Library Resources

Library Catalog: The library catalog catalogs (naturally) books, periodicals, government documents, and audiovisual materials that Olson library owns. To find magazine or journal articles, use the resources listed below.

CQ Researcher: In-depth, non-biased reports on political and social issues, with regular coverage of topics in health, international affairs, education, the environment, technology and the U.S. economy. CQ Researcher is particularly helpful as each article generally includes information on opposing views, giving both sides of the issue.

Evaluating Internet Resources: Never blindly assume that all websites, and the information gathered from these websites, are equal. You must think critically about information gathered from the web (and from just about any other source) and be able to judge if it is information that you can use to inform your research. This guide will help you form a critical framework from which you can judge the informaiton you find on the internet.

Journal and Magazine Articles

Academic One File: Journal articles from more than 8,000 scholarly and general periodicals across all fields of study. Indexing from 1980 to present; full-text from 1989 to present.

General One File: Journal, magazine, and news articles from over 9,000 general and scholarly periodicals. Indexing 1980 to present; full-text 1983 to present.

Keyword Searching

Keyword searches can be used in the library catalog and article databases. They are important because these searches allow you to find materials without knowing the title or author. Keyword searches combine words that describe the integral concept of your subject.

(Trent University in Canada has a good on-line tutorial for keyword searching if you get confused or want more help.)

For example, say you're going to write a paper on lowering the drinking age to 18. Some of the keywords for this subject could be:

"drinking age," "legislation," "law" and "lowering" or "lowered."

(Legislation and law are implied by the thesis statement since drinking age is determened by state legislation.)

**Note: If you need resources that provide an opposing viewpoint, using the antonyms of your keywords could be very helpful.

Remember, you have to command the database to do the search in a particular way -- the way that will provide you with relevant search results. This is done by combining keywords using the Boolean Operators and, or, not.

AND: Retrieves all terms.

OR: Retrieves items that have either one of two search terms.

NOT: Tells the database to ignore records that have a certain term. Ex: Twins not Minnesota. This search would retrieve articles that have the term "twins," as in the biological phenomena, not the baseball team.

Confused? Justin Bloom at the University of Nevada, Reno does a good job of defining these terms at the Mathewson--IGT Knowledge Center.

***If you get zero results you probably need to find synonyms for the keywords you are using. Also, if you get too many results, your search should be narrowed. For example, if your initial search was just on "drinking age" you could add another term that would more closely describe your topic, as in the search examples above.***

Library Help

If you need any help just come up to the reference desk. Or, you can get help via chat here.