Skip to Main Content
Calvin

Hekman Library logoHekman Library

Research Resources 101

Librarian-created information guide on different types of library tools and research sources

Books

Hekman Library has over 500,000 books in print in its collection, and nearly 400,000 e-books, all organized across 5 floors of stacks and in the online catalog using the Library of Congress call number system. You can borrow books from Hekman using your Calvin ID card (or guest card, available for purchase at the Circulation Desk), and you can even request books from other libraries through MeL and ILL services.

  • Pros: familiar format; many well-known scholarly publishers and authors; extensive collection at Hekman; more available through MeL/ILL 
  • Cons: heavy to carry; must return on time; may not be immediately available if checked out by someone else 
  • Scholarly or Non? Some books are only written for entertainment or recreational reading, like novels, and some may be informative but are written for a popular audience, but books written primarily for objective information or education by authoritative experts may be considered scholarly. Pay attention to things like citation as you evaluate: a book meant for scholarship should provide thorough references through footnotes or bibliographies, to prove it is founded on good research.

How to Find Books at Hekman (Videos)

Ebooks

Ebooks are books, in electronic form - you can find them through the library website and view them online, with many available to download as well. Hekman Library gets its ebooks through many different ebook-vendors, such as EBSCO, and each vendor has its own policy for user access to ebooks - this is why you may see different formats for ebooks and different restrictions in the different ebooks you see in the library catalog.  

  • Pros: Great for off-campus study ; carry titles electronically instead of heavy print ; make notes in the text when you print or download
  • Cons: Restrictions for access, download, and copy may vary ; not every book in the library has an ebook counterpart
  • Scholarly or Non? Like books, ebooks may be written at a variety of levels of expertise for a variety of readers, so some can be scholarly sources and some can be popular reading. One tip for evaluating ebooks is to look at its publication information and see whether it has been written by verified experts in their field and if it has been published by a credible publisher.

To find ebooks through the Hekman Library catalog, you can simply use the Limit options under the searchbox to change Type and Form to "Book" and "Online" - this will automatically filter your results to show just ebooks.

You can also browse through our ebook collections through the links below (the last three are a few of our biggest online dictionaries and encyclopedias):

To access your e-book, click on the link that says "Access full-text resource" in the catalog record. This will take you to a page of information about the e-book - from there, you can choose to read the ebook online or download it to read on your computer or ebook reader. Depending on the e-vendor, some ebooks may be available as PDFs and can be downloaded or copied as much as you want, some ebooks may be downloaded only as a "checkout" and will be deleted from your computer after 7 days, some ebooks may only be available to view online by one person at a time, some ebooks may require you to download a ebook reader. Hekman Library cannot change the e-vendor's access policies, but we do try to give you information about them in the ebook record, and if you have any questions about access, you can always contact a librarian for help.

Screenshot of Hekman catalog book entry with purple boxes and arrows indicating certain pieces of information for accessing online books.

The EBSCO EBook Collection is available for download, but you'll have to install Adobe Digital Editions to read them. Adobe Digital Editions is available freely here, and then activate it by creating an Adobe ID and password to login. See this FAQ from Adobe for more instructions.