This chapter teaches students how to use the MGU Library as an integrated research system rather than a collection of disconnected tools. Students will learn what each part of the MGU Library does, when each tool is most useful, how different library sections work together to support a research project from first question to final citation, and how to build a research path that moves intelligently through the library's resources in the right order.

By the end of this chapter, students should be able to enter any research project with a clear plan for which MGU Library resources to consult first, what each resource offers, and how to move from one resource to the next as their research deepens.

The MGU Library is not organized the way a bookstore is organized — by product category, with popular items near the front and everything else in the back. It is organized the way a research process is organized: by the kind of question being answered and the kind of thinking being supported at each stage.

To understand the MGU Library as a system, it helps to think about the stages of research and what each stage requires.

Understanding this progression does not mean you must follow it rigidly every time. Some projects require only a few stages. Some projects circle back through stages as the research question develops. Some projects start in the middle when a student already has substantial background knowledge. But knowing the stages helps you identify where you are in a project and which MGU Library resources are most useful at that moment.

The MGU Library includes the following primary sections, each of which is addressed in detail in this chapter:

The most common research mistake is skipping the orientation and navigation stages and jumping directly to source discovery. Students who skip orientation — who go directly to a database without building background knowledge first — often search with the wrong vocabulary, fail to recognize relevant sources when they appear, and misread what they do find because they lack context.

Students who skip navigation — who search without knowing which resources are most useful for their topic — spend far more time searching and find far weaker sources than students who consult a relevant guide before they begin.

The MGU Library Dictionary is the appropriate first stop when you encounter a term you do not fully understand, when you need to verify the precise meaning of a concept, or when you want to confirm that you are using a word correctly in a specific disciplinary context.

A dictionary gives you the definition, derivation, pronunciation, and usage of words and terms. In an academic library context, dictionaries serve a more specialized function than a general-purpose dictionary: they define terms as they are used in specific disciplines, fields, and bodies of knowledge.

The MGU Library Dictionary section includes:

General dictionaries. Standard reference dictionaries that define words in common academic and professional usage. Useful for everyday vocabulary, basic definitions, and spelling.

Subject dictionaries and glossaries. Specialized reference works that define terms as they are used in particular disciplines — medicine, law, philosophy, economics, literary criticism, psychology, biology, and many others. These dictionaries give you the technical meaning of a term, not just the common meaning.

Bilingual and multilingual dictionaries. Useful for research that involves materials in languages other than English, for translation verification, and for understanding how concepts are named and framed in different linguistic traditions.

Etymological dictionaries. Sources that trace the historical origin and development of words. Useful for understanding how concepts have evolved and for recognizing the historical roots of specialized terminology.

Use the MGU Library Dictionary when:

The MGU Library Encyclopedia is the appropriate second stop in most research projects. After you understand the key terms involved in your topic, you need a broader picture: the history of the concept, the major debates, the key thinkers and events, the current state of knowledge, and the connections between your topic and related topics. Encyclopedias provide exactly this.

An encyclopedia article gives you a structured, reliable overview of a topic written by a knowledgeable author and reviewed for accuracy. Encyclopedia articles synthesize what is known about a topic, organize that knowledge for a general or intermediate academic audience, and — in quality reference encyclopedias — cite sources and provide bibliographies.

The MGU Library Encyclopedia section includes:

General encyclopedias. Works that cover a wide range of topics across disciplines. Useful for initial orientation on almost any topic and for cross-disciplinary connections.

Subject encyclopedias. Works that cover topics within a specific discipline in depth. A philosophy encyclopedia, a legal encyclopedia, an encyclopedia of sociology, a historical encyclopedia, a science encyclopedia — each provides substantially more depth and disciplinary precision than a general encyclopedia for topics within its field.

Specialized reference encyclopedias. Works focused on a specific sub-field, period, region, or type of knowledge. An encyclopedia of African history, an encyclopedia of environmental ethics, an encyclopedia of public health — these provide expert-level overviews within very specific domains.

One of the most powerful uses of an encyclopedia is as a starting point for citation chaining. The bibliography at the end of a quality encyclopedia article points you to foundational sources. Those sources have their own bibliographies. Following this chain of citations from one source to the next is a well-established research strategy that quickly builds a strong source list. Chapter 22 of this textbook covers citation chaining in detail.

The MGU Library Reference section is distinct from both the dictionary and the encyclopedia. It is designed for a different research need: quick access to specific, factual information rather than definitions or extended conceptual overviews.

Reference pages compile structured, factual information in formats that are easy to consult without reading an entire text. They answer specific, bounded questions: What is the population of a country? What are the current legal standards for a practice? What were the dates of a historical event? What agencies regulate a particular industry?

The MGU Library Reference section includes materials such as:

Statistical tables and data compilations. Quick-access summaries of demographic, economic, scientific, or social data. Useful when you need to cite a specific statistic or establish a factual baseline for a research argument.

