Suggestions for Research in Penrose Library

Starting your topic:

The reference librarians and thesis advisors can help students decide on paper topics, narrow topics to a reasonable size, or help students locate materials in our library or in other libraries. Come to the library and meet with the reference librarians or set up an appointment for a student consultation by contacting the reference department.

Start your research early. The University of Minnesota has an Assignment Calculator to help manage time constraints.

Finding Material:

Librarians can also show you indexes and catalogs to journal articles, books & book chapters, government documents, bibliographies, and more. In addition, they can provide help in effectively searching the many electronic and print resources available.

When looking for books and collections begin with resources available in Penrose Library Catalog. For many topics, Penrose Library will have a sufficient amount of material for a research paper, and even for a thesis.

Penrose Library subscribes to electronic databases, most specific to a discipline. If you are not sure which databases would be best for your topic, or if you need help searching, ask a reference librarian.

Borrowing Outside of Penrose:

After working through Penrose begin searching Summit for books. Summit books will only take 2–3 days to arrive here. We can also order almost any journal article that we don’t own through Interlibrary Loan.

Plan well in advance so that you can get the information you need in plenty of time. Journal articles may take from two days to two weeks to arrive. Books borrowed through Interlibrary Loan may take over a month to arrive.

Back to Thesis help page