Getting Around the SFU Online Library

A few people have asked me for a quick review of the library website.  There is so much information online, but sometimes it’s a bit difficult to figure out exactly how to find it!

First thing’s first.  The library website is here.

You can get to the databases directly by clicking on the link “Journal Articles and Databases” or any of the links under the “Find” section on the front page of the site.  For me, this is a bit of a waste of time because if you don’t know what you’re looking for, this isn’t going to help.

Instead, under the “Help” section, I click on “BrowseResearch Guides”.  Here, all the databases are gathered under topic.  I typically go to the English Literature and Humanities sections, although the Philosophy section will probably come in handy now too.  Click through and select the tab “Books and Articles”. 

I find that the three best databases are MLA International Bibliography, Project Muse, and JSTOR.  The articles found in these databases are typically all peer-reviewed, from university published journal.  The MLA database also has a checkbox that allows you to find only articles with full-text attachments, which often really helps. You may find that many of the journal articles quote one or two popular articles.  If you look hard enough, you can often find that key article in one of the other databases.

The Online Encyclopedias and Biography databases found  under the Online Reference Sources on the main page of the library website might also come in handy when gathering information for our presentations.

The main page of the library also has a global search functionality, but again, I personally don’t find it as effective for finding journal articles as going to the databases themselves.  What this section is very useful for though, is for finding e-books. 

In my experience, these E-books are usually university-published documents which are a bit shorter than published books, but longer than journal articles.  Where the articles will usually attack a subject via a thesis, the e-books are typically a bit more expository and explanatory, and a better start to learning about a subject instead of arguing a minute point about it.   I like to search the SFU database directly.

I think that’s it.  Every database has a different search functionality, but I’m sure you can figure them out. If you need any help at all, I would be happy to go through this with you.  Also, I think that the library offers guided tours of the online and physical environments.