A library database is an a website containing organized data such as e-books, journal articles, book reviews, magazine articles, images, newspaper articles or streaming video. The databases can be searched by subject areas, author, title or keywords.
The information that you find in Google is free. It can be put there by anyone, and might be biased, inaccurate or illegal. If you are using Google, you will need to learn to evaluate your sources. The information in a library database has been bought by the Yeats Library, and is copyrighted and licensed for you to use in an appropriate manner while you are a registered student or staff member. The peer reviewed journal articles in the library databases have been through the peer review process therefore have been checked for quality. That's not to say you will never have to use Google for college, if you are looking for a government report or statistics for example a Google or search engine will find you the correct document, you just have to learn to evaluate the websites you use.
See the A-Z of databases or use the tab above. Just be aware that some of the titles can be a bit misleading. The Science Direct database for example contains more than purely scientific journals, and has other topics included such as tourism and social sciences.
Eolas is discovery search. It's a product that we have purchased to make it easier for you to search for information in the databases. Basically it's just a search interface for most of the library databases and quite a lot of open access resoucrces too. This way you don't have to perform a search in Science Direct, followed by another search in Emerald and then JSTOR Think of it like a one stop search. Eolas is fine for undergraduates, but if you are in 4th year or are doing a postgrad you should probably be doing database searches, as there are more features , and you have more control.
We get quite a few databases from EBSCO, and EBSCOhost is just all those databases stuck under the one interface. Not to be confused with Eolas. Even though Eolas looks a bit like EBSCOhost, an Eolas search finds more, is bigger and includes non-EBSCO sources.
