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Research Guides

Research Guides are mini-websites created by Librarians. When you go to the Guides, you are on a different platform from Tripod and the Libraries' website, but the sites work together to highlight resources, provide guidance, and offer suggestions for your research projects. The Guides are shared by the TriCollege Libraries, so you'll see useful Guides created by Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford Librarians.

screenshot of TriCollege Libraries Research Guides homepage

There are different types of Guides. The first helpful thing to notice when you get to the TriCollege Libraries Research Guides homepage are the buttons beneath the search bar that will help you explore what the Guides have to offer.

Here are some examples:

Areas of Study

These guides highlight the most useful databases, journals and other resources that are "best bets" for starting your research, for example:

Topics

The Topics Guides are similar to the Areas of Study Guides, but they pull in additional guides of other types that are related to the given topic. For example, clicking on the:

  • Environmental Studies as a Topic brings up:
    • Small Growth Organizations
    • Water Resources
  • Art and Art History as a Topic brings up (among others):
    • Current Art Exhibitions
    • Iconography
    • Studio Arts after Graduation
    • Video Game and Interactive Narrative Studies
Course Guides

These guides are created for specific courses, pulling together the best library resources to support your assignments, for example:

How-To Guides

This is a rich section to explore! There are more than sixty How-To Guides about all sorts of things: