For questions about placing new material orders contact the Collection Development Librarian. Please feel free to contact if your item does not arrive by the date you have indicated on the request form.
For Interlibrary Loan requests, please see Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery.
Materials that have already been ordered will appear in the online catalog. When they are available for borrowing, the record will provide this information. If you have requested notification, you will receive an e-mail when the item is available. If you have requested that an item be held, you will receive and e-mail asking you to pick it up at the Circulation Desk.
Schaffer Library is pleased to present to all Union College students, faculty and staff access to the digital edition of the New York Times. The Academic Pass provides you with full access to NYTimes.com and the NYTimes.com smartphone and tablet app. Register for The Academic Pass for full access to NYTimes.com. More information available here.
Login to Chronicle of Higher Education, where you can register for a free account to access full text articles online and share/email. To register, at the home page, click "log in" and you'll be prompted to create an account.
1: Once on the page, please use your @union.edu email for registration.
2: Create your own password: 5-15 characters long that contains at least one number. May not contain spaces, +, % or &.
3: You will receive and email confirmation from DownJones with subject "The Wall Street Journal Order confirmation".
4: You are set! You can also use apps to link to your subscription.
Access trouble? 800-568-7625 OR support@wsj.com
Get started early - The 10 week trimester goes by quickly.
Be organized - Manage your files and data with the understanding you will be accessing them in the future and possibly sharing them with others. Name your files and folders to represent the content and version of your work.
Use Refworks - A citation manager that will save time. A few mouse clicks will produce your bibliography. Most of our databases and search tools allow you to export a citation directly to Refworks. You can create an account now; ask a librarian for assistance
Enjoy yourself - Investigate things that are of interest to you. Research is an exploratory and iterative process. Identify a topic or research question; gather relevant, accurate and timely information; evaluate the quality and possible bias of that information; then processing what you've learned in a way that addresses your original question. If you realize your original question was not framed well it may mean you have learned something. Continue. Finally, put it in writing, tell others what you have learned.
Contact a Librarian for assistance. Our goal is to provide you with most appropriate scholarly content, the tools to access it, and assistance at any point along the way. You will find a librarian at the Reference Desk between 9am and 6pm, weekdays and 10-4 on Sunday. You can also schedule an appointment by e-mail: reference@union.edu.
Identify appropriate resources - The following search engines will help you locate books and articles (as well as reference sources and other materials). In general monographs (books, ebooks) are a thorough treatment of a research topic while journal articles are more specific and limited in scope.
Primo - a "discovery layer" that searches across most of our licensed content (articles, monographs). You may find Summon delivers a large number of results, especially for a general topic, i.e., women and history. Narrow the results by refining your search terms or selecting facets in the left-hand column. Select the "Peer-Review" facet if you are dong scholarly reseach. Summon has licensed access to a lot of our content that Google Scholar does not.
Google Scholar - Google Scholar does not include our library catalog or all of the articles included in Summon. We can say the search is narrower but deeper because Google indexes the full text of digital content. Combined with the power of relevance ranking this may return useful results buried in Summon. If this were fishing, Google Scholar's net is smaller but goes deeper.
Specific Databases (A-Z) the library provides access to approximately 350 databases on a variety of topics. Some databases are considered "all topic" while others are more specific (Gender Studies, World War II). Some contain a type of publication (Reference, Newspapers). Searching via a specific database may provide a more precise search by taking advantage of it's own unique features.
Library Catalog the library's books, music, DVDs and more. You can renew books, request new ones and see what new titles the library has acquired.
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