Community & Regional Planning

Research Consultations & Instruction

Research Consultations

We are here to help faculty, student, and community researchers to develop their research projects, from discovery through end product, including navigating image rights for publication and managing citations. We also assist in developing project plans that may require funding proposals and/or community collaborators.

  • Assistance with research question refinement
  • Researching topic areas, including searching and finding a wide variety of media formats
  • Documentation strategies and standards
  • Research area-specific repositories & archives
  • Strategies for planning the research process from start to finish

Reference Support

Working in research intensive disciplines like Community & Regional Planning requires delving into a wide variety of resources across media, related disciplines, and hard to find resources like journals, archives, and data. The Fine Arts & Design Library Public Services team in the University Libraries is here to help you in your research activities.

  • Locating resources, like books, archives and media for use in proposals, research projects and instructional programs
  • Evaluation tools, technologies and strategies for citation management, instruction, and more
  • Identifying both on- and off-campus collaborators and resources

Instruction and Training

Community & Regional Planning are continuously evolving disciplines in which continuous learning and practice of new skills and strategies is the norm. I will work with you to provide training and instruction for classes, groups and individuals in a wide variety of subject areas.

Credit courses:

  • Research Methods
  • Precedent Studies
  • Studio Courses
  • Intro Courses

General and Custom Instruction & Training Sessions:

  • disciplinary methods and approaches
  • documentation & citation
  • collaboration tools

Scholarly Conversation

Think about:

  • What perspectives are presented?
  • Who has the strongest voice in this conversation? Why?
  • How would you evaluate the authority of the authors?
  • Who are the intended audiences?
  • How would you involve yourself in this conversation?

Guidance For Finding Books, Articles And Data

You can discover and access articles to use in your research in multiple ways:

  • Browsing through specific journals
  • Looking up specific articles based on citation information (for example from a bibliography in an article or book)
  • Searching databases using terms relevant to your research interest

To find a specific online journal that you would like to browse you can use our eJournal Finder to search by journal title. 

If you have the citation for an article and you would like to determine if we have access to it through our many subscriptions and collections you can use our Article Finder search tool to find it. 

If you don't have a specific journal or article in mind for your search you probably want to use one or more of the databases that we subscribe to to search for articles that are relevant to your research topic. Below are listed some of the key Earth & Planetary Science databases that you might want to consider using as a starting point in your research. 

While  specific search options vary somewhat between databases, the following general guidelines are useful when composing your search terms:

Think about your topic and separate it into separate concepts

1) Vocabulary - Synonyms

2) Search construction - Boolean logic/Set theory

  • AND = Intersection of two sets
  • OR = Union of two sets

Connect synonyms with the 'OR' 

Connect separate concepts with 'AND'

3) Defining search phrases - Place phrases (i.e. words that occur together in a specific order) you want to search for in quotes to signal that the search should be executed as a phrase search instead of a search for a list of individual words. 

We have a large collection of both physical books and ebooks in our collections for your use. Most of them are discoverable through our campus' library catalogs, but some also appear in a number of specialized databases to which we subscribe. Core catalogs that you will want to use in your search for books include:

If you find a book that we don't have in our collections in either hardcopy or ebook form you can request it through our interlibrary loan service:

Access to data is critical to modern data-intensive research. While the number of key data resources is rapidly growing, the list provided below is a starting point for some key data resources.

Research & Lit Reviews