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Graduate Studies in Leadership (MA & PhD)

Graduate Studies in Leadership (MA &PhD)

This guide is designed for students in the leadership program. It offers an overview of library resources that support effective research. 

Library Services
  • Plan ahead! Please allow 2-3 weeks for ILL requests to be fulfilled.
  • PhD students may have up to 25 active requests at a time. Once an article is delivered it is no longer considered active.
  • MA students may have up to 15 active requests at a time.
  • Due to copyright regulations, the library can request a maximum of 5 articles from any single journal title per calendar year, with a limit of 1 article per specific journal issue.
  • Please note that eBooks cannot be requested through ILL due to licensing policies.

*Print items from Zondervan Library or accessed via ILL cannot be shipped to distance students. Please use your local library's Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service to access print materials.

 

Where do I find sources?

Where Do I Find Sources?

Here are some tips to help you effectively navigate the library catalog and databases to access books, eBooks, journals, and articles available through the Zondervan library.

The library catalog can be found on the main library page. The "Books and Media" search will allow you to search both eBooks and print books. All of the searching tips and tricks can be used to build a search in the catalog.

Databases are a premium tool for finding scholarly resources to support your research. Databases offer a myriad of ways to build and limit searches so you can find relevant sources quickly and efficiently. The searching tips and tricks will help you to become a proficient searcher who can navigate databases with ease.

eBooks can be found through searching the library catalog or specific databases featuring collections of eBooks.

Types of Sources
Primary Sources

Primary sources are original, firsthand accounts—published or unpublished—created at the time of an event. For information on where to locate primary resources, see the Grey Literature and Primary Sources section of this guide.

There’s no single source for all primary materials, but many organizations provide digital archives with varying detail and organization. Since metadata can be limited, take time to explore each archive’s structure and terminology. Some sources remain undigitized and require local access, but archivists can often assist—sometimes for a fee. Working with primary sources offers direct insight into the past, deepening research by allowing firsthand analysis.

Primary sources can include:

  • interviews
  • news footage
  • data sets
  • original research
  • speeches
  • diaries
  • letters
  • creative works
  • Oral records
  • Artifacts

Copies, translations, or transcriptions of primary sources still count as primary sources.

 

Build foundational knowledge through background reading and overview tools like encyclopedias, dictionaries, and websites (e.g., Wikipedia—with caution for academic use). As you learn key terms, figures, and contexts, your search skills will improve. Keep the historical time period in mind, communication was slower in the past, so don’t make your date filters too narrow.

For information on where to locate primary resources, see the Grey Literature and Primary Sources section of this guide.

Much like evaluating any type of source, you want to ask yourself a few questions:

  • Who was the author/creator?
  • When did he/she create the source and why?
  • Who was the intended audience?
  • What is the purpose of the source?
  • What was the context (historical, social, religious, political, etc.) in which the source was created?
  • Has the source been edited, translated, or altered?
  • What are the limitations of this source?
  • How does the account compare to that in other sources, both primary and secondary?
  • Consider the language used by the sources and whether meaning and/or context has changed?
  • What were the capabilities of the author/creator?
  • What are possible biases or assumptions of the author/creator?
Secondary Sources

Secondary sources analyze, interpret, or otherwise discuss an event, era, person, or topic in a manner that critiques or reviews the subject.

They can include:

  • Books
  • Journal articles
  • Textbooks
  • Biographies

Types of Secondary Source Publications:

  1. Scholarly - intended for academic use with specialized vocabulary and extensive citations. They are often peer-reviewed.
  2. Popular - intended for the general public and typically written to entertain, inform, or persuade.
  3. Trade - intended to share general news, trends, and opinions within a certain industry. They are not considered scholarly because they do not focus on advanced research and are not peer-reviewed, even though they are usually written by experts.

Dewey Decimal Classification

Dewey Decimal Classification

Zondervan Library uses the Dewey Decimal Classification (DCC) system for non-fiction materials in the Main Collection. By knowing the DCC # for specific disciplines, you can more effectively and efficiently search the collection. Morehead State University's Camden-Carroll Library has created a great website that provides an overview of the DCC.

The Dewey Decimal Classification System

Subjects: Leadership