- Home
- Welcome
Welcome to the Zondervan Library!
Welcome to the Zondervan Library web site. I often think of it as the library's "other front door." We hope that you visit the library regularly through both doors.
Libraries change daily – with resources added and removed. Libraries today provide more than what you can see. That's true of the Zondervan Library. Not only are there unprecedented tools for discovering information from the Library's Online Catalog to WorldCat, there is a vast range of resources available online with thousands of journals, magazines, newspapers, books, and recordings available through the Library.
You may already rely on the extraordinary tools and new ways that Google, Google Scholar and Google Books can help you discover a vast range of information in seconds. With the immense amount of information available online today, why do you need a library? The truth is, as broad as its reach, Google doesn't provide access to the entire universe of information. And, the majority of resources needed for research and scholarly pursuits are not available for "free" via the Internet. Google Scholar illustrates this – which you may have experienced. With Google Scholar you can discover thousands of research-based articles and documents but you will quickly find that many of these are available only by subscription. Zondervan Library provides access to subscriptions that include thousands of journals and magazines. These are readily available online – from on- or off-campus. You can even set up Google Scholar to identify the journals for which you can get the full article online through the library's subscriptions. The List of Journals, Magazines, and Newspapers on the Zondervan web site provides a searchable list of what journals and magazines are available to you.
Of course, the Zondervan Library doesn't subscribe to everything. When we don't provide access, that's where a very valuable service called Interlibrary Loan comes in. There's not much that we can't get for you from other libraries given enough time -- but you'll need to plan ahead. One of the great things about the powerful search or discovery tools available today is that coupled with Interlibrary Loan and other means, we can obtain most of what you need.
While the truth of everything one reads in a book, magazine, or newspaper cannot be assured, there are editorial and social checks and balances in published resources that generally provide more reliability than what one often finds through a general web search. The Library strives to acquire resources with quality and purpose. Google is a valuable tool, but it does not provide all or perhaps even the best information you may need. There is no credibility implied or endorsed by Google to the information that it retrieves for you. It simply returns everything it finds on the web arranged by algorithms that attempt to determine relevance. When you need trustworthy information, give more attention to the kinds of resources available through the Library and through refined discovery tools like the Online Catalog, Academic Search Premier and WorldCat.
Many of these search tools that the Library provides are called databases. (We'll award a prize to whoever comes up with a better name for them!) These databases reveal the contents of many journals and magazines with specialization in many academic areas. We call the database Academic Search Premier an essential resource because it is very often the place to begin when looking for a relevant article. It indexes over 8,000 journals/magazines across many topics and academic disciplines and provides the full-text to over 4,500 of those journals/magazines.
Deciding on which discovery tool to use, how to construct an effective search, and how to interpret results critically can be challenging. That's where librarians come in. We're here to gladly assist you with identifying the best tools to make discoveries and to help you understand the results. Be sure to visit the Library's Research Guides which suggest good resources with which to begin your research.
In this age of highly effective discovery tools (which will only continue to improve), we in the Zondervan Library are increasingly mindful of the need to inform, guide, and teach students and other library users about the vast resources available so that you will become capable information discoverers and evaluators. We're constantly learning ourselves. We hope that you'll feel welcome to call upon us – in person, via email or the phone. Ways of communicating with us are identified via Ask-A-Librarian. We want to combine the great technologies available to library users with a person to help navigate them. We believe that even with the many shelves of resources in the library and the thousands of resources online, our staff is the most important resource. You, as students, faculty, staff and other library users, are the reason we are here. Call on us!
Dan Bowell
University Librarian
