Databases & Resources
Britannica School is Encyclopedia Britannica's online database for schools. The site offers substantial research support for elementary, middle, and high school students. Britannica School, Britannica Academic, and Britannica Library are widely recognized as the ultimate reliable sources for research. Content on the site is differentiated for elementary, middle, and high school reading levels.
Gale In Context: Middle School is an online research database designed for middle school students. It provides age-appropriate content on a wide range of subjects, including history, science, literature, and social studies.
Gale eBooks
Gale eBooks provides access to a vast collection of reference materials and encyclopedias and related reference sources are authored by trusted subject matter experts. The platform covers a wide range of academic disciplines, including:
Junior Worldmark Encyclopedia of the American Eras: Primary Sources
Epics for Students
Gale Encyclopedia of Everyday Law
Literary Movements for Students
Shakespeare for Students
St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture
The Gale Encyclopedia of Prescription Drugs: A Comprehensive Guide to the Most Common Medications
Worldmark Encyclopedia Of Cultures And Daily Life
What is a research database?
A research database is an online, searchable collection of information that allows you to quickly search many resources simultaneously. The collection includes scholarly articles, books, journals, magazines, books, and newspapers. Some research databases also include videos, images, and more.
CQ Researcher is a collection of weekly research reports on recent news topics and issues of broad interest in the public policy sphere. Reports address a wide variety of subjects, including health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology, and the economy.
The Gale Virtual Reference Library provides access to reference titles on American Indians, the environment, history, law, and natural science. There are also some general reference works and biographical sources. Search a single eBook or the whole collection.
KidsHealth offers support and advice on health, emotions, and life — created for people 13–18 and approved by doctors.
PubMed is a free, government website that allows users to search for biomedical and health related scholarly literature.
This website focuses on Black Freedom, featuring select primary source documents related to critical people and events in African American history.
The exhibition draws from the individual accounts and oral histories collected by the Voices of Civil Rights project, a collaborative effort of AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) and the Library of Congress.
The Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative delivers educational content on the Civil Rights Movement.
The Maine Memory Network, a project of the Maine Historical Society, provides access to thousands of historical items, stories, and exhibits from across Maine.
Library Databases and Resources
Library databases are different from most search engines. How do they differ?
The library pays to access these resources (that's why we log in through the library homepage)
Databases can help get you to specific content related to your topic!
You can search by topic keywords, author, title, or other criteria
You can easily limit/filter searches to get more relevant results
The results that are returned:
Are usually trustworthy
Are organized and easy to sort
There are fewer overall results returned, but those returned will exclude more irrelevant results
Make full text more easily accessible
Can be limited to peer reviewed sources