If you must use Google...try Google Scholar

While I strongly encourage you to use the library's databases and online resources (after all, your tuition helps to pay for them - you might as well get your money's worth, right?), many people still prefer to use Google to find resources for essays and assignments.

As you will quickly discover, a search for almost any topic in Google will bring back 10's if not 100's of thousands of records. Then your work begins: which ones are scholarly, credible resources that are based on quality research and which are primarily opinion pieces (not generally suitable as a resource at the university level).

INSTEAD, try Google Scholar which will only retrieve scholarly, academic resources. You can either go to Google Scholar directly (http://scholar.google.ca) OR go to www.google.ca and click on the 'More' tab, then select 'Scholar' from the list.

Once at the Google Scholar page, select the 'Scholar Preferences' link. On the Preferences page, you will need to select Trent University as your Library Link (type 'Trent' in the search box, hit the 'Find Library' tab and select Trent from the list) and click on the 'Save Preferences' button at the top or bottom of the page.

Now, once you search for your topic, you will see links beside many of the item entries that will either take you directly to the fulltext of the item or to the 'Get it @ Trent' option to access it in one of our online resources.

Google Scholar still isn't a perfect search option for a number of reasons: very large number of results retrieved for most topics, many of which may not be available in our library; search function isn't as refined as in many of the library's databases, etc.

However, if you must use Google, try Google Scholar instead!