Grace Library is open 24/7! The third floor of the University Commons is accessible to all students, faculty, and staff at all times.
First, on the Grace Library homepage, you will see there are multiple tabs at the top of the Library Search box. You can limit your search to books or articles by clicking the appropriate tab before a search, but we recommend starting with the "Everything" tab if you are new to a subject.
If you are looking for resources on a subject, try a general keyword search. Keep your search brief at first. You may type in your subject, or even the title or author of the material if you know the item you want to find.
Then, click the "Submit" button to see a list of results.
Any time you see a"View full text" or "View eBook" button, you can click these buttons to immediately view the full text of the article or eBook.
Any time you see a green check mark and the word "Available," this is a book that's available at Grace Library. To find any item in the library, all you need to know is the collection and the call number.
This is a lot of results to look through - many of which you may not be interested in - so you will want to use filters to narrow down your results. The filters are the check boxes on the left side of the screen. It is possible to limit your results to just articles, or by a time period such as the last 5 years. Another useful filter is "Peer Reviewed" when you only want to see academic or scholarly results for sourcing research papers.
Below you'll see how a search with filters can limit results down to a smaller number.
Sometimes you will have to experiment with new keyword searches in order to get different or more relevant results. During your exploration of a topic, such as "information," you may find sources that prompt ideas for other search terms. Each time you search for your topic using different keywords, you will come up with a different list of results. A related term to search for on this topic is "data," which in this case retrieves many more results than "information."
You can even get more specific, using phrases such as "information science" or "data analytics" if they are relevant to your topic. Try multiple searches and use all of the same tools - sorting, filtering, etc. - to find the best results.
When typing new search terms you will see other suggested terms, try some of these as well if they are relevant to your topic.
Library Discovery System: A one-stop search system where users can search for all materials owned by the library, as well as many of the articles and journals subscribed to through library databases. The library's discovery system works much like an online shop such as Amazon, except it is used to find library materials to help with your research. Users can also access other library services through the discovery system, such as managing your account, viewing what books you currently have checked out, placing an interlibrary loan request, and more.
