Welcome to the Library: Home

Welcome to the COD Library!  We are glad to have you at the College of DuPage. 

As part of the beginning of your academic career, it is important that you begin to develop habits and skills around quality research, as well as an understanding of the various search tools one uses to find and access research and information created by others.

As you begin your college education, as a budding professional in your chosen area of interest, it is important to enhance your current research methods and search tools AND learn new ones.  You should begin to incorporate these new skills and habits into your professional practice. 

This is where the Librarians and the Library at large come into play.  We are here to help you with your research, teach you to conduct good research on your own, and help you consider what characteristics quality information has.  You will have way more access to librarians at college (whenever you want) than you did in high school. The Library thrives on questions.  Ask as many as you like.  We are here to help you with your education. Be curious.

Investigate different academic disciplines you are curious about in our Librarian curated Research Guides

Asking questions is NOT an illustration of ignorance, it is an illustration of curiosity.  You do not look dumb asking questions; you look curious.  Changing the way you think about asking questions will change your experience in college.

Select from a variety of methods to ask questions in the library at our Ask page, from chat, email, virtual appointments, or telephone.

On all the COD Library's webpages, you always find the CHAT button in the upper right corner of the page.  Ask us questions from any Library page!

If you are searching in the Library Catalog, the chat button will look like this (lower right corner of the page):

During the COVID-19 pandemic, remember to look for the yellow bar at the top of every Library webpage.  This is where you can get quick access to online resources, like ebooks, streaming video, and article databases. You can find help with research skills and resources in different fields.  We link directly to our Ask page in the yellow bar as well, where you can chat, email and make an online appointment (via Blackboard or Zoom) with the Library.

One of the general education learning outcomes for you, as learners, is information literacy. "Graduates can explain the need for information, locate information effectively and efficiently, evaluate information and its sources critically, and use information effectively, ethically and legally to accomplish a specific purpose."  These are skills and ways of thinking that you will learn from librarians, but NOT only them.  Your professors and colleagues will also help you build your information literacy, demonstrating tools and information sources used in those specific disciplines, how to read well, and how to evaluate quality research in those fields of study.  Librarians and professors will also show you how popular news about your discipline relates to the research being done in said discipline - accurate, misleading, or false.

Ask one of your professors about what information sources they use to stay current in their discipline.