Library Services
Aggregator Search Tool
Find articles, books, journals, media, news, and more through the powerful AggreGator search tool.
Help with Research
For in-depth help with research, especially with senior projects, schedule an appointment with one of our Research Librarians.
Schedule an Appointment With Doug Anderson
Schedule an Appointment with Andrew Miller
Schedule an Appointment With Tressa Snyder
Consultations can be in person or via Google Meet. We need 48-hour notice to schedule a meeting. Please tell us about your topic when you schedule a consultation.
Please use your @allegheny.edu account when setting up an appointment.
If you have questions about research assistance, please email research.instruction@allegheny.edu.
Types of Open Access
Gold Open Access
“Gold” open access refers to journals in which all articles and content are open access — available to anyone on the internet without any subscription fees or sign-in. These journals are either supported by their organizations or funded by fees charged to the author or institution to cover organization, review, formatting and archiving expenses.
Directory of Open Access Journals
Green Open Access
“Green” open access occurs when the publisher of a subscription journal allows the author to keep the non-commercial rights to his/her article so it can be posted in open internet archives. Archives may be institutional repositories such as Allegheny’s DSpace or discipline-specific archives maintained by scholarly associations. In some cases, the publisher requires that open access in the archives be delayed for 6 to 12 months.
This site tracks current open-access related publisher and journal policies.
Hybrid Open Access
“Hybrid” open access means that one or more articles in a subscription journal may be open to anyone on the internet even though all the rest of the content is available only to people and institutions with paid subscriptions. Anyone who can discover these open access articles can use them. This is better than a closed subscription journal but makes the freely-accessible articles hard for faculty and students to know about. These journals often offer their authors a choice of paying the fee to make their article freely accessible or leaving it behind the subscription barrier. American Chemical Society, for instance, calls this their “Author’s Choice” program.
AggreGator Guide
AggreGator searches through all the content owned by and accessible to Allegheny College from a single search box. However, some content from specialized databases may not be indexed in AggreGator. For subject-specific searching, it is best to use a specialized database. AggreGator search results will contain books, e-books, videos, and articles from journals, magazines, and newspapers.
For additional help with AggreGator, using a specialized database, or accessing library materials, contact Research and Instruction Librarians at research.instruction@allegheny.edu or make an appointment with a Research Librarian.
- Search for a specific book title by using quotation marks around the title.
- Open the Filters sidebar.
- Select Library Catalog and Book / eBook under Information Type from the Refine Your Search menu.
- The Advanced Search function can also be used to locate a book title.
- From the dropdown menus, select title and/or author.
- When searching for a known title, select Exact Match.
- When searching for authors, put the last name first.
- Use keywords related to the topic.
- Put quotation marks around a set of words to search for the words as an exact phrase.
- In this example, putting the phrase “television programming” in quotes will bring up results containing the phrase “television programming”
- somewhere in the text, rather than television and programming alone.
- Leaving the word “censorship” outside the quotation marks means that the word will not be considered part of the quoted phrase.
- To expand results, use similar words with OR (in capitals).
- The search broadcast OR cable (without quotes) will return items that contain either word.
- When combining another keyword or phrase with the OR statement, place parentheses around the group of words using OR.
- For example, using the combination censorship (broadcast OR cable) television, results will contain censorship and broadcast and television, OR censorship and cable and television.
- Searches often yield many results.
- Narrow the search results with categories under the Refine Your Search popout menu discussed previously.
- Results can be saved to a temporary folder which can be printed, emailed, or saved to RefWorks.
- Items in the temporary folder can be formatted in APA, MLA, or Chicago style, which can be used in your bibliography.
- Save results to RefWorks using the Export To menu.
