What is a library database, anyway?

Library databases are typically:

• digitized indexes of citations to materials in a particular field of study, eg. engineering, law, biology, etc.
  
• those citations are typically to magazine articles, newspaper articles, journal articles, and sometimes book chapters, conference proceedings, government reports, and more. [Subscription-based computer science and engineering databases typically include citaitons to journal articles and conference papers].
• The materials referenced might be in copyright, out of copyright, or somewhere nebulously in between. Obviously, more recent stuff is generally copyrighted. The materials referenced may also be available free online or not; generally, material published by society publishers (like ACM) and commercial publishers (like Elsevier) is only available by paying a subscription fee. That's where the library comes in: we buy the materials for you (along with access to the databases). The library is funded with money from the campus (which comes in turn from state funding, student fees, etc) and is as vulnerable as any other campus service to funding cutbacks and budget crises. Unfortunately, publishers don't stop charging money even when that happens.
  
• The reason that for-pay library databases are useful is that they represent the collective, long-term effort to capture citations to literature in a particular area, often with human indexers manually going through journal table of contents and the like. Large-scale automatic efforts like Google Scholar are also useful, but they return different results because the indexing is done automatically of stuff available online, which isn't everything. Also they don't feature things like manually-added indexing terms, etc.
  
• For-pay library databases may or may not include the full text of the item to which the citation refers [they usually do not]; the item may or may not be available in any form to the person doing the search.
• We also have access to several digital libraries of materials; these can also be useful places to look if you know what you're looking for. For instance, the ACM digital library includes journals and conference papers published by ACM; the IEEE digital library includes journals and conference papers published by IEEE, and ScienceDirect includes online journals published by Elsevier, a commercial publisher. Note that these sources only have items from one publisher -- searching them does not guarantee complete results. By contrast, databases typically include items from many publishers.
• Particularly in the Computer Science field, there are also several free (online to all) databases of citations that are put together by other computer scientists. These include Citeseer, the DBLP, and Graphbib. Note these databases may refer to papers that are only available through our subscriptions -- for instance, to ACM papers.

So now what?

Therefore,there's a lot of steps involved in doing good research:

• figuring out what the question is
  
• figuring out what sort of source might have the answer to that question (a newspaper article, a book, a handbook?)
  
• figuring out where to look (e.g., I need books, therefore I shall check worldcat)
  
• figuring out if you have access to the best place to look (worldcat is free to all, hurrah!) [this can be more complicated than it sounds. The UCD library has access to ~500 databases, plus print stuff, plus the internet].
  
• searching in that place; figuring out how to best search for that question in that particular database (in worldcat, I can use LC subject headings! but I sure can't in google scholar); iterating your search until you find something, or not;
  
• rinse, wash and repeat for each possible database;
  
• figuring out if you can obtain your results (if the best result is a book in the Swedish national library, I'm going to have a tough time getting it; but hey, if this is for a person in Sweden, they might have better luck).

What is it? How do I find it?

Are you looking for....

• A journal article?
• A book?
• A conference paper?
• A preprint or unpublished paper?
• A government report?
• A patent?
• What if I already have the full citation for the item I am looking for?
  • If the item is a book, journal article, or conference paper: put the name of the journal, book or conference into Harvest, the UCD library catalog. This should tell you if we own the book, the journal that the article is published in, or the conference. If it's a print source, the catalog will tell you the call number of the item you are looking for. If it's a journal, and it's online, there will be a link to
• Help!