Ok, you've picked your topic; you've done your background reading and gathered a few keywords; you understand why Google isn't going to work well for this level of research ... so how do you actually start searching??

First step is to go to the library's webpage: Housatonic.edu/library

Next, enter some of your keywords in the search box and hit enter.  These are the important words in your topic and may include some of the words you discovered when gathering your background information:

This will bring you to a list of resources related to the keywords you typed in.  Often there are too many results on this page to read every one, so it might be useful to tweak your results to narrow down the results. 

Two great places to start to tweak your results are Resources type (do you want articles?  books?  newspapers?) and Publication date, but look through and see what limiters will work for you.

Once you see a title that looks like it might work, click the title to get more information about the resource:

This page has SO MUCH INFORMATION about the resource!  You can click "Details" to read more about it, including subject headings, a summary, additional authors, and publication information. 

You can click "View it" to access the resource if it is online (such as an article or an ebook) or to see where the library shelves it if it is a print book.