Dissertation Research in Education: Books & Reference Works

Speed Library has a growing collection of over 249,000 items including books, e-books, CDs, music CDs, sheet music, kits, cassette tapes, videos, and DVDs.   MICAL, the Library's Online Catalog (commonly called the OPAC), accesses the library’s holdings by author, title, subject, keyword, and phrase. 

Use Advanced Search if you want to limit your search by language, format, date, publisher or location

Keyword vs. Subject Searching - A keyword search looks for your search term(s) in the title, notes, table of contents and subject fields of the catalog record.  The subject search performs a search based on the approved and controlled vocabulary used in the catalog record subject field.  MC uses the Library of Congress Subject Headings as the source for approved subject headings.  A good tactic is to start with a keyword search, notice the records that are relevant, and note the subject headings in the record.  These are hyperlinked and can be used as a new search to retrieve more records.

See the MICAL HELP SHEET (TO BE DEVELOPED - keyword vs subject, limiting, sorting, holds, reserves, printing, etc) for additional suggestions and tips for searching in the online catalog.

All eBook collections are listed in the E-book Collections page.

If the College Library doesn't have the book or periodical article that you need, you can request that it be borrowed from another library through interlibrary loan.

Books: are usually received within 1-2 weeks through the mail and are generally at no cost.

Articles: generally take 2-3 days and because of the effort involved in locating and photocopying article requests, it is more common for libraries to charge.

Relevant Educational Leadership materials in the Dewey Decimal Classification System: