Holman Library One Search

The library's One Search searches for resources in all of our databases at once and it returns books, book chapters, videos, and a range of articles from news, trade, and scholarly sources.

This can be a helpful way to get a sense of the scope of issues on a topic. It can also be a great tool to help you find a focus for your research.

For example, if I type in college OR "higher education" OR university AND "first generation students" (as in image below)

(Click on image to enlarge)

I get over 19,000 results on a range of topics, including:

• the impact of social class
• faculty roles, mentorship
• attrition and retention
• aspirations
• engagement
• underperformance
• identify
• Black first-generation students
• understanding faculty expectations
• parents
• friendship with other students
• academic citizenship
• and much more. 

I cannot address all these dimensions in my paper, but I can choose specific aspects of my broad topic to focus on.

Don't forget to use the limiters on the left of the search results. There you can limit to only what is accessible online (rather than in-print inside the library), as well as limit by source type, year, and much more. See the image below for an example of the options to limit.

(Click on image to enlarge)