Welcome to our collection of databases, covering many academic and practical subjects. If you have questions about how to use them, please come by or call us at the Reference Desk, 246-0520. From home, you will need your Thomas Ford library card number to log into any of these great resources.
Use our database Subject Guides if you are unsure where to start.
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Academic OneFile
Designed for college and graduate students, Academic OneFile answers the call for a sophisticated, current and easy-to-use database for serious research. Home to more than 10,000 journals covering everything from science and technology to social science and the humanities, Academic OneFile delivers high quality literature that researchers can trust.
Agriculture Collection
With broad coverage of agriculture and its related fields, Agriculture Collection provides texts from nearly 200 journal titles. Articles span the industry from practical aspects of farming to cutting edge scientific research in horticulture.
Ancestry
In Library Only – The most asked for collection of genealogical databases. Many state, national, and international sources are included.
Antiques Reference
P4A Antiques Reference collects data from over 140 U.S. auction houses to provide you with detailed information, photographs and values for a variety of antiques, collectibles and fine art that are added daily.
Biography in Context
Biography in Context combines Gale biographies with related full-text articles from magazines and newspapers, thousands of images, and links to vetted websites. Search for current or historic figures based on name, occupation, nationality, ethnicity, birth/death dates and places, or gender, as well as keyword and full text. Included are nearly 160,000 concise and in-depth biographies drawn from subject encyclopedias published under the highly respected Macmillan, Scribner and Gale reference books.
Books and Authors
Books & Authors offers new ways to explore the endless possibilities and combinations of books, authors, genres and topics. Combining over 140,000 titles, 50,000 authors, and thousands of read-alikes, award winners, and librarians’ favorites lists, Books & Authors helps bring readers and literature together.
Business & Company Resource Center
Business and Company Resource Center is a fully integrated resource bringing together company profiles, brand information, rankings, investment reports, company histories, chronologies and periodicals. Search this database to find detailed company and industry news and information.
Communications and Mass Media Collection
From marketing professionals to students studying for advanced degrees in linguistic theory, Communications and Mass Media Collection provides current information from more than 100 journals focused on all aspects of the communications field. Key subjects covered include advertising and public relations, literature and writing, and linguistics.
Computer Database
Use Computer Database to find computer-related product introductions, news and reviews in areas such as hardware, software, electronics, engineering, communications and the application of technology.
Criminal Justice Collection
Lawyers, law enforcement officers, paralegals, and students interested in criminal proceedings will appreciate the Criminal Justice Collection with over 150 journals dedicated to law enforcement and court issues.
Culinary Arts Collection
The Culinary Arts Collection, including articles from 150 major cooking and nutrition magazines, is a great source for recipes, restaurant reviews, and food industry information.
Diversity Studies Collection
Appropriate for social science, history and liberal arts coursework, Diversity Studies Collection explores cultural differences, contributions, and influences in our global community. This set includes approximately 150 interdisciplinary journals.
Educator’s Research Complete
Educator’s Reference Complete is a source for more than 450 full-text academic journals, hundreds of full-text reports, and many premier educational reference sources. Included content focuses on educational principles, child development and psychology, and best practices in education.
Environmental Studies and Policy Collection
Covering the field of environmental issues and policy, Environmental Studies and Policy Collection includes nearly 200 journals, providing perspectives from the scientific community, governmental policy makers, and corporate interests.
ERIC via Firstsearch
ERIC indexes and abstracts journals and research reports about education. Call the Thomas Ford Reference Desk for a user name and password.
Fine Arts and Music Collection
With more than 100 full-text magazines and journals, Fine Arts and Music Collection provides resources to support research in areas such as drama, music, art history, and filmmaking.
Firstsearch
Firstsearch is a database host that provides Illinois residents free access to Medline, ERIC, and WorldCat databases. Call the Thomas Ford Reference Desk for a user name and password.
Gale Virtual Reference
Search many specialized encyclopedias simultaneously to find authoritative articles for many topics. These sources can be very helpful for students doing homework, business people needing industrial background, or readers interested in historical facts. Try this source as a scholarly alternative to the Wikipedia. Users from home need their library card numbers to log in.
Gardening, Landscape and Horticulture Collection
Homeowners, landscape architects, and biotechnologists will find nearly 50 useful journals about gardening, landscaping, and horticultural science in the Gardening, Landscape and Horticulture Collection.
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies
Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues impact society on many levels, from the global and cultural to the individual and personal. Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies includes nearly 40 journals aimed to provide balanced coverage of this aspect of our culture, covering such topics as gender studies, family and marital issues, and health aspects.
