GEOL 142: Home

Burgess Shale, B.C.  Nachosan, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Depending on your topic you'll probably want to do a bit of background research on the Internet. For example, if you are working on a presentation on the earth's major ice ages and their impact on life on earth you'll first want to determine what each of the major ice ages was. A quick Google search leads to multiple sites which will tell you the following were the 5 major ice ages:

Huronian

Cryogenian

Andean-Saharan

Late Paleozoic

Quaternary

From here we can take one of these ice ages and enter it as a keyword search along with any other terms we want to into Discovery. For example: late Paleozoic ice age is the first search term and life on earth is the second. Keep in mind that library databases are a little different from Google and you'll want to use keywords and short phrases in your search rather than questions and sentences.

If we are investigating all of the ice ages it's best to search each ice age one at a time.

To begin searching go to  http://library.selkirk.ca. Click on Advanced Search. In the search boxes enter your search terms and click search:

On the search results page the most relevant resources will appear at the top:

In the above example the first result is an eBook. Click on PDF Full Text to access the book.

You may find you'll have to adjust your search terms depending on if you can find relevant resources. You may want to try late Paleozoic glaciation and life

To limit your search results to Academic Peer Reviewed  articles, under the Limit To menu on the left side of the search results page click on Academic (Peer Reviewed) Articles.

Visit the help desk or schedule an appointment with a reference librarian to discuss your research. See our contact page for details.