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Faculty Library Resources

Useful services, resources, and helpful hints for faculty.

Open Educational Resources and E-Textbooks

"Open educational resources (OER) are free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes."  - Creative Commons

For more information, check out our Guide to Open Educational Resources and E-Textbooks

Virtual Instruction Resources

This page is designed to provide you with helpful resources for providing online/virtual instruction to our students. Please get in touch with any of the librarians if you have any questions or need any help providing resources or research instruction to your students.

Many publishers and online platforms have granted free or reduced-cost access to their materials during the COVID crisis.  Please view this list of resources to see if any of these options would be beneficial to you.  If something looks interesting, please contact John Garrison, Jamie Kohler, or Becky Graham for assistance in obtaining access to the resource. 

McGill Library provides access to a variety of virtual resources via the Online Journals and Reference Sources page, including:

  • Discipline- or vendor-specific indices and databases: Searching specific databases  (e.g., PsycINFO, SciFinder, ScienceDirect, MLA International Bibliography) is a better search strategy for more in-depth, advanced research.  These databases allow for tailored search strings and provide citation tools.
    • Many of our subject-specific databases are either partially or fully citation and abstract-only.  If you find an article with only a citation and abstract, you can search for that article in WISE to determine whether the library has full-text access to that article in another database (or through a journal subscription). If we do not have any full-text access, you can request the item via ILL directly. See ILL and WISE for more information.
  • Other types of electronic sources:
    • Newspapers:  U.S. Major Dailies, NY Times, Nexis Uni
    • Reference: Credo, Oxford, SAGE
    • Discipline-based: Birds of the World, Mergent Online
    • Streaming: Video (Kanopy, Swank) and music (NAXOS)
    • Primary Sources
    • and more!

We have a variety of e-book platforms/options already available.  You can find them in the WISE catalog (Hint: Use the e-book limiter on the left side of the results page), or in the individual platforms listed below.

There are also many, many sources for open access books and other open educational resources. We've compiled a partial list on our Open Education Resources & E-Textbooks page.

Westminster has paid access to many films on the following platforms. If you do not the film you are looking for, try searching the full catalog. If the film exists on that platform, contact Jamie Kohler to submit a purchase request.

Need help finding a specific film in streaming format? Let Jamie know and she'll do the research for you!

For those interested in COVID-19 research, for individual or class purposes, WHO is aggregating sources and studies in a searchable database as well as links to academic publishers' contributions: Global Research on Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)

Virtual Information Literacy Instruction

The Librarians at McGill are ready to provide support to your students as they work on their research and learning, whether on or off-campus.  We would be happy to work with you in any way that would be helpful, but to start, we've identified several options for virtual Information Literacy instruction:

  • Hosting virtual "office hours" for your students via Zoom, either as a class or for individual appointments.
  • Joining your already-scheduled Zoom classes to provide targeted instruction and research assistance. 
  • Developing Libguides for specific classes/assignments
  • Designing short instruction videos/tutorials for various resources or research skills.  We can provide the embed code and/or link to a single video, or we can design a full D2L module that you can copy into your course page. 
  • Other ideas?

 

Grab-and-Go Service

McGill Library now offers a no-contact "grab-and-go" pick up service for any materials in our collection. Instructions for utilizing this service are here: