Library tutorial for Humanities and Social Sciences

This tutorial for Humanities and Social Sciences students introduces ways to find information for essays and projects in the Library's books, journals, databases and Internet sources. There are no questions involved, but there are suggestions for searches to try, to test your skills. You need to do the tutorial because for essay writing and other assignments you need to know how to find books and articles. Library Information desk staff are likely to direct you to this tutorial as a first step if necessary.

Section 1. The Library website

The library website is your starting point for using the Library and its resources.
This section introduces those parts of the Library website which are the focus of this tutorial.

Section 2. Searching for known books and journals

You may be given a list of citations to books and journal articles to find in the Library, in preparation for an essay.
Section 2 is about learning how to interpret lists of citations and how to search using the Library catalogue's Title, Author Name, and Journal Title search options, to find books and printed and electronic journals

Sections 3 to 5. Searching a topic

You may be given a topic without any citations to books or articles. Then it is easiest first to get an overview of the topic, then to look for books, then journal articles.

Section 3. Subject searching - getting an overview of your topic and learning ways to approach an unfamiliar topic by using encyclopaedias and other reference works, and Internet resources, as starting points. The Library's Resource Guides for subjects in the Humanities and Social Sciences help you select useful resouces.

Section 4. Searching for books on a topic . Learn how to use the Library catalogue's Keywords option (using and, or, not) , Guided Keyword search option, and Subject Heading search option.

Section 5. Searching for journal articles on a topic, using databases. This is the largest section of the tutorial, and involves you trying a few searches in some databases commonly used in the humanities and social sciences.