Searching Library Resources
Library Resources can provide access to scholarly or proprietary material not freely available on the web.
Our holdings this spring have been expanded by new purchases and additional material provided by generous vendors.
HOWEVER, all these enhancements are not yet fully represented in our library catalog (CBBcat), our regular databases, nor discoverable by our discovery tool OneSearch.
For this course, START with these two e-book databases, but follow the steps below to expand your search to include articles, features, reviews and streams from both regular and added content.
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Ebook Central (formerly Ebrary) Access to a large collection of academic ebooks from a variety of publishers, in subject areas such as anthropology, computer science, history, law, religion, and the fine arts.
FOLLOW THESE STEPS!
1. Click on “Advanced Search” (if not already there).
2. Click: “Change Databases” or “Choose Databases” 
3. Click: “Select all”
4. Click: Use selected databases” 
Your Advanced Search screen should now indicate you’re searching multiple databases. 
5. In the first row, put the full name of the writer you’re researching in quotes. SEARCH.
6. If you have a lot of results, chunk down your search by using the filters on the left.
A good way to do this is by type or format. 
7. Click on “More” to get the expanded list of choices.
Filtering by “Magazines” can get you results like these. 
If you don’t find what you’re looking for, also try searching these options.
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JSTOR Full-text access to thousands of scholarly journals covering the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, plus monographs and other academic materials.
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Literature Resource Center Database providing full-text biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from every time period and literary discipline.
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Google Scholar Google Scholar indexes many scholarly journals, theses, books, and white papers from academic and society publishers. It also indexes patents and some case law.
(For Google Scholar, you must be signed in with VPN to get Colby links.)
OneSearch
Be sure and use the limiters on the left to narrow your results. Try the following:
- Book Review
- Book Chapter
- Magazine Article
- Full Text Online (to make sure you get e-books, not print)
CBBcat (Our Library Catalog)
Change the 2nd drop-down to ONLINE to find e-books, e-documents and streaming. 
Searching Tips Using Library Resources
- Use an asterisk to stand in for different word endings: critic* = criticism, critic, critics, critical)
- Use quotation marks to "glue together" a phrase: "food additives"
- Use AND between terms to narrow results to items containing both terms: restaurant AND critic*
- Using OR between items (within parentheses) widens results to items containing any of the terms: (locavore* OR localvore* OR "local food movement")
- Look at subject headings and summaries to find new search terms.
Find Articles in a Specific Journal/Magazine
Want to see if Colby has access to a particular magazine or journal? On the Colby Libraries home page click on the "Journals and Articles" tab. 
Once the orange bar has moved down, enter the publication's name in the search box. 
Searching the Web
Use carefully crafted searches to find reliable sources.
Sometimes library resources don't yet have much content about a person or event of interest.
Library resources are the best places to find scholarly material, but there's other interesting content unique to the web. Careful searching is key.
Search Precisely - Use words and phrases that help to focus your search and reduce the avalanche. Beware of common words or words that have multiple meanings.
Use Pre-research to Strategically Add Search Terms - Use terms to help identify your subject. Add names of relevant publications and blogs. Try searching a writer's social media handle.
Use "Advanced Search" - On your Google search results page, click on Settings. The "Site or Domain" field can be useful in limiting your results to government information (.gov) or items created at educational institutions (.edu). Use the "Find Pages With" search boxes to finesse your search.
Use "Tools" - On your Google search results page, click on Tools > All Results > Verbatim. This can help focus your results. Limiting by date can get you items with greater currency.
Evaluate Extremely Carefully! - Investigate every source by doing separate searches of source creators, authors and publications. Every source you interact with is a conversation. With whom are you talking? What are their values and motivations? Are they trustworthy? Are they getting their information from reliable sources and interpreting evidence fairly and intelligently? Who is the intended audience?
Know the Limitations of Web Searching - Most scholarly articles are either not found by search engines or are behind paywalls. Information is sorted and ranked according to commercial/consumer/popular considerations. Information is not vetted for accuracy or reliability.
Reference Sources
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Credo General Reference A search engine covering hundreds of reference works, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauruses, and books of quotations, plus subject-specific titles covering topics such as arts, business, history, law, literature, medicine, music, philosophy, psychology, religion, science, and technology.
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Literature Resource Center Database providing full-text biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from every time period and literary discipline.
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Oxford English Dictionary The full text online version of the Oxford English Dictionary contains both the complete Second Edition and the New Edition in progress.
Course Librarian
Contact me by email or chat (send me a Google Hangouts invite). Or let's talk about your research or information need on Google Meet or Zoom!
MLA Citation Help
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MLA Handbook 8th edition by The Modern Language Association, the authority on research and writing, takes a fresh look at documenting sources in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook. Works are published today in a dizzying range of formats. A book, for example, may be read in print, online, or as an e-book--or perhaps listened to in an audio version. On the Web, modes of publication are regularly invented, combined, and modified. Previous editions of the MLA Handbook provided separate instructions for each format, and additional instructions were required for new formats. In this groundbreaking new edition of its best-selling handbook, the MLA recommends instead one universal set of guidelines, which writers can apply to any type of source. Shorter and redesigned for easy use, the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook guides writers through the principles behind evaluating sources for their research. It then shows them how to cite sources in their writing and create useful entries for the works-cited list. More than just a new edition, this is a new MLA style.Call Number: LB2369 .G53 2016 Colby Miller 1st Floor Reading Room Reference. Also Colby Miller 1st Floor Research Librarians Alcove
Older editions of the MLA handbook are also available. Many databases still use the 7th edition. OWL uses the 8th edition. Note the differences! Be consistent.
MLA 7th Edition: Falk, Cynthia G. "'The Intolerable Ugliness Of New York': Architecture And Society In Edith Wharton's The Age Of Innocence." American Studies 42.2 (2001): 19-43. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 19 Jan. 2017.
MLA 8th Edition: Falk, Cynthia G. "'The Intolerable Ugliness Of New York': Architecture And Society In Edith Wharton's The Age Of Innocence." American Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2001, pp. 19-43. EBSCO, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40643250. Accessed 19 Jan. 2017.