This book is a user-friendly guide explaining the fundamental principles of academic library research. It guides students through the specifics of finding, using and evaluating information in print, electronic and multimedia formats, and is geared towards helping students judge information sources for what they convey. The focus is on teaching students to select sources regardless of their format - a technique that will make the research process more productive, result in a higher quality better research paper, and ultimately help create an information literate adult. An introductory chapter discusses topic selection and provides an overview of research. Chapters Two and Three focus primarily on book resources, covering online catalog searching and library classification systems. This is followed by an overview of print and computerized reference sources in Chapter Four. Chapter Five discusses how to find periodical articles using indexes in both electronic and print formats. The next two chapters focus on two aspects of electronic resources: how to choose them and how to use them. Chapter Seven, which covers advanced database searching techniques. The next-to-last chapter is concerned with searching the Web, and the book concludes with a discussion of evaluating and citing resources. Includes an index. (AEF)