Chronologies and timelines. Organized records of events in a topic's history. Useful for establishing context, identifying turning points, and ensuring that your account of historical events is accurate.

Directories. Lists of organizations, institutions, agencies, professionals, or publications relevant to a field. Useful when you need to identify authoritative sources, experts, or institutional stakeholders on a topic.

Handbooks and manuals. Concise, authoritative overviews of established knowledge in a field. Handbooks summarize what is known, give standard definitions, and often include tables, formulas, methods, and references to foundational literature. They are particularly useful in scientific, technical, legal, and professional fields.

Almanacs and yearbooks. Annual reference compilations that summarize current events, statistics, and developments by year or topic. Useful for recent factual data and for tracking changes over time.

Style guides and citation manuals. Authoritative guides to citation formatting, writing conventions, and disciplinary standards. Useful for checking citation style requirements. Part VII of this textbook covers citation styles in detail.

The encyclopedia gives you a narrative overview: the history, debates, and significance of a topic. Reference pages give you structured data: specific facts, tables, lists, and compilations. Both are useful, but they answer different kinds of questions.

If you want to understand what the opioid crisis is, use the encyclopedia. If you want to know the overdose death rate per 100,000 people by state in a particular year, use a reference page or a statistical database.

The MGU Library Guides are among the most immediately practical resources in the library for students beginning a new research project. A guide does not give you content — it gives you a map.

A research guide (sometimes called a LibGuide, a subject guide, or a pathfinder) is a curated web page created by a librarian that tells you which databases are most useful for research on a particular topic or in a particular discipline; which search strategies work best for this field; which reference works and encyclopedias are most authoritative; which subject headings and controlled vocabulary terms apply; which journals are most significant in this discipline; where to find specialized primary sources, data sets, archives, or government documents; and where to get additional help.

A guide is expert advice in written form. When you consult a subject guide before you begin database searching, you benefit from the research knowledge of a subject librarian who has studied the literature of that field and knows which tools are most productive.

The single most important habit for using a guide is consulting it before you begin searching, not after. Most students look up a guide only when they cannot find sources on their own. By then, they have wasted search time, possibly with the wrong databases and the wrong vocabulary.

The MGU Library Tutorials section teaches research skills through structured instruction. Tutorials are different from guides: guides tell you where to go; tutorials teach you how to do what you need to do once you get there.

A tutorial is a step-by-step instructional resource that walks you through a specific skill or process with explanations, examples, and often practice activities. Library tutorials cover skills such as searching a library catalog using subject headings; using Boolean operators in database searching; constructing an advanced search in a specific database; evaluating sources using a standard framework; exporting citations to a reference manager; using interlibrary loan to request materials; finding and interpreting government data; reading and analyzing scholarly articles; creating a research log; and avoiding plagiarism through proper note-taking and citation.

Tutorials may be written step-by-step guides, short video demonstrations, interactive exercises, or combinations of these formats.

Guides tell you which tools to use. Tutorials teach you how to use them. These two resources are most powerful when used together.

Tutorials are most effective when you engage with the practice activities they include, not just read or watch passively. The goal of a tutorial is not to acquire theoretical knowledge about a tool — it is to build a skill you can apply. Skills are built through practice, not observation.

When you work through an MGU Library Tutorial, do the practice activities. If the tutorial asks you to perform a search, perform it. If it asks you to evaluate a source, evaluate it. The time invested in practice during a tutorial pays off significantly when you apply the skill to your research.

Tutorials are also valuable when something has gone wrong. If you have been searching a database for an hour and cannot find useful sources, one possible cause is a skill gap — you may not be using Boolean operators correctly, you may not know how to limit by date or source type, or you may not be using subject headings effectively.

Before concluding that no sources exist on your topic, check the relevant MGU Library Tutorial to confirm that you are using the tool correctly. Many failed searches are not caused by lack of sources — they are caused by search strategies that do not match how the tool works.

The MGU Library includes two additional sections that serve distinct but complementary functions: the Departments, which connect research to disciplinary expertise and provide pathways to specialized library support, and Malonicus Rex Educare, which provides structured course-based learning for research skills and information literacy.

The Departments section of the MGU Library organizes resources, guides, expert support, and specialized collections by academic department and discipline. Where a subject guide is a self-service navigation tool, the Departments section connects students to a richer set of disciplinary resources and, crucially, to expert human support.

Subject-specific resource collections. Resources organized by academic department — history, biology, nursing, business, literature, psychology, education, engineering — that are relevant to the research practices and source types of that specific field.

Departmental research guides. More detailed and discipline-specific guides than the general subject guides, often created in collaboration with faculty and tailored to the research practices of a specific department's courses and projects.

Research consultation services. Subject librarians associated with specific departments offer individual research consultations for students working on complex or long-term projects. A research consultation is a scheduled meeting in which a subject librarian helps you develop a search strategy, identify key resources, navigate specialized databases, and plan your research path. For students working on theses, capstone projects, or major research papers, a research consultation can save days of searching and produce significantly stronger source lists.

