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Resources for the Library Research Assignment

The tabs below will help you find resources for your library research assignment. They are labeled by the specific types of resources listed on your assignment.

OU Student Handbook

University Handbooks

To find sections from student handbooks that deal with your topic from universities other than OU, you can use Google's advanced search options.

  • Type your research topic into the first search box.
    • e.g. student handbook substance use
    • In the Site or Domain box, type in .edu
  • Click on "Advanced Search."
  • When the search results pull up, scroll through the results for something that interests you.​
  • Use online citation helpers like CiteThisForMe for the citation of your online source.

OU Libraries Databases

It might be difficult to find scholarly articles specifically about the OU student handbook policy you chose because scholarly researchers typically like to include more than one school in their research sample. To write about any of OU’s policies, researchers would have to look at OU’s specific policies and devise original research ideas they think would add value or new knowledge to the field/scholarly community. Also, in order to avoid a sampling error, most researchers will not study OU’s policy by itself because studying one school’s policy will not be a good enough representative of the population as a whole and will most likely result in a sampling error. What I recommend is not limiting your search on the libraries’ databases to just OU, and instead, use terms like universities, colleges, higher education, etc. The following databases will find quality sources for most education topics.

ERIC Tutorial Video

OU Regent's Minutes Digital Collection

For most student handbook policies, understanding the decisions behind the policy can be helpful, so I also recommend searching OU Libraries’ Regent Minutes Digital Collection. The Regent Minutes are primary sources that are kept as a record of the decisions that have shaped our University’s past, present, and future.

When you open a minutes document after you typed in your search terms, do a control (or command if you use a Mac) F search of the document for your student handbook policy. 

Screenshot of doing a command F search in a Regents Minutes online pdf document.

Videos

To find YouTube videos about your student handbook policy, you can the main topic of your policy followed by congressional hearing or interview or TedTalk as your search terms. For example, if you are writing about OU's hazing policy, you can use hazing congressional hearing as your search term.  

OU Libraries Video Databases

If you were not able to find a video about your student handbook policy on YouTube, you can try searching your policy on the libraries' video databases.

Popular Magazines

The publications listed below are some of the popular magazines the libraries subscribes to that will help you find two short articles about your student handbook policy.