WR 327 Technical Report Writing: Finding Books & ebooks

Start your seach for books and ebooks in the Library catalog on the front page of the Library's web site.  You can search by keyword, title, author, subject heading, you name it.

Once you've entered your search terms and you get a list of results, you can focus your results to PSU Library books and ebooks.  First choose the PSU Library holdings scope.

On the right side of the screen, you will find filtering options for types of resources, subject headings, dates, online resources, etc.  In the Resource Type list, you will see an option for ebooks.

Subject Headings
Subject headings are standardized vocabulary terms that Library's use to describe the content of a book. As a researcher, they allow you to search library catalogs for materials on your topic when you might not have been able to come up with the right keywords.  

The 'Find books' pages in the engineering and science subject guides can give you some insight into good subject headings. Environmental Science and Management, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Engineering and Technology Management are but a few of the relevant subject guides available. 

An effective research strategy is to look at the detail information the library catalog provides. When you've searched the catalog with keywords and you've found a book that looks like exactly what you want, click on the book's title to see more details. In the following example, the search was <process improvement technical report>.

The " From Baldrige....." title looks good. Click on the title, and a screen with more details opens up. Look at the 'Subjects'.

In this example, let's say that <Total quality management> is what I'm interested in.  By clicking on that subject heading, and then refining my results to ebooks, I will get a list of all the ebooks the Library has on this topic.