It is tempting to go straight to Google and search for all of your resources online, but that would be a mistake. In fact, it would also be a mistake to find all of your resources using the many databases we subscribe to at JBS. Why? Well, the most important reason is one of quality control. When you are looking for factual resources, a book can be a good place to go because it has been edited, reviewed and fact-checked before being published by a reputable publisher. For you, the student, this saves you the effort of deciding if a book source is of good quality - you only have to decide if it is useful for your paper.
Another reason is that web pages, and sometimes even database resources, can give you material in a non-linear format where you click through from one page to another, and can easily miss the connecting narrative and framework for your topic. Books can give you a better overview of a topic than periodical articles, and can also provide more indepth information than many periodical articles.
Print books v. Ebooks
Do you have to use only books you can find in the stacks at our library? No! We have a number of databases that offer full digital text of actual books, or what librarians call "print equivalent". These are the same books that you would find on the shelf except that they are in a digital format and can be more easily searched.
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