Let me help you transition from the tools, sources, and services you used in the university libraries you've been part of so that they serve you here! Set an appointment--you set the agenda, I'll create the online meeting room and do my best to answer your questions and address your concerns.

Topics to consider including on your list:

• The library catalog, a discovery system;
• WorldCat;
• Ejournal finding;
• Research databases, including Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life;
• Digital text collections;
• Online newspapers, current and historical;
• Interlibrary lending; 
• Reciprocal access to other Chicago libraries; and
• Chicago area archival collections, including those right here.

Zotero, an open source citation management system, helps researchers collect, organize, cite, and share their research. Graduate-level researchers anticipating work on related themes make best use of citation management when they start early and integrate their citation management system into their research practices and habits. Concentrate on developing and maintaining a library of one's prospective sources and past-used ones; the researcher who dies has a rich resource of existing source material at the outset of new projects and it will continue to grow thereafter.

Also use Zotero to maintain lists of books from classes and seminars in order to compile them into reading lists for comprehensive exams or for other future uses. Journal articles, films, and other source types, digital and analog, could also appear in these lists.

The citations you save in Zotero belong to you, allowing you to easily transition your academic work at Loyola University Chicago to another university and to other libraries.

• Zotero Quick Start Guide

  Essential information and how-to videos created by Zotero for new users.

• Zotero Tutorial Library

  Collected and topically-organized tutorials created by actual users to help others; selected for inclusion here by Zotero.

• Zotero download