Course-embedded library instruction. In some departments, librarians work directly with faculty to provide research instruction within specific courses. If your course includes a library instruction session, attend it — the instruction is tailored to your assignment and your discipline.

Interlibrary Loan assistance. If you need sources that the MGU Library does not hold, the Departments section provides access to Interlibrary Loan services that can retrieve materials from other libraries. For specialized or rare sources that are critical to your research, ILL is an essential resource.

A research consultation is a professional conversation, not a tutoring session. The librarian does not do your research for you. They help you think through your research question, identify the right resources, develop effective search strategies, and plan your research path.

Malonicus Rex Educare is the MGU Library's structured learning platform — a set of organized courses, learning pathways, and instructional sequences designed to build research and information literacy competencies systematically.

Where tutorials teach individual skills and guides provide navigation for individual projects, Malonicus Rex Educare teaches broader competencies through structured sequences of instruction, practice, and assessment.

Research skills courses. Full instructional sequences on core research competencies — information literacy, source evaluation, database searching, citation and academic integrity, avoiding misinformation, and others.

Subject-specific learning pathways. Structured sequences of instruction tailored to the research practices of specific disciplines — history, health sciences, social work, and others.

Library orientation modules. Introductory sequences that teach new students how to navigate and use the MGU Library effectively.

Skill certification and assessment. Some Malonicus Rex Educare courses include assessments and certifications that verify research competency, which may be required by specific programs or pursued voluntarily.

The MGU Library also maintains course-specific pages that connect library resources directly to individual courses and assignments. When your instructor has worked with the library to create a course page, it is one of the most targeted and efficient resources available to you.

A course page for your specific course typically includes the databases most relevant to your course's research assignments; subject headings and search terms tailored to the course's topics; links to key journals in the discipline; guidance on the citation style required by the course; links to relevant tutorials for skills the course requires; and contact information for the subject librarian associated with the course.

Understanding what each part of the MGU Library does is valuable. Knowing how to build a coherent research path through those resources — moving from one to the next in an order that matches the development of your research — is the practical skill that this chapter has been building toward.

A research path is a planned sequence of resource use that takes you from initial orientation to final source list in the most efficient and productive order. No two research paths are identical, because no two research questions are identical. But all strong research paths share the same underlying logic: they match the right resource to the right stage of the research process.

The MGU Research Question Model gives you the framework for planning your path:

Each element of this model points toward the MGU Library resources most useful for addressing it.

To illustrate how this works in practice, consider a complete research path for a student working on the following research question:

A research path is a plan, not a constraint. As your research develops, you will often discover that your research question needs to be refined, a source leads you to a new angle on the topic, a key source is not available in the MGU Library, your topic is more interdisciplinary than you realized, or you have found abundant sources and need to narrow your scope.

The single most important argument for building a deliberate research path is its effect on source quality. Students who navigate the MGU Library systematically — using the dictionary, encyclopedia, and reference pages for orientation; using guides and tutorials for navigation and skill building; searching the catalog and databases with focused vocabulary and strategy — consistently find better sources than students who search without a plan.

For a topic you are currently researching, or for a topic from the list below, complete the following navigation audit using the MGU Library.

Topics (choose one if you do not have a current project): the psychological effects of social media use on adolescents; environmental policy and Indigenous land rights; the economics of universal basic income; the history of vaccine hesitancy in the United States; criminal justice reform and recidivism rates.

Using the MGU Research Question Model and the research path framework from Section 23.8, build a written research path for the following scenario:

Your research path should include:

Practice Source Evaluation: Evaluating a Research Guide

Research guides are tools, and tools can vary in quality. Before relying on an MGU Library Guide (or any library subject guide), it is worth evaluating the guide itself. The following questions apply the MGU Source Evaluation Model to a research guide.

Model Entry: Planning a Research Path

Citing MGU Library Resources in Your Work

When you use MGU Library resources in your research, you will rarely cite the guides, tutorials, or dictionary definitions themselves — these are navigation tools, not evidence sources. Your citations will be for the sources those tools helped you find.

However, there are situations where you may need to cite the MGU Library resources directly.

If you are defining a specialized term in your paper and the definition comes from a specific subject dictionary or encyclopedia, cite that source. This is most common in papers where precise terminology is important — legal writing, scientific papers, policy analysis.

This chapter has introduced the MGU Library not as a collection of separate tools but as an integrated research ecosystem — a set of interconnected resources that work together to support research from first question to final source.

Here is a consolidated map of the MGU Library resources covered in this chapter and their primary research functions:

All of these resources are most powerful when used in combination and in sequence. The MGU Library has been built so that each section prepares you for the next. Using the full ecosystem — not just the search box — is what transforms research from a struggle into a skill.

For additional help with any of the resources covered in this chapter, visit the MGU Library Reference Desk, consult the relevant subject department, or contact the MGU Library Tutorials section for step-by-step guidance.