I’d like to invite you to our new E-Reference Shelf page on the Library Website. This is an exciting time for the old page – it has been re-focused on great electronic sources that the library has to offer. In the past, we kept a set of recommended websites, but we found through our usability studies that this made the page overwhelmingly huge, daunting, and cluttered. Instead, we’re now sending you to the experts on librarian-recommended websites, the Internet Public Library, which allows us to put our library resources on center stage.
What is the E-Reference Shelf, anyway? It’s a place to go before you do any heavy research, where you can get basic information on a topic through dictionaries, encyclopedias, and more, before diving in to in-depth stuff like scholarly journals. Think of it as a “shelf” of online resources that you could consult instead of just Googling a topic, and you’ll get the idea. E-Reference Shelf also includes our biggest databases of E-books, like eBrary or Virtual Reference Library. These databases have even more dictionaries and encyclopedias toward very specific subjects, so feel free to search through those, or just find them in the Library Catalog as usual.
We hope you like the new E-Reference Shelf; explore the page to your heart’s content! You can get to it by selecting E-Reference Shelf in the “Articles By Subject” menu on the homepage, or by clicking “Library Help” and going to the E-Reference Shelf link.