How Does A Research Guide Help You With
Your Library Research?
What is a Research Guide?
Library Research Guides help you find credible, reliable information on your topic. Our library guides provide information, resources and links suitable to subjects, courses, or general topics. Library guides save you time by providing information, resources and links for you to use to help you with your research and studies.
The A-Z Research Guide List
The A-Z Research Guide List provides an alphabetical list of all the guides that Snow College Librarians have created. You can also explore the guides by typing keywords into the search bar near the top of the page, or choose to display them by popularity, or how recently they were created. You will also find contact information for each librarian when you click on their pictures.
The Home Tab
Once you choose a guide, you'll be given some options via tabs near the top of each guide: 
The Home Tab will show automatically when you enter the guide. Here, you'll find Quick Links to the library homepage and the catalog (search physical items like books, CDs, etc.here). Additionally, it offers information about how to get help with your research, off-campus access to databases, and things like Canvas and BadgerWeb. The Home Tab also gives the user information about the purpose and scope of the guide, and contact information for the librarian who created the guide. If you need help at any time, feel free to use the Ask-A-Librarian service to start a live chat, text or email for assistance. The library email is checked twice daily, but chat and text should get near-immediate responses.
The Articles Tab
The Research Guides Articles Tab is perhaps the most helpful feature here. It lists databases that are strong in the guide's particular discipline or topic. In today's information-based world, databases are the backbone of any research. If you need trustworthy, specific information on a topic the articles tab is a great place to start. There are also links similar to those found on the Home Tab as well as easy-to-find information so that you can quickly get any help you need.
The Books Tab
The Research Guides Books Tab leads you along the path to what libraries are known for--books! Along with the usual Quick Links, this tab houses information about where to find books for a subject according to the Dewey Decimal System. Call numbers on the spines of books (or other items) assign them a place on the shelf and guides you to that spot. There is also a collection of Sample Books to give you a taste of what the library has in stock for the topic. Each sample book lists the title, author, call number, ISBN and publication date. There is more information about Dewey Decimal Classification in the right-hand column of this page to help you out.
The Web Resources Tab
The Web Resources Tab offers information from the web that has been analyzed by librarians or other subject experts.These are sites you can trust to give you good background information, statistics, trends in the field or just something fun in the discipline to help you get more acquainted with it. While the information here is reliable, talk to your professor before you use any of these sites as sources for a research paper or other projects.
Other Possibilities
While many of the guides Snow College Library produces contain only the tabs listed above, other guides may include a little something extra based on need, interest, or because it is requested by a department or individual professor. For example, some guides, like the one for Psychology, may include content that has been requested by a professor for their specific classes. Other guides may contain information about films for that discipline, like the Introduction to Shakespeare Research Guide, or they might, like the Allied Health Research Guide, include Education & Career resources or other specialty items. Sometimes we create guides to highlight a specific library service, like the Research Guide for Flipster Digital Magazines. We are here to give our campus community what they need, so go ahead and explore, make suggestions and . . .
Enjoy!
