Linfield College Libraries:  Class Research Support for Critical Thinking 

 

 

Formulating your research questions.  What do you know about your topic already? Do you need to do some background reading to get ideas, answer brief questions, or to check facts?  What do you want to find? What question(s) do you want to answer?

 

Consider words for searching. You'll need words to enter into search boxes. What if the words you think of first don't match the words used by the authors and indexers? Think about synonyms for each concept. Gather ideas from your background reading and develop lists of terms that are useful.

Some Reference Sources for Film Studies (Background Reading)
Encyclopedia of Ethnic Groups in Hollywood REF PN1995.9 .M56 M85
The American Indian in Film REF PN1995.9 .I48 1986
Blacks in American Films and Television REF PN 1995.9 .N4 B68
Women in Motion REF PN1995.9.W6 F67 1983

Finding library BOOKS (also Videos, DVD’s, etc.)

We offer three online catalogs for library materials.

These are all linked from the library home page at http://www.linfield.edu/library

.       Wildcat - Linfield college library's resources

.       Summit - Shared catalog for three dozen academic libraries in the NW

.       Worldcat - Shared catalog for literally thousands of libraries in the world!

You can ORDER books from Summit or Worldcat at no cost to you.  They’ll arrive here within a few days, and you can use them for a few weeks.

Finding ARTICLES from magazines, newspapers and journals

Linfield subscribes to dozens of periodical indexes! Which one(s) will contain articles from the journals most likely to have published articles relevant to your topic? From the Library's home page, your choices include:

EBSCOhost Databases for articles from multiple disciplines all from one vendor.

Research Databases Specialized article databases, by discipline, from various vendors.

Clicking on the "Research Databases" link takes you to the index for dozens of specialized online indexes organized by subject. Use these to go deeper into your topic, beyond EBSCOhost if needed.

 Use INTERLIBRARY LOAN (abbreviated as ILL) to get articles not available via Linfield's subscriptions.

To check whether we have a subscription, search for the title of the periodical (not the article) using the Periodcals@Linfield link from the library's home page.

Cross-database searching with Central Search from the link on the library's home page.

This is how you can search across many library databases at once.  The default box on the main page does search multiple databases, but not ALL of the databases to which we subscribe.  You can gain more control by using either the "Search by Discipline" or "Search by Database" options.

More about Central Search.

 

Evaluate for author credentials, currency, relevance to your need as you read.

Evaluating information found on the 'open' Web is crucial because in many cases no editors, librarians, or faculty made selection decisions as they probably did for books, periodicals and subscription Web resources, but you need to evaluate EVERYTHING you use.  

To increase the proportion of scholarly sources via a Google search, try Google Scholar at http://scholar.google.com

 

Jean Caspers. Reference Librarian.  jcaspers@linfield.edu  Phone:  503-883-2262