The library website - www.iup.edu/library - is the hub that connects all of our print and electronic resources. From there, you can search our library catalog (our books, journals, eBooks, and more), contact a librarian for immediate help, learn about the services we offer, or do a deep dive into our subject-focused databases.
We use Google and other general web search engines all the time, and our instinct might be to turn to them for our research too. Web search engines might be very good at what they're designed for, but they're not designed for scholarly research. For that, you'll want to look to your library!
If you're just starting out, the Discovery Search option will search through almost all of the resources we have, and bring back matching hits of every type of item: books, articles, videos, you name it.
When you're starting out - especially in an unfamiliar or new subject area - it's helpful to get a feel for what's out there. Discovery search helps you develop a "big picture" view:
The type of materials available (books, videos, articles, dissertations, etc.)
The level of the material (are they highly technical? is it mostly popular reading?)
The availability of the material (is it in the library, or electronic?)
This option performs a more focused search into materials held in the library. It will include our books, journals, videos, and other holdings within our collections.
Selecting this option narrows the search to items within our holdings only (whereas the Discovery search throws a broader net). If you're looking to see if we own a book in print or electronic format, or whether we subscribe to a journal, this is the option to use.
Searching using the E-Journal title option will tell you whether we subscribe to a journal electronically - and if so, you can use the information there to discover what database the journal articles can be found in.
When you've found a reference to an article that sounds like a good item for your research, it's very handy to search our e-journals to see if we have the journal the article appears in. If so, you may be able to get the article immediately.
This search only looks for journal titles. So when you put in a search, make sure to use the title of the journal, not the title of the article or keywords from the article. For instance, if you wanted to check on this reference:
Blaise Cronin, "The Mother of All Myths," Library Journal 126, no. 3 (Feb 2001): 144
You want to search for the journal title Library Journal.