Instruction Provided by Rachel O. Jorgensen

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. 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: Since you are looking for an opposing position for this paper, knowing and using the antonyms of your keywords will 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.

These operators make it possible to do effective searches in almost any type of database. So, for the example above, the search could be: (drinking age) and legislation, or lowered and legislation and (drinking age), or (drinking age) and lowered or lowering.

Note: "Drinking age" is in parenthesis. This tells the database that it should look for those two terms in conjunction -- the database will not look for the words "drinking" and "age" seperately. Parenthases can also be used to group words in a particular way. This is important when using multiple Boolean Operators in one search: the words must be grouped correctly in order to retrieve pertinent results. The search drinking and legislation or law is not the same as drinking and (legislation or law).

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

***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're having problems finding materials for your assignment and want to ask a librarian for help, just come up to the reference desk. Or, you can get help via chat here.