Chemistry 232

Finding Your Way

Books and Background Info

Journal Articles

Need more help?

Finding your way

Library, Information and Technology Services (LITS) provides library and technology support to the campus. Use our document Getting Around in LITS to tell you where to find people and places in our buildings. Many of the materials you may want to use for your classes are available online, but you will also need printed resources to do your best work. You may also want to Ask a Librarian for assistance. The science librarian is Sarah Oelker, and her office is next to the Reference Room on Level 4 of Williston Library.

The library also has a lot of online tools and tips for helping you with your research:
Writing and Citing Tools - links to lots of online writing and citing information, including how to get started with RefWorks bibliographic management software
RefWorks - the bibliography software purchased by MHC for student use.  You will need to sign up for this system from a computer that is on our campus network, in order to begin putting references in the system.
Inter-Library Loan (ILLiad) - our system for requesting books outside of the five colleges.  If you have not registered for ILL use yet, please click on the "New to ILLiad?  Sign up!" link on the page.  You will need the library barcode on the back of your OneCard in order to sign up, and please don't use the same password for this system as for your MHC email account.   

Books and other Background Information 

You have been asked to find primary resources, accounts of original research, for your assignment, but you will also need secondary resources, which are overviews, summaries of many studies, or other documents that will give you  background information and "the big picture" about the systems you are studying.  There are a few different ways to find information in books for your project.  One of those ways is to search the Library catalog.  Once you are in the catalog, you can choose from the links in the upper right to search Mount Holyoke alone, or All Five Colleges.  Note that you can request books at the Five Colleges libraries using the Request Item link present in the catalog's records for individual titles. 

When searching the catalog, or other book resources, you will find more results about broader topics like climate change, glaciation, and atmospheric chemistry than about the names of very specific things that appear in many systems, like calcium or sulfate ions.  Another thing to watch out for is that the same abbreviation often means different things in different fields, so you will probably want to spell out the full names of concepts you're looking for, when you search.

General works on geography have call numbers that start with G or GB, books on chemistry are in QD, and books on geology are in QE.  If you're studying effects or processes involving plants or animals, you may also want to look books in the QH-QL call number ranges.  TD contains books on environmental engineering, and TP has works on chemical engineering and chemical technology.  Books in Q through TP are on Level 6 in the Miles-Smith wing of the building, over the Information Commons. 

Here are a few reference books, located in the Reference Room on Level 4 of Williston Library, that might help you with background information on your topic:

QE5 O94 2000       Oxford Companion to the Earth

QE5 P55 1975       The Planet We Live On

QE26.2 C35 1981 The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences

RS35 .M524         Merck Index: An Encyclopedia of Chemicals, Drugs, and Biologicals

TD9 .E51992         Encyclopedia of Environmental Science and Engineering

TP9 .K54 1999      Kirk-Othmer Concise Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology

Journal Articles, AKA Primary Sources

GeoRef - GeoRef has citations to literature in the earth sciences going back to 1785, from all around the world.     

Web of Science - ISI Web of Knowledge and Web of Science index the most highly cited journals in many subject areas.  This is also an easy way to see who has cited whom.  This database can be hard to search-- try this Web of Science Guide from librarians at The University of Maine for more help.  Look for the MH Links buttons to tell you which things we own (and help you request the others via inter-library loan!) 

Science Direct - This database is the world of science according to one very large publisher, Elsevier.  Beware!  You will see lots of PDF files of whole articles in here, but nothing older than 1995.  Web of Science will give you a more balanced search with links out to older material and things from more publishers.  Science Direct is great for many geochemistry topics, though.

Need more help?

Try our Ask a Librarian page if you would like more assistance from the LITS liaisons-- it's a way to reach the entire Research and Instructional Support team.  You can also visit us at the reference desk in the library's main reading room.  You may want to speak with Sarah Oelker, the science librarian, and she can make individual appointments with students who need additional help.   You can find additional resources on the library's Chemistry Research Guide and Environmental Studies Research Guide as well.