This guide is designed to be help with research assignments in Professor Harris's POL 233 course in the Winter 2022 term -- specifically to identify appropriate scholarly or academic tools and techniques for researching the policy analysis paper assignments.
The library catalog, accessible through our homepage, can be used to find out what print and online books are available to W&L researchers. Here are some suggestions.
If You Know a Book's Author or Title
Select Browse Search ( you may have to choose "Advanced Search" to see this) and then use the drop-down menu to:
If You are Searching for Books on a Topic
If you are using the basic "Simple Search" (or "Search Everything"), a drop-down menu will be activated which allows you to select "Books Only."
If you are using "Advanced Search," you can select "Books Only."
You can combine words or forms of words that appear in descriptions of books. Some examples:
Doctoral dissertations are not published books, but can be considered book-length scholarly studies.
W&L subscribes to a database which offers the complete texts of over 1 million dissertations and theses.
Described as "the world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses," this database contains over 2.7 million citations to dissertations and theses from around the world, dating back to 1861. About 1.2 million items are provided in full-text (PDF) form.