WebPals
Our catalog; also searches a number of other libraries

MnLink
A shared catalog for Minnesota libraries; choose search, then under the map, choose to search college and university libraries.

WorldCat
The mondo-catalog. Searches thousands of libraries world-wide. Note: many of the things you find here will not be available even through interlibrary loan.

Books are shelved using the Library of Congress classification system. If you are wondering what a cataloger might use for a subject heading, you can search the Library of Congress Authority Files. Or use the subjects heading lists kept under the dictionary by the computer cluster in the front of the library (aka "the big red books")

Good places to check facts, get concise overviews, and find out what the most influential texts are. Check with a reference librarian to see what reference books are available on your topic. The following are examples:

Chicano Literature
Ref PS 153.M4 C46

Encyclopedia of Cancer
Ref RC 262 .E558 2001

Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice
Ref HV 6017 .E52 2002

Hispanic Literary Criticism
Ref PQ 7081 .A1 h573

West's Encyclopedia of American Law
Ref KF 154 .W47 1998

See Resources Arranged by Subjects and Disciplines for more options.  We also have a Web guide to statistical sources.

You may find it useful to browse journals relevant to the topic you're researching. In this library, journals are arranged by title, not subject. You can find a list of at which journals we subscribe to by field on our Resources Arranged by Subjects and Disciplines page. You may also want to look at Magazines for Libraries (kept behind the reference desk) to find very brief reviews of journals by discipline.

Expanded Academic ASAP
Magazines, trade magazines, scholarly journals, and newspapers are included in this mixed bag. Some are full text; others are citations and abstracts; yet others are only citations.

Lexis/Nexis
A collection of lots of news, business, and legal, and political material. Especially good for full-text stories from newspapers and for law review articles.

CINAHL (nursing)
ComAbstracts (communication studies)
CSA (biology)
ERIC (education; some documents are in full text in the E*Subscribe database)
Lexis/Nexis (law)
Medline (via PubMed; medicine)
MLA International Bibliography (literature and linguistics)
PsychInfo (psychology)
Web of Science (a citation index to science journals)

See Resources Arranged by Subjects and Disciplines for more options.

Here are some general hints for using a search engine:

• Think small. The more specific your search, the more likely you'll find what you want without wading through thousands of hits to get there. If your topic is broad and you're looking for a few good sites, skip the search engine and try one of the directories below.
• Put a phrase in quotes to search for those words in that exact order.
• Use multiple terms. Google assumes you want all of the terms you type in to show up in your search - you don't have to use the boolean operator AND, but you can expand a search with OR in caps or exclude terms by placing a minus sign in front of a word: guns -roses.
• Check out the advanced search options. With Google's advanced search you can, for example, limit a search to sites updated within the past three months or to a particular domain type (e.g. .gov if you think what you are looking for is on a US federal government agency site.)
• You can add a Google toolbar to your browser. This can save you time if you do a lot of impulsive searching. Then again, all that goofing around may be a symptom you're in denial about a looming deadline.

• Look at the URLs for clues. If the domain ends in .gov, it's likely a US federal government page. If there's a K12 in it, it's hosted on a school site and may be aimed at a young audience. Those with .edu are at institutions of higher education - no guarantee the site has any intellectual content. Those with .org are non-profit organizations. Countries also have abbreviations: .ca (Canada); .au (Australia); .uk (United Kingdom), .se (Sweden) and so on.
• If something looks as if it came from a promising site, try shorting the URL by deleting everything after the first slash. Say you found a document on computer privacy issues with a long dot-org URL. Erasing most of it takes you to the parent site - which may have a lot more material on the topic.

Internet Public Library. A long-standing collection of useful online research tools based at the University of Michigan.

Librarians' Index to the Internet. A good selective guide to Web sites, from the University of California.

Scout Report Archives. A searchable archive of Web site information from the University of Wisconsin, with descriptive and critical reviews. These sites were chosen for their valuable research content rather than for charming flakiness. You can also sign up for weekly e-mail alerts of new reviews or visit Scout's Weblog for new sites.

WWW Virtual Library. A world-wide effort to compile expert guides to the Web - the original Web directory of directories.

• Plan ahead. You should allow several days for books and articles to arrive.
• We may have to get back to you in cases where we've exhausted our fair use rights for a journal under copyright law.
• You don't have to know which library has a book or article for us to order it. Just tell us what you need.
• You can order things online or by filling out paper request cards or by printing off a list of references, marking those you want to order. Include your ID card bar code and last name (which, for library purposes, is your password) on all orders.
• Order books online using this form; articles using this one. Some databases have an interlibrary loan or request button. In the case of articles, you can opt to have it delivered to your desktop by checking the "electronic delivery" option.

Avoiding Plagiarism is a handy online guide from the Purdue University Writing Center.

Citing Your Sources offers models for common print and electronic sources.

Take advantage of the librarians' expertise. Here are some ways to get the most out of them:

• Tell the reference librarian what you need. Be up front about what you're looking for, how much time you're willing to invest, whether you want a small amount of stuff or as much as you can get, whether you want technical or lay information, and what you've tried already.
• Sometimes you don't have a definite question. It's perfectly okay to simply say, "Can you tell me what resources you have on -- ?" Or simply say, "Can you give me some pointers?"
• Be prepared for an interrogation. A good reference librarian wants to be sure she understands what you need. And if she starts giving you the wrong stuff or says something you don't understand, tell her so. Librarians are experts at finding information, but you're the expert at what   you need.