When you open the Student Resource Center, the home page looks like this:
For a basic search, type in a topic in the "Find" box and click search. You can select what type of resources you would like to include in your results: magazine articles, newspaper articles, books and encyclopedias, biographies, radio and TV news transcripts, country reports, state or province reports, primary source documents, and/or photos, maps and flags. For a broad search and lots of hits, check them all. For less hits, just select one or two. In the example below, I typed in Ronald McNair, an astronaut who lost his life on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986, and then clicked on the "Search" button.
Notice this search produced 151 hits. That is a lot to have to go through, so there are ways to make the search more specific, reducing the number of hits.
Under "Filter results by" you will find the different types of resources you can limit your search to. By clicking on "Magazines", the hits were reduced to 33, a much more manageable total to browse through. Clicking on "Biographies" will produce only four hits.
You may sort your results by "Date Newest", "Date Oldest", or by "Relevance". If you are searching a current event type topic, you will want to see the most recent articles first, so sort by "Date Newest".
Now you're ready to look at some articles. If you click on the title, you will see the citation, an abstract (summary) of the article, subject headings, and other information. Reading the abstract can help you decide if this is an article that is relevant to your search.
Remember if you use this article in a paper, you will need to cite your source. For directions on how to cite using MLA format, go to the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL).
Sometimes you will have the choice to view it as a PDF file, and other times in HTML. The PDF will show you the article as it appears in the magazine, and the HTML will just have the text of the article. It really depends on what you prefer. You can make the text bigger on a PDF file, save a copy, and highlight it as you read. HTML is nice because you aren't distracted by all the other things on the magazine page. You can look at the PDF file of the above article here. Other information included here is the author, title of the magazine, date published, number of pages the article is, and the reading level.