Library Tutorial: Finding Resources

Finding Resources

Determining the right sources to use, and evaluating those sources is an important skill we need all the time. It’s been called an art as well as work—much of which is detective work. You have to decide where to look, what clues to search for, and what to accept. You may be overwhelmed with too much information or too little. The temptation is to accept whatever you find. But don’t be tempted. Learning how to choose and evaluate resources effectively is a skill you need. What kind of information should you look for?

• Facts?
• Opinions?
• News reports?
• Research studies?
• Analysis?
• Personal reflections?
• History?

Where would be a likely place to look? Which sources are likely to be most useful to you?

Common sources of information:

Current event: a reliable newspaper like the NY Times.

Statistics on some aspect of the U.S. population? the United States Statistical Abstract, and United States census reports.

Commercial products/Companies: Company analysis, Industry analysis, and SWOT analysis of companies can be located in Business Source complete; company web sites are also good starting points.

Education resources, peer reviewed journal articles, topics, etc., can be found in any of the general article databases, including ProQuest. See the ebook section of the tutorial for more information.

Religion topics: The Cannon Memorial Library has extensive religous holdings; start with OCLC worldcatVoyager, and include a search of the ATLA Religion database. For general information, biblical interpretive texts, etc., we have a large selection of reference books available.

Psychology projects and papers: If you need scholarly articles, PsycINFO will have abstracts and some full text available, and PsycArticles will have full text articles. 

Science projects and papers: A good starting point would be the reference section of the library, as well Access Science, and Credo Reference.  

English and Literature projects and papers: A good starting point would be the print reference section of the library, as well as our online databases for scholarly articles --we subscribe to JSTOR,  Literature Resource Center, and Literary Criticism. 

Military History, ROTC projects and papers: International Security and Counter-terrorism index in EBSCO would be a good resource to examine, along with our selected website links for students.