The Whittemore Library's dedicated professionals are continuously busy, obtaining, curating and ensuring access to the high quality resources that FSU students need to thrive in their programs. Below, we'll highlight where the various types of materials that we provide (books, articles, etc.) can be found, focusing on the library website.
Scholars most often communicate about their work as well as collectively record their discipline's progress of knowledge creation by publishing articles in academic or scholarly journals. Sometimes they publish opinions, letters, and brief synopses of current work being done in their field, but they most often publish the results they have obtained from their research. Many of these research articles are 'peer-reviewed', which means the articles are checked and critiqued (as a form of 'quality control') by several of a researcher's peers prior to being officially published.
'Grey Literature' is a term for documents that are academic and scholarly, but NOT peer-reviewed.
Several types of what is considered 'Grey Literature' (e.g.: Reports, Working Papers, Theses, Dissertations, etc.) can be found in most of our databases - there will tend to be several ways to limit results based on the document format, rather than a 'Grey Literature' limiter.
'Trade Journal' content (professional magazines with content useful to professionals working in a field, but not research articles) can be found in the results sets of many of our subject-specific databases if you choose limits such as 'magazines', or sometimes if you choose 'academic journals' but NOT the 'peer-reviewed' limiter.
You have several options for where to find basic,factual information (from sources such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, handbooks), depending on which format (such as print books versus digital sources online) you may prefer.
Below you will see your options for finding academic, scholarly books (also known as 'monographs'). Remember: if you can't find a needed book at FSU, you can request it from the Minuteman Network, or from libraries outside the MetroWest area via our free inter-library loan service.
We have access to two very good streaming video databases both of which have a wide variety of content, though our video collections are academic, mostly documentaries and instructional films. Some of our other databases also have some video content (again, educational).
To find news you can use, you have several options: