When you have a selected book or article, check out their bibliography and their footnotes/endnotes. This will help you add to your growing list of articles and other sources.
Having TROUBLE finding an article? For journal articles not available in the three colleges, use the Article Delivery form 
. In around 3 days you will receive a digital copy of the requested articles in your email.
Tripod offers the broadest way of searching through the Tri-Co's books, journals, and other media. Depending on the situation, this breadth can be helpful or unhelpful, because a broader search can sometimes return less-relevant results, and often in large quantities. See below for an example of how to filter Tripod search results and use advanced searching techniques to make your searching more efficient and fruitful.
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This link opens in a new windowOne potentially very helpful type of resource for your course and final assignment is what is called a reference source. This includes encyclopedias, which you are probably already familiar with. Broadly speaking, reference sources provide general information about a topic to either give you an introduction or overview to it, or they may provide a series of facts relevant to some topic or discipline.
In your course readings, you have likely come across a variety of technical terms from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, classical psychoanalysis, and more. Further, there may be reference to various figures, movements, or texts that is not explained in great depth within the reading itself. Reference sources can help get you acquainted with such terms, concepts, figures, and so on relatively quickly. They also often provide further sources you might read to learn more about them.
If you just search for "Freud" or "Hegel Philosophy of Right" in Tripod, you will get all sorts of results: long books about those figures, texts by those authors or titles, very technical scholarly articles about them, and so on. If you just search for "epistemology," you will likely get hundreds of thousands of results, and only some of those will be helpful in introducing you to that topic.
Eventually we will probably find some helpful resources in our huge list of results from the general searches above, but often they are lumped in with too many others for this to be efficient. To find reference books specifically, we can do a more specific search which firstly just returns books but also finds things with only common reference work title words.
After clicking on Advanced Search, use the left side drop-down menu to tell Tripod to search for certain words only in the titles of items. Because reference books usually have words like encyclopedia, dictionary, handbook, or companion in them, we can list those words. Instead of searching for each of these individually, though, we can tell Tripod we want all the books with any of those words in the title by putting OR between them.
Next, we might guess that a more general reference source for philosophy would have the word philosophy in the title, so we can drop down the menu to tell Tripod to search for title words again, and then type philosophy in the text field.
Given that we are seeing encyclopedias for more specific areas of philosophy than we might want, we might also try searching for a strict combination of words like "encyclopedia of philosophy." Putting words or a phrase in quotations like this tells a search engine or database that we want to see results with that specific combination of words in that order.
In the image above, notice the text that is underlined in red. In that part of the Tripod description of the item, you see information that tells us how to find this book. We see that it is located in Lutnick Library, in the Reference Collection. (Other results are labeled as Available Online or at other libraries, etc.) After this basic location information is a series of letters and numbers which are called a call number. This helps you locate exactly where a book is inside the library and on the shelf.
To find this particular book, we first need to know where the Reference Collection is. Lutnick Library has books in several different areas and on different floors. You may see the link to maps below, or click here. Physical/print items (including books) are grouped together according to their type or subject matter. Look on the second (2nd) floor for the reference collection, which is also close to where the subject area research librarian offices are.
On the side of bookshelves, or at least near them, you will see placards indicating the range of books on the shelf.
The call number we are looking for here begins with a letter and a number, B51. But sometimes there are two letters at the beginning before you get to the numbers. This will be more intuitive once you are looking at the books, but think of the second letter (if the call number has one) as being "within" the first. To find BL, we first need to find B, and then BA or BF or BQ will all come before we get to C.
Most print or physical books in Lutnick will be in the General Collection. This is located on Floor 0, or the basement of Lutnick Library. See the maps below. Those books will be marked like this:
This link opens in a new window This link opens in a new window This link opens in a new window This link opens in a new window This link opens in a new window This link opens in a new window This link opens in a new window This link opens in a new window This link opens in a new windowWhen you are doing more in-depth research, and especially if you feel like you are not getting good quality results related to your topic, it is a good idea to check more subject-specific databases. The best of these in Religion is called ATLA, linked below. When using ATLA, you will notice that you can use many of the same search tactics we used in Tripod. Many of these generalize across different databases.
JSTOR is also listed below. While it is focused on the Arts & Humanities, it is much, much broader than ATLA and contains a different selection of sources. ATLA is tailored to research in religion and prioritizes the major journals and sources specific to that field.
Also included above is an electronic version of the Encyclopedia of Religion, a reference resource that may be more easily searchable and accessible than the print version.
The call number for a book is determined by its subject matter or discipline. Many of the relevant books you will find on religion and philosophy will be somewhere in the B call number range. When researching the phenomenon you will use theory to illuminate, you may be led into a variety of other areas. For literature and books on literary topics, you will often look in the P call number range. For books pertaining to gender and sexuality, you will oftentimes be looking in the HQ area.
Searching Tripod and other databases is very useful, but oftentimes simply looking at the part of the book collection which relates to your topic area will lead you to items you otherwise may not have found. Sometimes these are incredibly useful and interesting discoveries.
For example, we see that these recent books on African American Pentecostalism are in the BR area of the collection. We might go explore that area of the collection. You may also find books on the same topic in the E call number range.
Additionally, even if you see a book that looks like it is interesting but is not at Lutnick (or whichever library you happen to be browsing), that library will most likely have other related titles to it. Finding where that book would be in its collection will probably lead you to find others which might be helpful. For example, you might use these titles to browse Lutnick:
