Library Guides
Librarians have created guides for every academic subject on campus, as well as for courses and broader topics. View all published guides here for pointers on how to tackle beginning a search in a specific area.
Openly Available Resources
The resources below are a sampling of non-SU resources. These are accessible from off-campus.
- American FactFinder
American FactFinder provides access to data about the United States, Puerto Rico and the Island Areas. The data in American FactFinder come from several US Census Bureau censuses and surveys, including the American Community Survey, American Housing Survey, Economic Census, and more. Use the Guided Search or Advanced Search. - Public Library Databases
Maryland’s public libraries share a collection of Internet-based research databases that are purchased through the Sailor database budget. They are available to anyone with a Maryland public library card. - Eastern Shore Regional Library
ESRL also provides access to databases with a public library card. This links to another guide with the ESRL links as well as the SAILOR ones above.
Books
Maryland residents of Wicomico, Worcester, Somerset, and Dorchester Counties may apply for a free Special Borrower Card at the Library Service Desk and must present it when borrowing items. As a part of that, community borrowers are able to check out books from the general stacks and leisure books, as well as CDs, DVDs, and headphones. To find out more about loan privileges as well as paid account types, check out the Borrowing Policies page.
Use the box below to search for books in SU Libraries' collections.
Search Library Databases
Searching a library database successfully requires different skills than searching a search engine like Google. Identifying keywords and alternate keywords will improve your results. See the example below.
Research Question: "How does media affect voting in young people?"
Keywords: media voting young people
Alternate keywords require you to identify synonyms, broader ideas, and narrower concepts. For the example of media, one might generate a list of words like this:
mass media
social media
social networking
entertainment
news
print newspaper
television
CNN
Databases
Library databases can be used by non-SU patrons only when on-campus. Community patrons can obtain a temporary user ID (available for up to two weeks) from the Library Service Desk. Patrons need only bring a valid photo-ID to register for one.
While a complete list of all our databases can be accessed here, the ones below might be of particular use. Academic Search Ultimate and JSTOR are both databases covering a wide variety of areas; starting broadly with them is usually a good start. Statista is a great resource if statistics are needed.
- Academic Search Ultimate This link opens in a new windowAcademic Search Ultimate offers access to an unprecedented collection of resources including journals, magazines, reports, books, and videos. Many are peer-reviewed and full-text. Subjects range from astronomy to zoology.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new windowElectronic archive of core journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Includes complete runs of journals with full-text of all articles published prior to the most current five years. Coverage spans the humanities, sciences, and social sciences.
Please note that this publisher is offering EXPANDED CONTENT through June 30, 2023. - ScienceDirect This link opens in a new windowScienceDirect's Freedom Collection includes extensive full-text journal coverage of the physical and biological sciences, as well as some coverage of the social sciences and humanities. For a LIMITED TIME, Elsevier is making all of their textbooks available at no charge, as well as 20,000 free articles.
- Statista This link opens in a new windowStatista.com, by Statista, Inc. provides data on over 60,000 topics from over 18,000 sources, categorized into 21 market sectors. Statista.com provides quantitative data on media, business, finance, politics, and a wide variety of other areas.
- SPIN
InfoEd's database of sponsored funding opportunities. "The site is designed for institutional executives, principal Investigators, research administrators, and other faculty and students involved in the research process."
