Topic Guides

Check out our quick guides for ALA, MLA, and Chicago styles; a cheat sheet on how to use RefWorks to do the heavy lifting; and links to some of the better online citation tools.

The Library Catalog, EZ-Borrow, and ILLiad are your friends when you're looking for books, CDs, DVDs, etc. The catalog will tell you if Ship owns the item, EZ-Borrow will check Pennsylvania libraries, and ILLiad will request a specific, known, item from the 5 libraries closest to us which own the item.

Need company data? Looking for competitive information? Market share? Financial data and company or industry outlook? Here's a basic process to follow.

eBooks: they're like books, but not as heavy. The library subscribes to some useful collections of eBooks and others are freely available online. When you can't get to the library building, you can get to these online.

Got a literature or composition assignment? Literary criticism resources will help improve your paper. Read what others have written about your topic and build in the shoulders of giants.

Want or need pictures or video to jazz up an assignment? We subscribe to several databases of high res images and we have loads of videos on VHS & DVD.

All the news that's fit to print, and more. Search full text databases by topic or browse a newspaper by date there's more than one way to find out what's going on in the news about the topic for your assignment.

A wealth of statistical information is available on both U.S. and international topics. While much of the material is freely available on the Internet, several library databases are also important data sources. The following guide will lead you to the most important general and specific sources for national and international statistics.

Selecting a topic to write about doesn't have to be difficult. Try selecting a topic about which your professor hasn't read before.