English 151

Welcome to the Library’s Online Research Website for ENG 151 students. We designed this site to help students do research online while the CSI Library is closed, and while courses are running online because of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Your professor may assign one, a few, or all of these course topics for your class. Each tab to the left contains a lesson, which will include text to read and video(s) to watch to help you use the tools you’re learning about. All of these lessons were designed with your ENG 151 class in mind.

This video literally walks through the CSI Library and shows you what we have and how to access books, ask research questions, and check out materials, among other things.

To get started, you may want to start here and review what’s on the CSI Library homepage and how to use it. Each lesson will ask you to consult a specific database or tool. If you forget how to find databases or where to search for a book, come back here and review these short videos.

This super short video shows you around the Library's homepage and how to get started using it for research.

This short video shows you how to find and use a research guide for a class discipline.

These databases are selected for use by students in ENG 151 classes. For videos showing how to use these databases, see the tabs on the left for instructional tutorials.

1. When you don't have a topic yet, you can use CQ Researcher to browse topics. Click BROWSE and you'll see a huge list of topics that the database has already curated for you. You can read articles from magazines, newspapers, and journals to get a taste of what people are saying about this topic. You might even find enough content to write your paper.

2. When you have a topic but don't have background information like a definition of your terms, a timeline of major events related to your topic, an overview of the people, places and things involved, or basic concrete facts about your topic, use Gale E-Books (formerly Virtual Reference Library) to look up your term. Use it the way you would use wikipedia (because wikipedia is an encyclopedia of entries, much like what this database provides!)

3. When you have a topic and background information ready to go, jump into Academic Search Complete. This database gives you advanced search tools so you can zero in on your focused research question. This database includes a lot of peer-reviewed (ie scholarly) articles, which you can limit to with the click of a button. See the video tab for instructions on how to use it. This database will be your biggest source of information for your paper.