FLITE Course Guides
Course GuidesFLITE Course Guides
Course GuidesFor those students who do not live in Michigan - you should contact your local librarian about interlibrary loan services for books. There may be state-wide agreements to share books, and receiving books through ILL at your local library is a much more practical solution to getting books that you need.
For students who live in Michigan, request books through the Michigan E-Library (MeL) to have them delivered to your local college or public library. You can also use ILL services.
Books are one of the best ways to gather background, gain a general understanding of your topic and explore subjects in-depth. In addition to print books, FLITE provides access to over 110,000 electronic books. Books can be located in FLITE's online catalog. You can search by title, author, keyword, and subject.
Keyword searching is the most natural way of searching for most people. It allows you to brainstorm for possible words to describe your topic.
Subject heading searches are more precise; they are what we librarians call "controlled vocabulary". One of the better ways to determine the correct subject heading for a topic is to "back into it" with a keyword search. When you find an appropriate book using keywords, you can then check out the subject headings and search on those as well.
Check out this short (about 3 minutes) tutorial for more information:
E-Reference books are excellent starting points. FLITE's large collection of e-reference books includes general encyclopedias, subject encyclopedias, dictionaries, glossaries, and biographies. The social sciences, including social work, are well-represented in these resources.
Online reference resources can be found at the Online Reference Resources link on the Databases tab.
FLITE provides access to over 200,000 e-books through the Proquest Ebook (Ebrary) interface and the Springer-Link interface. FLITE also has access to a large collection of e-reference books.
You can locate e-books available through FLITE by searching the online catalog - the same way you look for print books. Search as you normally would and then limit your search by material type. You can also browse the Ebrary collection by searching "ebrary" as an author search or you can go directly to the Ebook Central.
You need to create a personal account in the Ebook databases in order to bookmark, highlight, and add notes to ebooks.
If you would like to download an entire ebook, I recommend the app Bluefire Reader for reading the books.
Using E-Books
When you locate an e-book in the catalog, click on the link that says "connect to an electronic resource". If it is an Ebrary title, the book will open in the QuickView. You can read and search the book in this view. However, you will need to create a free account in order to save, print, highlight, take notes, or save books to your bookshelf.