General Collection books are either upstairs (if their call numbers start with letters beginning A - PQ) or on the main floor (if their call numbers start with PR - Z) These cand be checked out for six weeks.
Oversized Collection books are upstairs, in the back corner on the Olin Hall side. Many art books are in this section. These can be checked out for six weeks.
Reference Collection books are on the main floor. These cannot be checked out, but you can use scanners to copy pages and send them to yourself.
In brief, our library catalog is the search engine that will tell you what books we have and where they are shelved. You can search by "all fields" (that is, the information in the catalog, not all of the contents of the book) or by author, title, or subject. Because catalogers describe the subject of books as a whole - rather than going into detail about everything the book contains - your searches will work best if you keep your search terms quite general.
Once you have a list of results, look for the call number - a letter and number combination that indicates where the book is shelved. Some books are shelved on the upper level and the rest are on the main floor. (There's more information available on how call numbers work. They take a little getting used to.)
Once you've located a book that looks interesting, browse the shelves around it. The Library of Congress classification system used in this library puts books on the same subject together; because you can look directly at the books while choosing, browsing is an effective way to discover useful sources.
A good place to start research on most any subject. This multi-disciplinary database indexes nearly 8,050 publications and provides full text for nearly 4,600, including more than 3,900 peer-reviewed journals. Access is provided by eLibraryMN (ELM).
Articles in journals and magazines can be found through databases. Some of the articles are in the databases; in some cases, you need to click a "find it" button to see if it's available in another database or to request it from another library.
This search engine points toward scholarly research rather than all Web-based sources. It is stronger in the sciences than in the humanities, with social sciences somewhere in between. One interesting feature of Google Scholar is that in includes a link to sources that cite a particular item. Not all of the articles in Google Scholar are free; the library can obtain many of them for you through Interlibrary loan.
JSTOR is a digital library of journals, academic eBooks, images, and primary sources. JSTOR provides book and journal content from the date of initial publication up to a "moving wall" of 3 to 5 years before the present year.
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