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

Scholalry vs. Popular Use this guide to understand how you tell a scholarly resource from a popular one.

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.

JSTOR Provides image and full-text online access to back issues of selected scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, demography, mathematics and other fields of the humanities and social sciences.

Keyword Searching

Keyword searching is a fundamental research skill and is used in all types of databases, from the library catalog to Google. These searches are important because they allow you to find materials without knowing the title or author. Basically, keyword searches use words that describe the integral concept of your subject - multiple terms can be combined in one search, allowing you to find very specific materials, or very general ones, depending on your needs.

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

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.

General Guidelines:

1. Write a thesis or subject statement.

2. Use the words in this statement to create a keyword list.

3. Include synonyms in your list, in order to facilitate your searches.

4. Don't do just one keyword search. Do several.

5. Ask for help.

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.

You can also email me at rajorgen at nmu dot com.