Cabrillo College Library

Books

Periodical articles

Web

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How to get to this Web page

1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage  http://libwww.cabrillo.edu
   [If you are at an Information Workstation in the Library, just click on HOME near the top of the screen.] 
2. Click on Library Catalog

If the book is a print source, and it's a circulating book, you'll be told its LOCATION (e.g., Main Stacks), its CALL NUMBER (number on the spine of the book that shows where it is shelved), and its STATUS (is it on the shelves, or checked out?)

If you are not given call number information, you have accessed an electronic book. Read Information about eBooks. If you want to use eBooks from off campus, you must first set up an account with NetLibrary from somewhere on campus (Aptos or Watsonville). Click on "Create a Free Account" (top right of the screen). Remember your user name and password!

Academic Search Elite provides access to information about articles published in approximately 3,200 periodicals (both magazines and journals); for about 2,000 of those periodicals, fulltext copies of the articles are in the database. Here's how you use EBSCOhost

1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage 
   http://libwww.cabrillo.edu [If you are at an Information Workstation in the Library, just click on HOME near the top of the screen.] 
2. Click on Fulltext Articles  [If you are coming in from off campus, your user ID is your library card number] 
3. On the next screen, click on Magazine & Journal Articles  (EBSCOhost) (top
4. left)
5. On the next screen, click on 
6. On the next screen, click on  
7. Click in the small box next to Full Text. This will limit your search to articles that are fulltext in the database.
8. Type in your search terms.  Then click on  

   Watch a little movie about how to use Academic Search Elite.

Health Reference Center

1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage
2. Click on Fulltext Articles
3. Click on Health Reference Center -- Magazines and summaries
4. When you are at the Health Reference Center search screen, click on Full Text

As you look over your results, note that you are given access to different types of materials, e.g., encyclopedia articles, medical news periodicals, articles in popular magazines, etc. You'll probably want scholarly journal articles. You can tell that an article is scholarly if it includes bibliographic citations. It also helps to check how long the article is -- look for number of words or page numbers.

To get to a list of Internet Search Engines

1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage
2. Click on Search the Internet
3. Click on Search Engines

Use quotation marks to hold words in phrases together. For example, "Crohn's disease."

Google is the largest search engine and the one most people now use. There's an Advanced search option which you might want to try.

Sometimes students get discouraged using Google. It's helpful to remind yourself that computers and search engines are dumb: they just look for what you ask them to look for.  You are trying to anticipate what terms people actually use when writing about your topic.  You learn as you search which terms are best. Play around -- be creative -- try doing broad searches, then try more narrow ones.

Google is also involved with a project that is digitizing books -- millions of them. And you can search inside books.

Go to books.google.com This approach is especially useful when you want to look for the co-occurence of different words or phrases. For example, a search for the phrase "crohn's disease" and the word holistic gets you this:

How to Get to this Page on the Internet

1. Go to the Cabrillo College Library homepage <http://libwww.cabrillo.edu>
2. Click on Internet Links
3. Click on Medical Assistant
4. Scroll down, and under Course-Related Materials, click on Researching a Topic

Topsy N. Smalley
last rev 3/06