When it comes to searching for materials, looking in the right places are just as important as knowing what materials to look for or how to search for them. Every platform for finding information will provide different types of publications, which vary in accessibility and quality. Some materials are held in physical copies rather than electronic, and others live solely online. Not all information is freely available, requiring subscriptions or being held behind a paywalls to access them. Knowing how to circumvent these barriers and acquire the information you need is invaluable.
The library provides access to several physical and digital materials: books, journals, magazines, newspapers, videos, art, ephemera, and much, much more. There are several different ways to search our library.
Our discovery layer searches across most of the library's resources in all formats, both physical and digital. You may apply filters such as content type, date, discipline, language, and more. Feel free to use the one on the library home page, or try completing a search below.
While searching everything seems like it would be effective, sometimes it can be overwhelming and inefficient. If your results seem limited try searching individual databases instead.
The library has over 250 databases in their collection, both general and specific. You can narrow down the list of databases by subject area, database type, and vendor. Make sure to use the legend to determine what kinds of materials the database holds.
Journals by Title searches across our print and electronic journal holdings. It will tell you what years of coverage we have for a particular journal and what databases they are located in. You can search a specific journal or try typing a keyword to see what journal results pop up. You may also sort by peer-reviewed journals.
Our Journals by Subject are brought to you by Browzine. This platform allows you to create bookshelves of items you are interested in and see the look and feel of the journal content (for those of you who like to judge a *book* by it's cover!).
WorldCat is exactly what it sounds like - the world's largest library catalog! The default search in WorldCat will place items that HWS owns at the top. You may place InterLibrary Loan requests directly from inside WorldCat.
Google Scholar lists itself as an 'index' of scholarly materials, including books, scholarly articles, preprints, abstracts, conference papers, technical reports, grey literature, and other materials. All of these have varying degrees of reliability and credibility. While Google scholar can be a wonderful source for finding materials, be sure to evaluate your resource using the information in the Evaluation Section.
Google Scholar results provide the link to where the information was published, which may be behind a paywall. Items that are freely available or those linked through a library will appear on the right side of the page. You can link your library (or libraries) to google scholar to optimize the number of results that you can access.
Searching the web can be a great way to access background information, digital archives, datasets, government resources, and more. The internet also holds misinformation and bias, so be sure to critically evaluate your resources. Begin by looking at materials from respected publishers or authors that you trust. If you are uncertain about the credibility or reliability of a resource check out the Evaluation Section.
Is there a resource that you want but we don't have it in our library? Place and Interlibrary Loan (ILL) request to try and borrow it from another library. Sign into your ILL account, place an item request, and you'll receive an email when your item comes in.
