To find books, ebooks, and videos that might help you with your paper, you can use the Books and Media or the Quick Topic Search.
When using the Quick Topic Search, your keyword search will return books, ebooks, DVDs, streaming video, journal articles from academic publications, articles from non-academic publications, and a host of other materials. If you are looking specifically for books, using the Books and Media search (also called the library catalogue) may return more relevant results more quickly.
Don't be afraid to use books in your research papers. Instructors do not expect students to read a whole book when writing short research papers. Read enough of the book to get context (a chapter or two is usually fine), but don't waste time reading what is irrelevant. Books still contain great analysis and information and should not be easily discounted from the research process.
Start by using broad keyswords to describe your topic in the Books and Media search. When you find one book that works well for you, you may also want to try this trick to find more resources:
If you find one book that is useful, look at its record in the catalogue to see if we have more books on similar topics. In the library, books have information attached to them that tell you what the book is about. We call these Subject Headings. In the Subjects area of an item record (the information page on a book, DVD, video, etc.), the links will take you to other books that have that been given that subject heading.
You can also look for books on themes, historical and social events related to your story and various background topics by searching for the specific topic. In the Books and Media search, you can try the Subject starts with option to do some searching.
When viewing a page of search results, you are able to sort the search results by publication date to make sure that you are getting recent resources. On the top of your search results, change the drop-down menu from "Systems Sorted" to "Publication Date" and hit the "sort" button.