You will likely begin by searching one or more of your keywords in the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), also known as OneSearch.
Learn how to use OneSearch to find books, ebooks, articles, and other media that are housed within the LBCC Library, academic databases, and even at external publisher sites. Sample searches are linked below.
Get started right away! Enter keywords (like music theory, indigenous music, etc.) into the OneSearch bar:
Learn how to explore individual academic databases that are relevant to your assignment. Use these popular databases to search for a little bit of everything.
This database features hundreds of titles covering Art, Architecture, Design, History, Philosophy, Music, Literature, Theatre and Cultural Studies. It is designed to complement the following indexes: ABM, Avery, BHA, BHI, DAAI, Index Islamicus, MLA, Philosopher's Index and RILM.
Covering Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Social Sciences, this very popular database is user-friendly, with a clean and simple interface. A "Go To" websites for college students.
One of the most used and popular academic databases for college students, Proquest uses a student-friendly layout and covers business, medical, social sciences, arts and humanities, education, science and technology, and religion. Formats include books, articles, dissertations, videos and blogs. Use the thesaurus tool to use the databases' keywords.
The library gives you access to other internet resources like recommended reading lists and digital magazines.
OneSearch is a great first place to start for your research. You can use OneSearch to find books, ebooks, articles, and other media that are housed within the LBCC Library, academic databases, and even at external publisher sites.
OneSearch can help you build a working knowledge.
The first thing you will see is the search bar. In OneSearch this search bar will show you not only books and media held within the physical library shelves, but also articles that appear in academic databases and even in relatively nontraditional ecosystems for information like OpenAccess journals. Therefore, once you enter your keyword search, it will be important that you take a moment to look at the search results and figure out exactly what you are looking at.
A database is a digital container that holds many journals. And in turn, each of those journals contains many articles. This taxonomy allows you to see that articles feed into journals and journals feed into databases. The result is that you can search for literally thousands of peer-reviewed articles on a certain topic within a single database.
High quality peer-reviewed journals like Nature and the Journal of Applied Psychology can appear across multiple databases. Think about how a pair of shoes can be purchased on eBay, Foot Locker, PayLess Shoes. Multiple databases may have access to one and more of the same journal, and all of its articles.
Conversely, some databases are special in that they only carry one type of journal or article. For instance, there are some databases that specialize in carrying old archival, old, newspaper articles. Other databases specialize in primary sources, biographies, and histories. Other databases curate their own articles and can specialize in pro/con arguments and controversial topics.
Check out this video to learn about academic databases.
