If I got a nickel every time a student asks me at the reference desk for a “book or article” on their topic, I would have a lot of cents. But the warm, happy feeling I get when I show a student a useful resource he or she didn’t know we had is priceless.
Library databases contain so much more than scholarly articles that you can use to complement your research or for building your own knowledge: documentaries, speeches, streaming music, photography, decades-old newspapers, your professors’ professional work, the list goes on and on.
This session of Research Therapy will introduce you to just a few of the databases that contain resources that you may not think about when you think “research”:
In addition to the databases in the video, here is a list of other resources (free websites and library databases) you can use to build your Digital Library:
| Name | Images | Video | eBooks | Audio | Ephemera |
| Internet Archive | X | X | X | X | X |
| ScholarWorks | X | X | X | X | X |
| Project Gutenberg | X | X | X | X | |
| American Memory Project | X | X | X | X | |
| Berg Fashion Library | X | X | X | ||
| NBC Learn in Higher Ed | X | X | X | ||
| Calisphere | X | X | |||
| Oviatt Library Digital Collections | X | X | |||
| Biography Index Past and Present | X | X | |||
| Great Speeches Video Series | X | ||||
| Films on Demand | X | ||||
| Theatre in Video | X | ||||
| Environmental Studies in Video | X | ||||
| LGBT Studies in Video | X | ||||
| Naxos Music Library | X | ||||
| Ebrary Academic Complete | X | ||||
| Safari Tech Books Online | X | ||||
| eBook Collection | X |
Wayback Machine
You know how websites change all the time? If only there was a way to see what the page looked like five years ago…
THERE IS!
The WayBack Machine on the Internet Archive has been capturing websites since the nineties. And these aren’t just screenshots, many of the links still work so you can click around like it’s 1999.
ScholarWorks
Did you just take a class that blew your mind and want to learn more from your professor?
Do you want to see what academic research looks like?
Are you considering grad school and want to know what a thesis looks like?
Check out ScholarWorks, CSUN’s institutional repository, where you can search by type of work, author, and department:
Need help building and organizing your digital bookshelf? Take a look at the Research Therapy session on Using Reference Managers to learn more about organizing your digital library.
And remember, you can Ask A Librarian about much more than books and articles. Let us know if you need help!
– Anna Fidgeon
