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Santa Clara UniversityUniversity Library

How to Learn with the Library

A resource for students to help you with your research and study needs.

Resources for Your Courses and Assignments

Use the library's electronic resources to find digital articles, newspaper, books, and videos for your course assignments. We have ~300 specialized databases for you to choose from, as well as OneSearch to search across many of them simultaneously. This page provides guidance about how to find and use these different tools. 

Remote Access: To access all of these resources remotely, you will be prompted to login using your SCU email and password. 

Reminder! Your Subject Librarian can provide one-on-one research support. Email your librarian for support. If time is an issue, you can also use our 2/47 help service for immediate, more easily resolved needs. 

Get Started: Use OneSearch for Broad Searching

OneSearch is a simple search engine that allows you to search simultaneously for books, articles, and more available at SCU Library. OneSearch brings together content of a large selection of our subscribed e-journals and databases, our library catalog, and our digital library collections in a single search interface. It can be a good starting point for interdisciplinary research, which you then might augment with some discipline-specific databases. Access OneSearch directly on the Library homepage. Learn more about OneSearch here. 

 

Get Started: Use Disciplinary Databases for Narrow Searching

While OneSearch may be good for getting started in interdisciplinary or lower division courses, selecting and using databases specific to a particular discipline is a more effective and efficient strategy for upper division or discipline-specific courses.

E.g.:  Psychology majors: using APA PsycInfo is likely to be a better strategy

E.g.: Business majors: using Business Source Complete may make more sense

To locate databases specific to a discipline, select "Databases" off the Library homepage and then "Browse by Subject". Your subject librarian has listed recommended databases; reach out for help selecting or using those tools.

Get Started: Use Materials in Archives & Special Collections

  • Access digital scans of historical documents and selections of rare books in our Digital Collections. We offer you more than 45,000 digital images from the University's Archives and the library's collection of rare books, with a special focus on university history.
  • Ask for help finding scans in the Digital Collections based on your knowledge of archival documents or rare books kept in the department of Archives & Special Collections.
  • Email us at SpecialCollections@scu.edu or chat with us on the Archives & Special Collections website to get help with any research need--we will guide your search process and offer scans of archival material or live consultations of books and documents via Zoom when possible.

Get Started: Troubleshoot Your Access Issues

  1. Are you getting error messages when you're using a database, or
  2. Are you being prompted to pay for a resource when it looks like you should have access through SCU? 

For help with (1), see the Troubleshoot Your Access page in this guide or (2), file an error report and we'll follow up with you.