 The Kirkwood Libraries provide access to over 200,000 eBooks online for student and faculty use. The eBooks we have are almost all academic type books rather than popular or leisure reading titles. Why use eBooks as part of your research? There are many things we like about our eBooks. First, you don't need a special app to read them. They can be read right from a browser on your laptop or tablet. Second, you can print or download and save the sections you want to use so you can read and refer to them offline. Third, with most titles you can search the full text of the book within the website. How do you find library eBooks? The simplest way to find library eBooks is to use the WorldCat search on the library's homepage. The default search, as it shows here, searches some of everything, including articles, print books, and eBooks. It doesn't actually search every single resource the library has access to, but it does search a lot at once. So if you want a specific format, such as eBooks, it helps to select it right from the start. Click on the eBooks tab, then enter your search terms. If you don't remember to click on the eBooks tab first, you can also select it as a filter once you're looking at your search results. What are the best ways to search for eBooks? Most often you'll have a topic you're researching, and you can use the keyword search to find relevant books. With eBooks, it's best to keep your keyword search fairly simple, using only two or three terms important to your topic, at least to start. For example, if I'm studying changes in turtle population size over time due to changes in the environment, I might keep it simple and just enter turtle population. Let's go over some basic search strategies when looking for eBooks. Search strategy one, check subject terms in your results. For the keyword turtle population as a WorldCat search, I don't get very many relevant results. There's one result here, an eBook titled decline of the sea turtles. It's at least related to my topic, so I'm going to click on the title to get into the record and see if I can find a better keyword term to try. I see here turtles plural rather than turtle as one of the subjects listed. Even that small change could affect my results. I don't see the word population or something with a similar meaning in the subjects, so I'm just going to rerun my search changing turtle to turtles and leaving in the word population. Just that change brings up four more books than my previous search, all possibly relevant to my topic. That leads us to search strategy two, broaden your search. Many times if your search isn't bringing up relevant results, you need to widen your view a little and broaden your search. I noticed the word conservation being used in some of my search results. Searching the keywords turtles and conservation is a more broad search than turtles population. You can think of it like this, the study of declining turtle populations would be just one part of the study of turtle conservation. So we rerun the search and now I have even more ebooks to choose from. Doing a broader search does not mean that you give up on finding information on your specific topic. It's just another approach to locating the right resources for your needs. Search strategy three, use the built-in filters in library databases. Library databases have what are called search filters. We actually used a filter earlier in this video when we selected ebooks before we ran the WorldCat search. Ebooks is a format filter. Other format filters are print books, articles, or videos. The publication date filter is another useful one. In WorldCat, the quick date filters limit results to the last five, 10, or 25 years. You can also enter a specific date range. Now that we have some ebooks to look at, we can easily search within each book. With Ebscohost ebooks, this is especially simple. Follow the button in WorldCat to view ebook. This will take you to Ebscohost or to another site like JSTOR or Project MUSE. The library has subscriptions to each of these, and they each have ebooks in their collections. If you're now in Ebscohost, select the PDF full-text view. In other platforms, you will be able to view, save, or print from a PDF file, and you can use Adobe's search feature to search within each chapter. But in Ebscohost, the search within tab is right above the front cover image. Click, and a search box appears where you can enter a word or phrase you want to locate in the book. In this example, I would probably start by entering population to see each mention of turtle population in this book. You may be thinking, this seems like more work than a Google search. It does take more time and thought to locate information this way. But the payoff is a depth of perspective from a dedicated and reliable authorship that is very difficult or often impossible to find in sources through a Google search. We're talking McDonald's burger and fries versus a homemade meal made with garden-fresh ingredients. And the quality of the information source, good or poor, will be reflected in the quality of your own writing. One more note. When using library databases, there are usually tools within each record that can be very helpful. For example, in Ebscohost ebooks, you can save or print sections of the books, copy and paste a citation in MLA or APA format, or grab a permalink so you can get right back to the book or back to a specific page within the book. Thanks for watching and good luck with your search for ebooks. If you have any questions or need some help at some point, don't hesitate to ask a librarian for help.