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So, you’re trying to find resources for your technical writing research project. One
of the best strategies is to try to get a variety of resources, so maybe some newspaper
articles, some scholarly journals, and, yes, some books. The way you get books is to go
to the library’s website. The library’s homepage defaults to a book search by keyword.
You can immediately start trying to find stuff from home. In the search box, you want to
think about your topic, and just type in the key word that’s the most relevant. So, if
I’m doing research on Facebook, I could type Facebook. Or, I could get more broad
and use the category of things that Facebook belongs to. I could try social networking.
You can see that I get over 3300 results when I do a search for social networking. What
I can do is over here on the left-hand side of the page, I can start to narrow that down
using the “General Topic”. The “General Topic” gives me little branches of that
key word. I can narrow down to “Social conditions”, “online social networks”, “Computer
networks”, “Psychological aspects”. Just think about what’s relevant to your
topic. I’m going to narrow mine down to “Online social networks” which will take
it down to 193 results. Next to “General Topic”, you’ll see on “Format” that
there’s actually “Electronic Resources” that you can access. Those are usually government
documents or ebooks, which is really helpful, for an online class if you’re trying to
do your research from home. Some other things I can do is to limit it down by the campus.
So, if I live closer to Hamilton or to Middletown and I need to get it immediately, I can click
on it, and I’m only going to have the 14 results from that campus. If I wanted to get
this book from Hamilton, I would need the call number. The call number is the book’s
address in the library, and it’s going to help you find it once you get here. You can
have that information sent to your phone, or you can just write it down. I always recommend
clicking on the title to get more information about the book. What this does is pop up similar
items on the side that might be relevant to your topic. It will also tell you how many
pages it is. You always want to click the “Cite” button, because then you can copy
and paste the citation in APA or MLA to get a head start on that Works Cited or your references
page. Going back to my search results, you might be able to pick up books from any campus,
and I want to point out that you aren’t limited to your home campus. If a book looks
good, and it’s from King Library in Oxford or from Gardner-Harvey in Middletown, you
can actually request it for delivery. So, you see this number 5 “Virtual Social Networks”?
That might be kind-of good. That’s actually located in Oxford, but as long as it says
it’s “Available”, I can click “Request Item” and enter my Miami unique ID, password
and select my pickup location, and have it delivered down to campus. Now that takes a
day or 2, and you’ll get the email the day after it arrives on campus for you to pick
it up. In addition to being able to borrow things from all the Miami Libraries, you can
borrow things from all across Ohio as long as they’re available. So, this item here
“Are social networking sites harmful?” I can click on the title of that for more
information, and since it says “Library Use Only” that means I can’t request it
for delivery. It’s not available for me. I’m going to click on “OhioLink”. OhioLink
is going to go look in all of the other libraries in the state of Ohio that we borrow with.
And, as long as one of those copies says “Available”, I would click the green “Request” button,
select “Miami”, and then process the request for delivery at the campus that I want. Now
some of those will come from all around Ohio, so they could take a little bit longer. You
want to give yourself a good 3 to 5 days to get back. That’s a very quick introduction
of how to find books at the library. Good luck on your research, and if you need any
help at all, please get ahold of one of us. You can IM us, email, or give one of us a
call. Bye, now!