The amount of educational archives and databases available to CSU Bakersfield students for research purposes is astounding. A few scrolls and clicks through the library’s website leads to a world of deep archives and near limitless articles on a myriad of subjects, and our librarians are masters of navigating this world of password-restricted information.

One click on “Articles and Databases” in the library page leads to nearly any subject one could possibly want to learn about, and there is more information than someone could possibly consume.

Possibly to the chagrin of the librarians, too many students are oblivious to these great resources, and completely unaware of the massive amount of information at their fingertips. Full documents of research journals or articles can be e-mailed to your student email for convenient paper writing.

We as students need to be taking advantage of these free library resources. The CSU system shells out $5 million for access to our core databases such as EBSCOhost Academic Search Complete and LexisNexis. Some changes may be coming to the resource lineup, but utilizing them while we have them is in our best interest.

At this point in our educational journey, Google can only get us so far. These research databases are set up so that keywords are at the core of search, not a whole question or phrase. Librarians often suggest specifying whether you want the words in the title or abstract, as well as truncating certain words so that you’re getting results you can really use. Additionally, switching up searches with synonyms for certain terms can provide richer results.

Not only are these databases for academic research, but there are enough magazines and literary journals to satisfy a variety of tastes for pleasure reading. Spending a few hours browsing the free articles can be a great way to enhance your college experience.