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RELS-255: Research & Writing in Religious Studies

Finding Books

Discovering Books

Use Omni to discover books at Queen's Library. It is a searchable database that lists materials (books, journals, magazines, newspapers, videos, government documents, maps, microfilm and much more) found in all the libraries at Queen’s and at our partner libraries in Ontario.

Understanding Call Numbers

Call numbers in most academic libraries are based on the Library of Congress (LC) Classification system. This A to Z classification scheme organizes books by main subject, so that books on similar topics will be shelved together. Once you have located the book you want on the Library’s shelves, you can browse the shelves in the same area for additional books on your topic. Clicking "show on floorplan" provides information about the library, floor, and general area where the item is shelved.

Religious Studies is an interdisciplinary field with components in many areas. The following is a partial breakdown of the Library of Congress Subject classification for “Class B” that includes books on the subject of religion:

Religion itself is a broad heading and therefore has been broken down into narrower subjects. BL -- Religions, Mythology, Rationalism -- is broken down as follows:


 

E-Books

You can also search e-book subscription packages directly. The following collections are particularly useful for research in Religious Studies:

  • Scholars Portal
    The platform is designed to provide a single interface for accessing digital texts from multiple content providers. With a single search, you can find books from a variety of scholarly publishers.
  • Proquest Ebook Central
     Search and browse the full-text of books from scholarly Canadian and international publishers including Duke University Press.

This concludes this module called "Finding Books." We now turn out attention to finding articles using library databases.