General OneFile
Gale’s General OneFile is a comprehensive periodical resource that puts more than 60 million articles at your fingertips with a single search query. More than 11,000 titles and backfile coverage from 1980 make this a powerful source for virtually every popular, business and professional topic.
General Science Collection
Composed of over 200 journals — from highly specialized academic journals to general science-focused magazines — the General Science Collection provides coverage of all scientific endeavors, including such topics as particle physics and quantum theory, advanced mathematics, and biotechnology.
Grolier Online Lands and People (Away from the Library)
Grolier Online presents Lands and Peoples, a geography resource for students.
Health & Wellness Resource Center
Health & Wellness Resource Center provides instant access to carefully compiled and trusted medical reference materials. It includes nearly 400 health/medical journals, hundreds of pamphlets, over 700 health-related videos from partner Healthology, Inc., and articles from 2,200 general-interest publications in addition to a broad collection of Gale reference titles.
Home Improvement Collection
Accessing nearly 100 home improvement-focused titles, Home Improvement Collection aims to help home owners and professional builders alike. Coverage includes such topics as architectural techniques, tool and material selection, and zoning requirements.
Hospitality, Tourism, and Leisure Collection
With current and relevant content from over 500 industry journals, Hospitality, Tourism, and Leisure Collection provides well-rounded coverage of both the historical and current state of affairs in the hospitality and tourism field, while also allowing for focused study of specialized aspects of the industry, including cultural aspects of travel, leisure activities, and economic aspects of tourism.
Information Science and Technology Collection
Information Science and Technology Collection, comprising content from nearly 100 leading industry journals, provides current and accurate information in the fields of library and information science and technology. Information professionals and other knowledge workers — from the librarian to the information architect — will find appropriate and useful material in their areas of expertise, including such topics as information infrastructure, data processing techniques, metadata architecture, and library management.
Informe
Informe is a Spanish-language collection of full texts of articles from hispanic magazines. Business, health, technology, culture, and current issues are among the subjects covered.
InfoTrac Newspapers
InfoTrac Newspapers provides full-text access to over 100 national and regional newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune (March 2006-current) and the New York Times (1985-current). Search articles by title, headline, date, author or section.
Insurance and Liability Collection
Protection of assets is a concern for all. From the individual property owner to the multinational corporation, all have a vested interest in ensuring the retention of their assets, physical or intellectual. Insurance and Liability Collection, comprised of nearly 40 journals, takes a broad view of this multimillion dollar industry, covering such topics as labor relations, mortgage banking, legal issues, and more.
Kids InfoBits
Kids InfoBits is a database developed especially for beginning researchers in Kindergarten through Grade 5. Featuring a developmentally appropriate, visually-graphic interface, the most popular search method is moving from a broad subject to a narrower topic using a subject-based topic tree. The curriculum-related, age appropriate, full-text content is from the best elementary reference sources and magazines. This database covers geography, current events, the arts, science, health, people, government, history, sports and more.
LegalTrac
Students, law school faculty and legal researchers will find the legal publications that they need in LegalTrac, including major law reviews, legal newspapers, bar association journals and international legal journals. Each title included is selected on the basis of criteria provided by a special advisory committee of the American Association of Law Libraries. LegalTrac also contains law-related articles from over 1,000 additional business and general interest titles.
Literature Resource Center
Find up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism, and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world in Literature Resource Center.
Litfinder
Covering world literature and authors throughout history, LitFinder contains literary texts, including over 150,000 full-text poems, as well as short stories, speeches, and plays. For students or patrons seeking a deeper view into literature, LitFinder also includes secondary materials like biographies, images, and more! From Shakespeare’s sonnets to contemporary poems by Donald Hall or short stories from Edgar Allan Poe, this collection provides literature to your computer.
Mango Languages
Mango is the fast, easy, and most effective way to learn to speak a foreign language!
Medline via Firstsearch
Medline indexes and abstracts journals in the field of medicine. Call the Thomas Ford Reference Desk for a user name and password.
NoveList Plus
Tell Novelist a title you enjoyed and it will suggest similar reading. You may search for novels by subject, author, and title. Book book club discussion guides and essays are also available.
Nursing and Allied Health Collection
All aspects of the nursing profession from direct patient care to health care administration are covered in Nursing and Allied Health Collection. Including nearly 400 titles, this collection’s current and authoritative content is useful to both professionals already working in the field as well as students pursuing nursing-focused careers.
Opposing Viewpoints
Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center is a one-stop source for information on today’s hottest social issues. Drawing on acclaimed series published by Greenhaven Press and other Gale imprints, this resource features viewpoint articles, topic overviews, full-text magazine, academic journal, and newspaper articles, primary source documents, statistics, images, podcasts, and links to Websites.
Physical Therapy and Sports Medicine Collection
Both researcher and practitioner alike will find relevant, authoritative content in Physical Therapy and Sports Medicine Collection, which includes over 100 journal titles. Topics include proven treatment techniques and experimental research theses.
Pop Culture Collection
Pop Culture Collection is made up of 100 subject-appropriate full-text periodicals that provide useful information for students in social science, history, art, or liberal arts courses.
Psychology Collection
With instant access to 200 subject-appropriate full-text periodicals, Psychology Collection gives individuals a basic understanding of the study of the mind, emotions, and human development.
Religion and Philosophy Collection
With 250 subject-appropriate full-text periodicals included, Religion and Philosophy Collection provides ample resources for students of the world’s faiths and how they impact daily life and international relations.
Science in Context
Science in Context provides thousands of science topic overviews, experiments, biographies, pictures, and illustrations from articles from over 200 magazines and academic journals and links to high-quality web sites. The database covers curriculum-related science topics and offers teachers an easy-to-use tool to identify content directly correlated to state and national standards.
Small Business Collection
Designed for business students and entrepreneurs, Small Business Collection provides management insights, tips, strategies and success stories. Users will find 250 subject-appropriate full-text periodicals.
Small Business Resource Center
Search Small Business Resource Center to learn how to start, finance, or manage your small business. Resources include sample business plans, “how to” guides, links to helpful websites, and thousands of journal articles.
U.S. History Collection
U.S. History Collection provides well-rounded coverage of both the current thinking and events in US History, as well as scholarly research in the field. This compilation of over 40 journals provides robust and balanced coverage of this field, useful both to the novice historian as well as to the advanced academic researcher.
U.S. History in Context
U.S. History in Context provides integrated access to over 4,000 historical (primary) documents, articles from more than 30 reference titles, and over 110 full-text journals covering themes, events, individuals and periods in U.S. history from pre-Colonial times to the present. The material also includes citations from over 180 additional history journals from the Institute for Scientific Information’s Arts and Humanities Citation Index.
Vocations, Careers and Technical Education Collection
Choosing the right career can be a daunting and high stakes task. Finding an appropriate institution for learning, seeking jobs, and maintaining a career are all topics covered by Vocations, Careers and Technical Education Collection. Offering content from nearly 400 journals, this collection provides content from general career guides to highly specialized industry journals.
War and Terrorism Collection
War and Terrorism Collection is a definitive collection for students of history, social science and current events, who will gain valuable insight to conflicts and their cause as well as their impact on a global scale. References include 100 subject-appropriate full-text periodicals.
Western Springs Newspaper Obituary File
Citations to obituaries in Western Springs newspapers between 2003-2007. Incomplete.
Wilson OmniFile
Every article is full-text in this multidisciplinary database of articles from about 2,700 magazines dating back to 1994. PDFs of original print editions are available for many of the articles.
World Book Discover
World Book Discover is middle school encyclopedia with a dictionary, atlas, and other tools to help students with research.
World Book Enciclopedia Estudiantil Hallazgos
World Book Enciclopedia Estudiantil Hallazgos is an elementary school encyclopedia in Spanish with informative articles, maps, photos, news from Spanish language newspapers, and learning activities.
World Book Kids
World Book Kids is an elementary school encyclopedia with a standard search box and a colorful menu for finding articles, maps, photos, science projects, games, and learning activities.
World Book Reference Center
World Book Encyclopedia has been a trusted resource for students since 1917. Its easy-to-use online resource center supplements articles with historic documents, electronic books, tutorials, images and video.
WorldCat via Firstsearch
WorldCat is an international catalog showing the holdings of its library members. Use Worldcat to find titles not held in our local SWAN catalog. Call the Thomas Ford Reference Desk for a user name and password.
WorldCat via the Web
WorldCat is easy to use and requires no library card nor password. An advanced search provides almost as many ways to search as via Firstsearch.
World History Collection
With over 40 scholarly journals, World History Collection provides information and perspective on trends in world history and the study of history.
World History in Context
World History in Context is a comprehensive collection of entries from award-winning reference books, full-text articles from leading scholarly publications, maps, photographs, and primary sources for the study of world history. From ancient Europe to Latin America and from the Far East to the Renaissance, world history curricula are supported with over 1,800 primary sources, over 27 reference titles and more than 110 journals.
