ENGL 299: LIBRARY RESEARCH
Mackenzie Brooks
Assistant Professor & Digital Humanities Librarian
English Department Liaison
brooksm@wlu.edu // Leyburn M37
November 3, 2015
By the end of this session, you will...
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Understand how a library works.
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Be able to "search everything."
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Try out some English databases.
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Have a framework for evaluating sources
How the Library Works
How the Library Works
Collections + People
Research!?!
words of wisdom
1. Research is iterative.
2. Information overload = filter failure.
3. There is no perfect source. There is no perfect database.
Search Everything is:
- a discovery tool/system/service
- something we pay for
- potentially biased
- one of the best of its kind
- still not perfect
- constantly changing
Everything =
- 384,267 e-books
- 94,735 e-journals
- 513,255,675 records
- 975,050 catalog items (mostly print)
- 1.5 billion citations
- 90 content types
Remember
You have to tell Search Everything that you know what you're looking for.
Also
If Search Everything is too much, try a discipline-specific database.
A-Z Database > limit by subject
English databases
- Literature Online (LION)
- MLA International Bibliography
- Literature Resource Center
A word on Google Scholar...
Zotero and ILL are your best friends.
http://library.wlu.edu/zotero