Library instruction on how to find books, and how they can be valuable for your research - and easier to use than you might think.


Transcript follows below:

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The first thing you see on the library website is a big search box, and as you might expect, that’s the best place to search for books in the library. I know it’s more appealing to look for articles: they’re shorter, and your lives are super busy, and you don’t have time to read a whole book for one paper. But the good news is, you don’t have to have time to read a whole book to be able to use them for research! You can just use parts of a book that specifically address your topic: maybe just a chapter, or maybe just a few pages. In fact, that’s the best way to use a book for a research paper.

More importantly, books can be better than journal articles for some kinds of research. Articles in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals are generally valuable resources, but it’s important to understand why they’re written to use them effectively. Experts on a subject publish articles in journals to report to other experts on research they’ve just done in that subject area: that could be a new theoretical approach to a concept, in philosophy, or in English literature it could be a new insight on an author’s work, or in the sciences and social sciences it might be the result of an experiment. In any case, they’re adding new knowledge that they’ve discovered to an existing discussion, and though they may include a recap of what other experts have said about the subject before, called a “literature review,” they expect their audience to be other experts who know the topic area well already. They bring you in in the middle of the conversation, because they have something new to add, and they don’t spend a lot of time bringing you up to date.

Books, on the other hand, are much more likely to start from the beginning, and give you more background. Books are much more comprehensive, so their purpose is usually more to either sum up the conversation on a topic to date, or to add a really large and complex new contribution to the knowledge on the subject, or both. In philosophy, in particular, books are often used to develop much more in-depth new theories and ideas than would fit in an article. When an author does this, they have to do their due diligence and provide background on the topic, to set the stage for what they’re going to contribute. They might give a basic overview of the whole topic, the history of how the ideas around the topic have developed, and other things like that. So if you need a source that will start you at the basics of a topic, it’s probably more effective to look for a book – and then maybe only use the first chapter.

The library website search box actually searches across lots of things, so for books I suggest clicking the “Advanced Search” link below it, which gives you some more options to focus your search. Type the words you’re searching for in the field that says “Enter a search term,” on the left, and then on the right, select Books under Material Type. You can also specify a start date, to keep from getting any results from before a certain date: that can be helpful if you only want recent books.

Once you search, you’ll probably see mostly books like this one, with a link that says Available Online under the book information. These are e-books, and you can access them online from anywhere. We generally buy e-book versions of books whenever possible, so students in online programs can easily use them too. Sometimes, though, you’ll see a book that says “Available at Campbell Library” instead, which means that it’s a physical book at the library. These books will have a call number that you can use to go to the library and find the book on the shelf.

For e-books, though, click on the title of the book, and then scroll down in the next screen to find the section marked “View Online.” There should be one or more links listed here, and any of them should take you to the book. You’ll go to a landing page, where you can scroll down to find links to the individual chapters, or options to download the whole book. You can usually also search inside these books once you’re reading them, too, or you can use the Index to find the page numbers of relevant information.