus was changed to Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo, where most people can find him. Our catalogers work hard to keep these changes up to date, and are resourceful at putting a lot of variants in LINUS (often in different languages) as finding aids, with a link to the correct heading. This can be useful for finding a number of variants on a name you are seeking for searches in databases and full-text sources that aren't consistent with each other.
Some databases are not as forgiving as LINUS! You may have to use exact forms of the name, even though the 'incorrect' name as keyword may still pull up a number of hits. The most popular names (Dante, Petrarch, Abelard) will be the easiest, but be careful when you see more complicated names. Try to analyze and see if any part of the name is an honorific or a geographic descriptor instead of the name itself, so you can put it in correctly as a subject heading. Check the database's thesaurus or try a search and see what the database uses as a descriptor. It may surprise you.
See the Dictionary of the Middle Ages (an encyclopedia, actually) to help you with medieval names.
Make a good guess and search by Keyword. You can narrow down too many results by combining your first word or phrase with another word or phrase with AND as the connector. You can use OR to get either result. You can truncate with an asterisk ( *) to get words beginning with what goes before the *.
