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Depending on your topic, there may be a variety of types of sources you will want to consult.
This page focuses on where to find books and academic/scholarly/peer-reviewed journal articles.
The Library's catalogue (Omni) is where you should look to find books. Books continue to be an integral part of communication within the humanities and social sciences.
The Library's catalogue allows you to search:
The Library’s Find a Book page will help you learn to navigate the catalogue from identifying a relevant book to physically locating it in the book stacks.
The Library subscribes to many ebook collections. Search these collections of online books and view the text at your desktop.
Many, but not all, individual titles will be listed in the Library's catalogue.
Due to the current COVID-19 situation, Interlibrary Loan service for print items is not available. However, it is good to know that this service does exist and will return as soon as practicable.
In the event the Library does not have something in its collection, you can see if any other universities have what you’re looking for and request an InterLibrary Loan.
Databases are organized and searchable collections of information such as articles, newspapers, reviews, and datasets. Databases can be subject specific or multidisciplinary.
To identify the top databases recommended for your discipline by Waterloo librarians, consult the Library's Research guides.
The Library’s Find an article page will help you learn to search for articles including accessing a database and downloading a full-text .pdf.
Note that some databases are indexes. Indexes are a special type of database that contain only data about the article, not the article itself. You will usually be able to find the full-text version in another database.
Journals and articles can vary in quality. See the Evaluating sources section for information on how to judge the quality of a source.