A Guide to Research in the LRC || St. Clair County Community College



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A Guide to Research in the LRC

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At SC4’s Learning Resources Center, students, faculty, and members of the community have access to a wide variety of the most up-to-date research resources available. In addition to our collection of over 60,000 books, periodicals, & audio visual materials, the LRC subscribes to several electronic databases, some of which provide full-text articles online. LRC staff provides training and support for using all our facilities, including expert assistance in searching the internet for resources appropriate for college level research.

How to begin

When conducting research, you should use more than one type of information resource. Your instructor will probably tell you what kinds of resources to use. We recommend you use information from:

Books (reference or circulating books; print or e-Books)
Articles from Periodicals (magazines, newspapers, & journals)
Internet Sites which you determine to have credible, reliable information

Books

Search for LRC books using the Library Catalog linked from our homepage at: www.sc4.edu/lrc.

You’ll definitely want to use Reference Books and Circulating Books, and maybe e-Books too.

Reference Books

These are books like Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, Statistics, Maps, Almanacs, Directories, etc. The LRC has Reference books on all topics.

Examples:

Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine
Violence in America
Contemporary Literary Criticism
Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary

Circulating Books

These are books you may check-out from the library. You are very likely to find a book on any topic you are researching.

Examples:

Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform & Rebuild Their Lives
Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
Toni Morrison’s Fiction

e-Books & NetLibrary:

There are several places where you can find e-books. Check with an LRC Librarian for the best place to find e-books relevant to your topic (e-books are not listed in our catalog).

To the left are two of the most useful e-book resources – try these first.

Reference e-Books in Gale Virtual Reference Library:

Go to the LRC homepage, click on:

1. Databases

2. InfoTracWeb

3. Gale Virtual Reference Library

Reference & Circulating e-Books in NetLibrary:

Click on the NetLibrary link from the LRC homepage.

Special Note about NetLibrary: The first time you use NetLibrary, you must go to any Michigan Library, visit NetLibrary’s homepage, and create a free account. After that, you can use it from anywhere.

See How to Find Books and AV Items

Articles

The LRC subscribes to over 100 print periodicals & has 1000s more available electronically through the on-campus and off-campus database pages.

For your research, you may want to use articles from various types of periodicals: Newspapers, Magazines, Scholarly Journals and Professional Journals. Here are some example periodical titles for each type of article:

Types of Periodical Articles	Example Titles of Periodicals
Articles in Popular Magazines	Newsweek Rolling Stone National Geographic
Articles in Scholarly Journals	Journal of Marriage and the Family Alcohol Research & Health
Articles in Professional Journals	Advertising Age Michigan Farmer
Articles in Newspapers	Port Huron Times Herald Crain’s Detroit Business Chicago Tribune

See How to Find Periodical Articles in the LRC

Internet

You may need to include information from the internet in your research. Before you do, make sure you view the information critically by investigating:

WHAT is the website about? Does it really address your research topic?
WHO is responsible for posting the information? What are their qualifications?
WHEN was the information posted? Is it too old to be accurate or useful? Is it appropriately current for your research topic?

If you can’t discern if a website’s information is reliable or not, ask your instructor or a librarian for help deciding.

Beyond the LRC: Interlibrary Loan

In the course of your research you may come across a book or an article that you want, but that we don’t have readily available in the LRC. If that happens, talk to a library staff member about using our Interlibrary Loan service. Through Interlibrary Loan, we can borrow items from other libraries for you; just remember to plan ahead, because this process takes time. It can take 2 weeks or more before an ILL book or article arrives.

(This guide was last revised by SC4 LRC staff on December 2005.)