A library database is a digital collection of information, articles, and resources curated by experts.
Unlike a general search engine like Google, library databases focus on providing high-quality, credible sources.
These sources often include:
Here's why library databases are the best choice for in-depth research:
Reference databases provide you with reliable background information like definitions, historical context, key theories, and important figures. This background information helps you grasp the basics of your topic before you move on to more in-depth research.
Here are some suggested reference databases:
A wide-ranging research tool for African American history and culture. Includes more than 300 titles including reference books, primary source materials, WPA slave narratives, and thousands of photographs, maps and other images.
Offering the original profiles of Current Biography and World Authors series, and the periodical coverage of Biography Index. Search result limiters include occupation/activity, gender, place of origin, birth day or month, and lifespan. Includes a searchable image collection.
Contains many of the top-ranked biographical reference collections and magazines. Offers a comprehensive collection of full-text biographies, as well as thousands of unique narrative biographies.
Credo Reference is a library subscription database that provides access to thousands of articles from reference sources such as encyclopedias and dictionaries. Subjects covered include art, biography, history, literature, music, religion, and science and technology. You can use these types of sources to gain knowledge on a subject and to help you focus or narrow your topic.
Discover pro/con perspectives from authoritative voices. Opposing Viewpoints in Context is the premier online resource covering today’s hottest social issues, from capital punishment to immigration, to violent video games. Opposing Viewpoints in Context is cross-curricular and supports science, social studies, current events, and language arts classes.
Offers students, researchers, and professionals a wide variety of full-text interdisciplinary electronic reference sources on virtually any subject area to tackle their assignments, papers, projects, and presentations.
Empower students to understand topics from a non-U.S. perspective. Designed to support global awareness, Global Issues in Context ties together news, perspectives, reference materials, primary source documents, audio, video, statistics, and more. Through these tools, students are empowered to critically analyze and understand the most important issues of the modern world.
Provides full text of magazines, reference books, and primary source documents and an Image Collection with photos, maps & flags.
Find statistics, consumer survey results and industry studies from over 22500 sources on over 80000 topics on the internet's leading statistics database.
For a full list of all the Databases the Library subscribes to, please access the A-Z Database list from the Library homepage.
You can sort the A-Z Database list by subject by selecting the "All Subjects" dropdown menu from the top of the page and selecting a subject from the list. Once you sort the list by subject, your "best bets" for databases within that subject will be listed at the top in a highlighted box.
Here's a list of the most popular databases for finding articles:
While newspapers ARE NOT SCHOLARLY or peer-reviewed, they can be useful for reading about current events:
Requires registration. Access to current NYTimes (excluding Cooking, The Athletic, and Crosswords) and the archive back to 1851.
Each issue of the NYT is indexed thoroughly, to provide access to not only top news stories but also detailed information on the arts, sports, business, and popular culture. Even such items as editorials, editorial cartoons, obituaries, and letters to the editor from well-known people are indexed.
Collection of national newspapers: Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
This publication's detailed indexing helps users quickly find the news information they need. Each issue is indexed thoroughly, so they have access to not only top news stories but also the information contained on the various sections of the paper. The indexing covers not only complete bibliographic information but also companies, people, products, etc.
