This guide is aimed to help you with your research for Who Owns Culture. It will include information on how to find information as well as how to access it when you are off campus.
This guide was created by the librarian assigned to your class, Leanne Galletly. Please reach out with any questions about finding or accessing information this semester. You will see contact information at the bottom left of each page.
Reasons to contact a librarian:
The library curates hundreds of thousands of resources for our community. We encourage students, faculty, and staff to use our platforms because we think they will help you find the most trustworthy and relevant materials.
go.middlebury.edu/LibrarySearch
LibrarySearch is our version of Google. It's a search engine with that will return all of the materials the library provides access to. It's a great place to start your research and a good way to be confident that you will have access* to the resources you find. Once you have some leads on topics and sources, you may want to search in a specific database instead of LibrarySearch.
* Be sure to check the "Available at Middlebury" filter as seen in image
MIDCAT is the library catalog and it is useful to find physical items in the library, such as: books, DVDs, magazine, newspapers, cameras, laptops, etc. MIDCAT can also be used to find e-books when you are off campus.
A database is an online, searchable collection of publications that can include journals, magazines, newspapers, ebooks, images, and reference sources. Databases can include citations of the publications they index, the entire full-text publication, or both. Some databases are general enough that you can find material from any discipline. Other databases are subject specific. Most databases you find through Middlebury Libraries are scholarly and have publications that are not available for free elsewhere online.
(See Articles tab of this guide to start searching relevant databases)
If you want to search for a specific name or phrase, try putting it in quotations, this will tell the search engine only to look for that exact word order. So searching "Heart of Darkness" will provide resources that about the book, while searching Heart of Darkness, could bring up results about the color of internal organs because the words could be taken out of context.
Boolean Operators are search functions that allow you to specify how keywords should appear in a search. You must write the operations in all caps for them to work. You can also use Boolean Operators with Google.
When you find a particularly helpful book or article, look at its work cited list to find more sources on the same topic.